07mk
1mo ago
good game writing, like Disco Elysium
This... this is perhaps the single most offensive opinion I've ever read on this forum.
07mk
24d ago
Technology was supposed to automate away the drudgery, so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, and science.
I think technology has done a lot of that, though, with things like dishwashers, washing machines, running water, elevators, cranes, cars, and such. These are all "dumb" tech, though, and they hit diminishing returns; we still have to load our dishwashers and steer our cars (for the most part) manually. I think this just speaks to how difficult the precise and fine manipulation of objects in the physical world really is. From what I heard, image generation AI was actually a consequence of trying to solve this problem; we needed AI to be able to perceive the world similar to humans, which meant identifying objects in images, which was able to be reversed in some way to create new images. And this happened much more quickly than the robotics controls, because manipulating stuff in the digital world is much easier than in the real world.
It's still way too early to tell, but I could also see the argument that AI art does automate away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits, since it's really primarily good at creating high fidelity illustrations while lacking the good taste or artistic vision required to convey some emotion in a pleasing or provocative way (this is arguable). This allows people to work on the more high level vision of what they want their illustration to look like instead of devoting the time required to develop their manual muscle control.
07mk
2mo ago
There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
I've noticed that the people who tend to emphasize how bad online abuse towards women is tend to carve out an exception for Rowling because she's someone who managed to convince lots of people to voluntarily hand over billions of pounds to her and as a result has substantial resources at her disposal. In a very real way, this is an honest and straightforward way of analyzing the situation based on the privilege framework that such people tend to subscribe to. The fact that such a thing is an exception rather than the rule would have been an interesting observation at some point in the past, but that seems banal now.
07mk
1mo ago
I don't think these substitute for each other to any meaningful extent. An action movie buff is going to watch, what, like 5-15 action movies a year in theaters? Accounting for modern film runtimes and ticket prices, that's up to 45 hours and $225. 45 hours is nothing in terms of gaming, that'd be easy to cover within a single month. $225 is the equivalent of 3-4 AAA games, so there could be some substitution effect, but honestly, for most people with enough free time and money to be into playing AAA games, the equivalent of < $20/month doesn't seem likely to significantly influence decisions on this.
Anecdotally, the types of gamers who are most into the types of games where you can see explosions and gun fights also are most appreciative of action films. Which makes sense to me, since if you like explosions and gun fights, there's separate and complementary enjoyment from partaking in them in a video game and from watching professionals performing it at a high level. Playing as Nathan Drake hanging off a cargo plane is a poor substitute for watching Tom Cruise hanging off the outside of a real plane as it takes off.
07mk
2mo ago
The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
07mk
1mo ago
Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."
I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.
Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.
This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.
07mk
1mo ago
I have very few thoughts on the actual topic of your post, but as someone who spent more time than was healthy on 4chan a little before 2009, your description of 5channel now sounds similar. As I stopped using 4chan around 2009 and started using other social network sites, I found that the quality of conversation on places like Twitter or Reddit were substantially worse in comparison to 4chan, and it has only gotten worse in the 15 years since. My pet theory is the enforced anonymity and abrasive/offensive social norms helped to keep everyone from taking things too seriously, which in turn helped to keep conversations from getting enflamed. I've heard 4chan also got worse in the meanwhile, so maybe those golden years are forever gone. But if I could wave a magic wand and destroy every social network and replace them with something akin to the mid-late-00s 4chan, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
07mk
2mo ago
In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination.
It shames me that as a kid I actually believed that this kind of phrase was anything other than obfuscation for the sake of reducing cognitive dissonance. But what I'd actually love to see is a true "tie-goes-to-the-runner" affirmative action implemented in real areas where true "equally qualified candidates" can and do exist. Such as baseball, which is what that phrase alludes to. No need to have extra innings, if the game is tied at the end of 9, then the team with more aggregate oppressed identities on the team wins. If the Super Bowl is a tie at the end of regulation, then give the Lombardi Trophy to the team that has more oppressed identities in aggregate. If two Jeopardy contestants have the same score at the end, then the person who is more oppressed gets to stay on and the other guy gets kicked off like any other loser.
If we truly believe in "tie-goes-to-the-runner" as a proper way to fix problems in society, then let's walk the walk.
07mk
1mo ago
The format is pretty awful, though, at least in the image linked in the top post. A grid of 3x3 means having to scroll left and right and then down then left and right, which is a pain in basically any browser compared to just scrolling down on 9 rows of 1 column.
07mk
2mo ago
I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.
That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.
Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.
To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.
07mk
1mo ago
The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.
