07mk
7mo ago
That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction. But my observation is that women aren't concerned with that, and I doubt it's physically possible to make them concerned with that, in general. They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism. If the tests fixed any of these things, then the tests would work less well.
07mk
7mo ago
This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."
"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"
"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."
The issue here is that the muddling of the message is the point, and encoded in that above interaction is the clear message: "figure it out yourself [the first step of which is to ignore everything my peers and I tell you to do and learn to think for yourself]." Women want men who can figure things out for themselves, and the only way to discriminate between men who do and don't is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.
07mk
7mo ago
The problem is that some differences certainly aren't, but that doesn't mean other differences aren't. The questions here would be: (1) which characteristics of Iranian society/culture would need to change and how, for Iran to "turn into Afghanistan" as is meant by that statement here (presumably culturally/socially/governmentally or the like, rather than literally or demographically), and (2) are those changes within the bounds of what is possible in a population made of people who we would genetically categorize as "Persian."
Unfortunately, I feel like our level of knowledge on this kind of thing is akin to Archimedes's level of knowledge of orbital dynamics and special relativity. We just haven't done the (potentially centuries' worth of required) scientific work to actually gain meaningful insight into this.
07mk
7mo ago
Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.
This is one of those things that seems obvious, but also seems like it's not talked about nearly enough, to the extent that people actually don't understand it as obvious. I certainly wish the feminist movement talked more about these downsides and the fact that many women will end up less happy (and, quite possibly, less good for whatever they might judge as "good" in terms of their life), but that this is a worthy cost to pay for the freedom that feminism offers them. Because, right now, I see so many women being failed by the feminist movement, having been convinced that freedom won't have these severe and significant downsides and then conclude that their own lack of happiness despite their freedom means that the movement clearly needs to keep doing more until morale improves somehow both greater freedom and greater happiness is achieved. Without that grounding in actual reality - and the tradeoffs that are always present in reality - it's become a movement that just keeps inviting greater and greater justified pushback while leaving its supporters dissatisfied.
Of course, the market movement can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent alive, and there's a sucker born every minute, so its inability to - and apparent lack of desire to - accomplish its stated goals doesn't mean that there's going to be some correction anytime soon.
07mk
7mo ago
But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.
I'm reminded of a line in some Op Ed (NYTimes or Boston Globe, IIRC) I read in early 2000s, where some Republican pundit was justifying his push back against president Bush, in part by saying something like, "When the car you're in has veered sharply to the right towards a cliff, the proper thing to do isn't to turn the wheel back to neutral; it's to turn it sharply back to the left." Looksmaxxing to the point of self-surgery like in Gattaca seems extreme to a demented extent, but it's a response to what I perceive as an environment in which the idea that looks don't matter at all has become the only allowable opinion to be expressed, to the extent that a significant portion of the population of those environments have decided to believe it, as expressed by their behaviors in terms of looks with respect to romance.
07mk
7mo ago
Either they're neuro-divergent to the point of suicidal credulity (in which case I don't trust that you actually read society's message correctly, there are implicit messages), very young or are actively in denial. Someone like Lindy West or the fat acceptance types are not unaware of their lower status, they reject it and reject anything that could fix it because they've decided a political situation is the only moral one. I suppose you can say that the last group were brainwashed into it but they're not ignorant. They're willfully opposed and you have to know what you're fighting to fight it.
This seems like just a semantic argument. Yes, these people are "aware" of these things happening, but, like you say, they "reject" it, because it's "immoral." Part of that rejection is the "suicidal credulity" and "denial," which causes them to lack an understanding of the fact that the reality of some fat acceptance type having "low status" due to their fatness is something that you can't rout society around through wishful thinking and bullying, at least not longer than the emperor can walk around naked before some kid asks why. I think that they don't know that their model of sexual attraction in society is useless in the face of the underlying reality, as evidenced by their behavior which leads to self-suffering, shows that they're still missing some core knowledge about how the "sexual marketplace [as] the manosphere describes" is accurate
But there's only so far you can get with the argument that people are this ignorant, that they think Chris Hemsworth takes his shirt off because women are attracted to Aussies.
The actual factually inaccurate but morally right explanation is that the only reason Hemsworth's good body attracts women is that women have been hopelessly brainwashed to value those things (similarly to how men have been hopelessly brainwashed to value youth, skinniness, etc. in women), and that simply freeing them from the brainwashing would make women exactly as attracted to Danny Devito as to Chris Hemsworth if their personalities were the same (similarly to how simply freeing men from the brainwashing would make them exactly as attracted to Oprah Winfrey as to Sydney Sweeney if their personalities were the same - that this hasn't happened indicates that we must free them even harder from their oppressive brainwashing that they cling on to so hard). This kind of thinking is basically universal in most Blue tribe environments I've been in (which has been roughly 3.5 decades in a row now), due to many Blue tribe environments enforcing this ignorance through heavy censure of any sort of inquisitiveness or curiosity at analyzing the situation (in a way that isn't intentionally biased in order to arrive at the Morally Right conclusions).
07mk
7mo ago
Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort.
Everyone already knows this.
That's not true, though, unless you're using some sort of "subconsciously know in a way that is directly contradictory to their behavior, their words, and their conscious beliefs" meaning of "knows" here. We have vast swathes of the population who genuinely believe that the part quoted above is merely the delusions of old, crusty, conservative ignoramuses who don't understand the Correct Feminist way that romantic relationships actually work among humans. The existence of these vast swathes who don't know this is pretty much why incels have become a noticeable issue at all in the culture wars.
07mk
7mo ago
The primary argument by opponents to such a policy is that everyone who has the legal right to vote ought to have the option to have their vote counted, and this policy would place a burden on those who have the right but lack a government-issued ID for whatever reason. There are many other arguments surrounding this, but this is the core point that all their arguments come down to.
07mk
8mo ago
This was like still during the crush, though.
If anything, that makes the "sour grapes" scenario far more likely.
07mk
8mo ago
Then he made one like off-color milquetoast but not like insane joke at the end of a meeting and she instantly icked on him/wanted to take him to HR.
To what extend would you guess that this ick was motivated by having a crush on him that was unrequited for 6 months? As a third party reading a second-hand text description, it appears to me like cliche-level sour-grapes behavior.
07mk
8mo ago
"Communist" and "Nazi" and even "fascist" has been used as terms of abuse in America for at least all my adult life, and indeed I'd guess you're right it's been going on for 90 years straight. But I rarely, if ever, saw people trying to use obscure loopholes and technicalities to "prove" that some idea they disagreed with was "Communist" and therefore deserved to be disagreed with, like how we've been seeing with things like "misogyny," "racism," and, again, "fascism" the last 15-ish years. It's this apparent attempt at finding a "glitch" or "exploit" in the system that that seems to reflect a belief that everyone else MUST abide by such exploits that I find interesting. Rather, calling something "Communist" (or "Nazi" or whatever) in the 90s-00s was just effectively calling it a slur.
Perhaps even that isn't new. That would mean that video games weren't a necessary part of causing this pattern of behavior, though it certainly could have been a part.
07mk
8mo ago
I've seen Freddie de Boer, long ago, inveigh against this habit from young Progressive activists as something like the "Magic Word" theory of politics; if you can just get the dreaded magic word to be applied consistently to the thing you abhor, then broader society will have to accept that you won the argument, and then Progressive social change will surely follow. He probably had some Marxist materialist complaints to go with it, but I think the observation and critique itself is really useful as a phenomenon I see constantly.
Like many people, I started noticing this in the early 10s, and one thing I've been curious about is, to what extent this was influenced by the fact that millennials and later generations grew up with video games being just a typical pastime? Video games, obviously, exist in an artificial world of computers and code, where developers can and do set up strict rules which can create arbitrary "win" conditions that have little to do with whatever underlying reality the game might be trying to simulate. Some even have "Magic Words" like iddqd which explicitly allow you to circumvent traditional vulnerabilities your character normally has, and the game universe will strictly conform to your Magic Word (unless you're in a Nightmare, anyway). Many games have glitches and exploits that allow you to gain advantages that the devs didn't intend but which the game must honor, at least until the devs push an update (even then, single player offline games can just not be updated).
Perhaps my thought is on this because of hearing about something kids are calling the "Klarna glitch," where you can enter someone else's name and SSN at checkout to charge someone else's account for your purchase. Calling it a "glitch" makes it seem like it's something that the "developers" of our universe accidentally "allowed," when, in fact, it's just criminal fraud that doesn't have very good pre-enforcement.
07mk
8mo ago
That actually seems like a much weaker version of what I see as the most common argument in favor of the idea that trans genocide is a real thing that people should be concerned about - not merely as a future possibility but as something that is happening and has been happening for a long time. Which is that, an environment where misgendering someone doesn't carry severe penalties or where transwomen aren't fully welcomed into women's sports and their locker rooms in a way that's indistinguishable from regular women or any number of other well known demands by people claiming to speak on behalf of trans people, will necessarily discourage some trans-curious people from deciding that they are trans and, instead, stick with their sex. This results fewer trans people than in the fictional alternative universe where all these demands were met, which, when you do enough of it, is actually just genocide.
07mk
8mo ago
For many people, "meaning well" and being nice is very important, sometimes even more than actually accomplishing anything. There is in particular a stark divide between left and right (and also men vs women) on this issue. Plenty of my friends and acquaintances, when confronted with the dysfunction of some left-wing regulations, will nevertheless defend them and not want them abolished, mostly on account that they were originally meant well and should at most be reformed (which nobody ever kicks off and thus never actually happens).