That is, uh, indeed very special. I had to pause 20 seconds in just from the cringe before continuing. I'm not sure I can watch the whole thing. It looks like if someone who has never trained in combat in their life or even watched a martial arts movie decided to write what they imagined a training scene might look like. Which, to be fair, is very common in action scenes in a lot of films and TV shows, where the choreographers clearly believe that making a good fight scene is about people waving their limbs around in flashy ways, rather than making every swing, punch, kick, block, dodge, etc. a meaningful and believable progression of the back and forth to weave the narrative that constitutes a fight. It's just, you'd expect with a billion dollars to play with, they could hire at least a half-decent action choreographer/director.
I absolutely hate the fact that I think of it in terms of cliches about sex differences, but at the time, the whole thing reminded me of the whole phenomenon of "She told me her problems, I suggested some ways to solve them, and all she did was get mad at me" and "I told him my problems, and instead of comforting me, all he did was provide me with solutions." IIRC Damore is on the autism spectrum, which is obviously associated with being "extremely male," whereas the ideology in question tend to be known for attracting lots of women, which doesn't help matters.
07mk
27d ago
Obviously there's no way to know for sure, even if you were this man and/or his health professionals, but I interpreted BurdensomeCount's comment as saying that this man genuinely having this rare psychological disorder is his attempt at becoming weaker to gain status within a culture that values weakness above strength. Very few people are going to consciously think to themselves, "My culture values weakness above strength, and so I will cynically weaken myself in order to gain status above others." Rather, their unconscious attempts to gain status within a culture that they unconsciously understand as valuing weakness above strength will manifest themselves as a rare psychological disorder that drives them to take action that weakens themselves.
07mk
24d ago
I wonder how differently this will impact the music industry versus how generative AI has and will impact the digital illustration industry. I'm not much into music, but I feel like a lot more of the appeal to music comes from the personalities attached to the songs than in the case of illustrations. And the personalities can't ever be truly copied without deception; even if we reach AGI with AI personalities indistinguishable from a human, the knowledge that the personality came from a computer instead of a human who had actually popped out of another human will color the perception. When someone puts on a Taylor Swift song during their daily commute or a workout, the knowledge that it was actually written and sung by Taylor Swift almost certainly plays a significant factor in their preference to listen to that song over something else.
That said, there are plenty of more functional uses of music, like BGM for ambience in works like video games, TV shows, films, other videos, b-rolls and the like, where no such personality matters. Even for big time composers like John Williams or Hans Zimmer, I'd bet the typical movie fan wouldn't care if the music had been made by AI, as long as the music actually served the purpose exactly as well as music that had been written by those people. This is analogous to the functional use of illustrations like for movie props, game textures, or book illustrations that provide employment for unknown low-level illustrators, which is what AI seems to be best positioned to disrupt (probably is already). But what I perceive with the music industry is that, even at the low level, fans tend to care about the musicians attached to the music; they don't go listen to the small local band or buy their albums just because of the audio that they put out, they do so because they want to support those people in particular. Again, AI fundamentally can't challenge this without deception, so those low-level employment opportunities for unknown musicians may survive in a way that it won't for unknown illustrators.
Another aspect is how using technology to automate music production seems to have been more accepted than for illustrations pre-AI, i.e. sampling and stuff like that. Some illustrators seem to see AI art as "cheating" because it allows the creation of very high fidelity, high detail illustrations without developing one's hand-eye coordination through years of practice. Whereas musicians are still respected even if they don't play the instruments or sing the vocals themselves. But generative AI will allow people who didn't even write the music or have any understanding of music to produce high quality songs merely from a text prompt, which is certainly a big difference. But also, just like how AI art is being used by illustrators to aid in their workflow, I wonder how/if AI music could play into it. Udio and Suno go straight from prompt to produced song, but what about prompt to lyrics and sheet music, or prompt + lyrics and sheet music to produced song, or any other intermediate steps? In illustrations, it's pretty easy to use the same tool selectively to aid in the workflow since it's all just putting pixels on a grid at the end of the day, but with song production with the different mediums involved, we'd need to see more specialized tools to aid musicians' workflows.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
I had a conversation with someone last year who was insistent that actually good (i.e. human-equivalent) voice acting AI would require us to first invent general AI, because the various tones and inflections needed to properly convey the character's emotions to the audience would require actual understanding of what the character was going through with all the various nuances and details and such. I just don't understand this perspective, since voice acting, like music, is merely the production of sound waves at the end of the day. AI will only get better at manipulating sound waves, and there's no need to understand the emotions of the character the same way a human actor needs to, merely what sorts of sounds give positive feedback from the human audience (i.e. evokes certain emotions). Same goes for text, images, and video, of course. But even once these technologies become superhuman in ability to create truly meaningful, inspiring, insightful works of art, I imagine there will always be a subculture of people who will insist on only appreciating the maximally manually produced artworks. It's just hard to tell right now if they will be the mainstream or a tiny niche like the Amish.
07mk
1mo ago
I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.
Sure, not everywhere, of course. I don't think anyone is claiming that it has to be everywhere. I don't think the population of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, is what's relevant here, though; it's the population of people who are intolerant of such issues. Many women, minorities, LGBT people have been pushed/pulled toward a belief system that causes them to choose to take offense at such issues, but there's nothing intrinsic or fundamental about those people that makes them intolerant.
I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?
Most internet arguments don't end in any arguer's belief apparently shifting and conceding. That's generally not the point of internet arguments. This doesn't mean that their beliefs didn't shift, and it also doesn't mean that some lurker's belief shifting. And for me, personally, simply learning the way that someone I disagree with (and continue to disagree with) chooses to structure their arguments in an apparent good-faith effort to get me to change my mind is something I find value in.
07mk
1mo ago
I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.
07mk
1mo ago
We're supposed to believe Lex Luthor, of all people, wrote this?
Frankly, I don't think we are. I think we are supposed to praise it, and whether or not we believe it isn't really a consideration.
07mk
1mo ago
For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich of of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.
I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination. A belief in this kind of coordination could be challenged and even destroyed by the lack of evidence of such coordination, and even more by the evidence of the lack of such coordination. Rather, "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" and other similar concepts are said to imbue these oppressors with attitudes that lead them to behaving as if they coordinate to oppress others without any of the actual coordination. The oppressors aren't meeting in a smokey room somewhere to discuss how to keep the oppressed people down, they're merely inheriting a legacy of oppression which reproduces the past oppression despite every individual in every situation behaving in ways that are completely egalitarian and non-oppressive at the individual level.
Where the hyper-agency comes in is that people who have been labeled as oppressors according to this worldview are deemed as having the responsibility to sacrifice in order to tear down this oppressive structure. While the those labeled as oppressed have only the responsibility to speak their truth and to yell at their oppressors until they go along with tearing down the structure. And if this doesn't work, then the oppressed have no responsibility to adapt their tactics to convince the oppressors; it's always the oppressors' responsibility to be convinced, no matter how unconvincing or abusive the arguments that come their way.
07mk
1mo ago
It's not even just because I'm a raging misogynist. Like, I could suspend my disbelief while watching a fantasy series enough to believe that a slender 5' 4" woman could defeat half a dozen people at once, if she's a master warrior and they're all lowly amateurs. That's a common enough trope in martial arts and other combat-based works - usually it involves a clearly powerful and muscular badass, but the world being a fantasy world goes a long way. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did it quite well with the tiny Zhang Ziyi making fools out of dozens of men at once. But that's the kind of thing the show needs to establish first by showing us what kinds of supernatural/fantastical abilities she has to overcome these odds that would be literally impossible IRL. And even then, the show needs to meet me halfway by showing her struggling, getting bested here and there for a moment before using her greater experience, skills, abilities, etc. to turn the tables. There's some level of incompetence and intentional "waiting their turn" we can accept in these 1-on-many fights, but the show needs to make an effort in hiding it.
But even before all that, there's the fact that they seem to be starting the training by having these rookies fight this master swordswoman using real weapons. That's like bringing in Michael Jordan to teach basketball to teenagers and throwing them straight away into a one-on-one match against him. Not even where he's pointing out errors in his opponent as they play, but he's just playing to win. Sure, that'd be a fun thing to try at some point in training, most likely as a little showcase for the most confident/best trainees, but as step one? All that would accomplish is showing off just how much better Jordan is than everyone else, and no one would learn anything. Perhaps there could have been some subplot of Galadriel getting no respect as an unproven small foreigner, and using this as a way for her to earn their respect, but that didn't seem to be the setup. I'm no expert in things like combat or training, but even I know enough to tell just how unbelievable the whole scene is, right from the jump. These writers getting paid handsomely in this billion dollar production should be expected at least to do enough research to make it believable to a layman like me.
Gotta say, it's a shame that the GOT curse of its less established actors not being able to transition to proper stardom seems to be in force with Gwendolyn Christie. Someone of her stature could make for a really fun action heroine to watch, and she seemed competent enough in the combat scenes in GOT. The Star Wars sequels completely wasted the opportunity with her character. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where ROP starred her instead; that said, I never got the sense from the Jackson trilogy that Galadriel was supposed to be some badass warrior, so perhaps it wouldn't have been the best fit.
07mk
1mo ago
On the flip side, I think this post was written tactfully, but it still ended up in the negatives - in fact I was surprised to see how many downvotes it had given how anodyne it was.
I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite. There's a good point to be made about singling out Democrats being unfair given the behavior of the other party, but that's not a tactful way to make it. This is the kind of behavior I tend to see out of people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place, that, at best, they're passive aggressive in an obvious way that's harmful to the quality of the discourse, instead of taking the effort to contribute their views in a non-combative way to produce good discussion.