I can't help but notice how well this parallels the discourse around generative AI and whether or not it has a "soul" in the sense of the author's intentions. To some people, this intent of the author exists in an image (or video or song or a block of text or etc.) only insofar as the actual final pixels represent such an intent; the actual thoughts that went through the author's head in the moment don't matter. To others, it's the actual thoughts that matter, and how well the pixels convey those thoughts are merely a curiosity.
Right now, the culture war lines drawn in the world of generative AI doesn't seem to neatly match other lines of older culture wars, but I wonder if this aspect will mean we'll see support/opposition to treating media generated by AI as having exactly as much meaning as those generated by humans without AI getting split up in right/left or male/female. It's possible we're seeing it happen already (it's hard to get a sense of the latter, especially, since new tech is almost always heavily male-dominated by default).
07mk
8mo ago
I think can kicking is a sufficiently attractive action such that its appearance of being reasonable has little correlation with it actually being reasonable.
I do think there's a good argument to be made that terrestrial scientific/engineering innovations in that 1 billion years will better prepare us for more easily producing the spacefaring tech in 1,000,002,026 AD than 2026 AD, and the recent innovations in AI is a strong point in favor of such an argument. Perhaps it will be possible to, on Earth, with the help of AI and other tools, sufficiently accurately and precisely model other parts of the universe such that we can design and successfully implement a human space colonial program (or at least human Earth-escape program) in one shot without growing pains and needing to learn about and solve unknown unknowns on the fly through actual real-life experimentation of iterating real humans living in space. But for something on the level of preventing human extinction, it makes sense to begin those iterations as early as possible.
07mk
8mo ago
I'm also not saying that rocketry is impossible, rather it's not economical. We won't go to space if there's no $$$ in space, and as far as I can tell, the only $$$ in space doesn't require humans.
But there IS $$$ in space, and in a way that requires humans. It is practically guaranteed according to our best models of cosmology and biology that humanity will go extinct within the next 5 billion years if no humans ever leave the Earth. If humanity goes extinct, there will be no $$$ anywhere, since $$$ exists only as a concept within the minds of humans - who no longer exist. So humans exploring space is required for there to be any possibility of $$$ in the future. So there's absolutely $$$ in space, and specifically in human space exploration; in fact, it's basically the mirror image: there's bankruptcy in lack of human space exploration.
07mk
8mo ago
This is how I feel about high level ultimate Frisbee. The nature of the sport is that good offense beats good defense, and the men at the top levels are so good that many games have only a handful of turnovers and even fewer breaks (on the order of 5-10 in a game where sum total score is usually around 20-30), which can make it rather boring to watch. "Oh, offense scored again on a full field throw, yawn."
Women at the top levels, are so much worse than the men in not just strength and speed but also finesse and technique, that their games end up having lots more messy points with lots of turnovers, which raises the overall excitement level. Even at the top levels, not many women can throw full field, whereas basically the weakest man in a top team could do it regularly. But I find the women more fun to watch because of that volatility.
Unfortunately, women's ultimate is also less mature than men's, so there are fewer truly elite teams, which means fewer competitive games due to more and greater disparity in team quality.
07mk
8mo ago
What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?
The big ones in recent memory that I see are the reduced credibility of most mainstream journalism outlets due to their obviously and blatantly tribal behavior with respect to Trump starting over a decade ago, and also the 2024 election, where I believe plenty of marginal Democrats and would-be Democrats seemed to tear away from the party due in part to the blatant tribal hypocrisy in that same period of time. I don't know, but I heavily doubt that it's uniformly applied. If you were to argue that, I would respond that, based on your writing, you likely have very good, very strong reasons for believing that, and unfortunately there's no real way to adjudicate which one of us is correct.
How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.
I think it lowered the rate at which white people (and white-tolerant people) were won over by the ideology in question, especially among young people who were just awakening politically and just gaining the right to vote.
People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues.
That's not my perception. Principled moderates didn't put it back in the box, and principled moderates largely can't (I think, most likely, no one can, just like no one can put things like Nazism or Communism (by many people's lights, wokeness is the latest iteration of this) "back in the box" - they'll always be with us, and that's why we'll always need to keep developing new antibodies against them, because god knows that they aren't stopping their continual evolution). What I think happened is that people who actually do care about principles got turned off from the Democratic party, and due to how the 2 parties are, at a baseline, around 50/50, there didn't need much of a shift to change the election results, which had downstream effects with respect to Common Knowledge about how much other people liked wokeness. Which was never popular organically, but rather popular like Kim Jong Un is in North Korea.