07mk
2mo ago
Most of them are heroes, and being a hero means having a flaw you are blind to, having a cathartic moment and fixing yourself. Steven Seagal and JCVD are famous for portraying hypercompetent protagonists and their movies aren't really taken seriously by anyone.
I'm surprised this never occurred to me, but it definitely seems like the last decade or so of Strong Female Action Heroes in films has been as if major Hollywood studios handed Seagal billions of dollars to make his god-fantasy wish-fulfillment vehicles just with more expensive CGI. And then blamed the audience for being bigoted against fat people (or whatever other category you could stick Seagal into) when they complained about boring, unlikable, unrelatable protagonists with no growth.
JCVD is also a funny choice of example in the previous post, since AFAICT, JCVD isn't held in all that high regard today outside of the campy nostalgia. What do people remember him for today, maybe Street Fighter, famous mainly for the franchise and for being a filmmaking disaster, and Bloodsport, the one that was a breakout film for him. There are far better examples of similar action stars from his era who were far more successful, such as (obviously) Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. And the films these guys were known for - e.g. The Terminator, Rambo, Rocky, Predator, Total Recall - were generally praised for having good scripts. Not fancy or deep or thought-provoking - though maybe on occasion - but having fun plots with charismatic, likeable characters that were easy to root for in stakes that made sense and seemed important and often even went through some journey of growth themselves.
07mk
24d ago
Oh yeah, for manufactured pop bands, of which Kpop is perhaps the perfected version, I feel like they're appreciated more for their performance abilities than for their song recordings. So fans might insist on actual human dancers and singers (I don't know how much lip sync is common in these performances; do fans insist they actually sing into the mics while also doing complicated/strenuous dance moves in concerts?), even if they don't care about the AI writing the songs or even "performing" the music. Virtual concert performances like the Crypton Future Media Vocaloids might gain traction, but I also imagine they'd have to be some rare major figure like a Hatsune Miku or perhaps some popular Vtuber (whether human or AI-controlled) for fans to actually want to come out to watch such things.
But with AI songwriting, that's the kind of thing that real human songwriters could employ and just lie about pretty easily, to get the best of both worlds. If Taylor Swift used ChatGPT extensively to write her lyrics or used Suno and reverse-engineered its melodies for her own melodies and just lied about it, no one would ever know, and fans would get the enjoyment of genuinely believing that they're hearing songs that came pouring out of Swift's heart or whatever.
07mk
2mo ago
It's definitely a hard question to answer, in no small part because of how there's no standard definition of what counts as "left," and how "left," "liberal," and "progressive" get conflated. When I look at the values that tend to get associated with such groups, I see values that I support today as much as ever - e.g. sympathy and support for the least well-off in society for "left," freedom of speech for "liberal," and changing the structure of society to get "better" in some meaningful way (i.e. for it to "progress" rather than merely "change") for people who used to be ignored or denigrated for "progressive."
Where I see myself departing greatly from the modern left - besides the fact that they largely just reject the principles of liberalism - is the willingness to check that claims are true and that policies really do create desired outcomes. E.g. the whole WPATH situation seems to be the result of people just deciding not to check what would actually lead to the best outcomes for kids who claim to be trans and just going along with people who are sympathetic and sound like they know what they're talking about. To achieve anything good in this world requires some level of brutal honesty about the reality of the situation, and I just don't see that happening.
And this is one insight that I think right-wingers of yesteryear had when I was poo-pooing their claims of "slippery slope" (I too admit that I have egg on my face on this, for whatever little it's worth) that I lacked. They understood the psychology of self-proclaimed leftists/liberals/progressives than I did. Perhaps unsurprising, because I'm not known for understanding the way others think, but I would have thought back then that as a leftist/liberal/progressive, that I understood their thinking better than their enemies would. They understood that the left/liberal alliance was largely one of convenience, and that liberalism would go out the window if the opportunity presented itself to most of those identifying on the left. That's what they were warning me about, and I was pushing back using basic philosophical/logical arguments instead of recognizing the way the landscape was shaped. Often, when someone is proven wrong, it's not that hard to reach for excuses for why it was reasonable to be wrong at the time or how this thing doesn't actually prove oneself wrong, as a way to save face, but in this one, I don't see any way around just completely submitting to any "I told you so"s that anyone might want to throw at me.
07mk
1mo ago
I didn't call anyone weird. I actually said "Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post."
To say that this is in any way meaningfully different from, "claiming the person [who made the post] is being weird [by making the post]" is pretty absurd in my eyes. The person who made the post is obviously the one responsible for what the post was focusing on, and you claimed that the particular focus in the post was weird. If you believe that making a post that has a weird focus isn't "being weird," then your skills at splitting hairs are greater than mine.
I also have no interest in up/downvotes in general and specifically find the idea of comparing downvotes between one's own posts and those of other people to be silly and rather narcissistic, so I won't comment on any particular comparisons.
As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.
It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.
Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.
Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.
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