And, indeed, it ain't dead. It's not even hibernating. It's going just as hard in full force, in the many little and large fiefdoms that it still owns. Again, I doubt it's possible to kill it, and I don't even have much of an idea on how to reduce it further.
Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".
I mean, to whatever extent that the Red Tribe wants to crush wokeness, I'll root for them and even help them along, in the same way that I would root for a surgeon to cut out a malignant tumor. But I'm not sure what sort of "moderation" you're talking about that would be the right-wing equivalent of a blue-haired leftist deciding that progressive leftist critical race theory/third-wave-feminist-informed principles find it perfectly okay that white people feel okay being white.
07mk
8mo ago
The press and political opponents can always twist whatever they want however they want. But by responding straightforwardly and honestly, one can at least claim to hold principles instead of having to admit that they're calculating tribalists who make decisions based on tribal allegiances rather than principles.
And moving up a level, a tribe that accepts or even encourages its leaders to submit to such tribalism has to admit that it's a tribe that is merely trying to beat the Enemy because they're the Enemy, rather than following principles that they believe the government and society at large should follow. This was one of the many small mistakes of the progressive left, in the "It's okay to be white" or "Islam is RIGHT about women" things. My perception is that the fact that there was even a single random blue-haired leftist who, when confronted with such a slogan, hemmed and hawed about dog whistles instead of straightforwardly and honestly answering, "OF COURSE it's okay to be white! I want white people to feel perfectly okay being white, and the principles and policies that I am (we are) pushing doesn't conflict with that in any way, so much so that if you or anyone else believes - incorrectly - that such a conflict exists, I will actively help you resolve that conflict, by crushing whatever might be making white people suspect that such a phrase is wrong" placed another chink in the armor that tribe was wearing.
Trump didn't go from laughing stock political outsider to 2 term POTUS by giving the straightforward, compliant answer to this kind of question, he got there by doubling down on "that's bait, fuck you" every time.
Trump has been noted to be not only an unusual, but a downright unique figure in US politics. Given that, I think it's reasonable to believe that copying his techniques and tactics isn't a good way for accomplishing the copying of his political success.
07mk
8mo ago
Reminds me of that ad about female homelessness ("1 in 4 homeless are women" — presumably the others are sexless automatons).
I mean, yes, to the target audience of such an ad, very likely, that other 3 in 4 are indeed quite sexless and barely count as automatons, if that.
07mk
8mo ago
I feel like, if a term were to exist for this, it should allude to Greek tragedies. It's one of those cases where everyone, including the baited, can tell that it's bait and that the winning move is to just simply answer in the most straingforward, simple and honest way possible, but their pride prevents them from doing so because that would be giving their enemies a "win." So they respond with something like "that's bait, fuck you," which is precisely the response that most benefits the baiter.
Unfortunately, what's likely the most famous Greek example of something like this already has very strong connotations of motherfucking, so something else would need to be found for the term.
I wasn't ever into hockey and still am not, but I do recall the controversy vaguely from that time. As a non-fan, it seemed silly to me to complain about seeing the puck, even if it was some bright color that distracted from the athletes, but since I wasn't a fan anyway, I figured if the fans didn't like it, then removing it is fine.
What's exciting is the idea of AI-based smart TVs in the (hopefully near-) future where you could just tell it to add on the glowing dot to the hockey puck in real-time while you're watching any random broadcast (or even VHS recording of a game from the 90s or earlier). So watchers who want the UI element could get it, and those who don't could avoid it.
I imagine that such tech could be applied to other professional sports in similar contexts. Or, to get back to women's hockey, what if the tech could, in real-time, depict the athletes as if not wearing padding but just their form-fitting sweat-wicking tights, and also with the helmet off so we could see their faces well? The Smart TV would probably need to have internet access to cross-reference official photos of players with their jersey numbers, for generating video of their faces, but it doesn't seem impossible, and it could be greatly beneficial for individual stars in the league to build their popularity.
07mk
8mo ago
I played Nioh back in the day when it first came out, the 2nd Soulslike I've played after Bloodborne. Definitely a steal at that price, though I didn't get 700 or even 70 hours out of it. I only beat it once, probably because I hated the RNG loot system (which I hate in every game). The 3-stance combat system felt really complicated at first, especially coming from Bloodborne, but it took very little time for it to feel intuitive for me. I think it reflects Team Ninja's experience in making intuitive fluid combat in Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden games.
Also, like Assassin's Creed Shadows, it features a gaijin samurai protagonist, but it caused no controversy back then, partly because of the times, partly because Tecmo is a Japanese company, and partly because the character wasn't obviously a pawn for waging the culture war.
Sometimes, at the direct one-to-one cost to the male children of other women who aren't related to them, of course.
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