07mk
14hr ago
“Alternative ways of knowing” have next to zero impact on the vast majority of progressive politics.
I'm not sure how one could even quantify this to enough of an extent to support such a statement. Perhaps you could come up with a way of measuring things such that this is true, but you'd have to be counting the stuff they have in common with virtually every other movement - akin to how humans, chimps, and mice share like 90%+ of the same DNA or something - because whatever sets apart progressive policies pushed by the typical/powerful modern progressive from bog-standard liberal is certainly mostly a consequence of "alternative ways of knowing." I.e. personal revelation, which is never called that but rather often "lived experience," based on the idea that we can judge the veracity of someone's claims about reality based purely on their identity, which is what holds up all of the stuff about "white/male/cis/etc. privilege," which itself holds up almost all of the specific policies that the typical/powerful modern progressive pushes for.
People can and do argue any number of progressive policies—police, borders, reparations—on the boring ol’ grounds of facts and logic. That doesn’t change when some jackass decides to mock mathematics for being too white.
Correct. I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment, though. Some progressives still exist who are still committed to facts and logic. Sadly, they have about a homeopathic level of impact and influence in modern progressive politics. I fantasize that many of us exist, and that we're just cowards who try not to be noticed lest we be cut down, but that's probably just typical mind fallacy + wishful thinking.
07mk
14hr ago
I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it.
I haven't lived in Korea for too long for my experience to matter, but my experience with Korean relatives who live (and only ever lived) in Korea is that this is a lie we like to spread out to the rest of the world because it makes us feel superior. We have less issue, but it's a stretch to say that the issue is little.
07mk
18hr ago
I'm a little skeptical of this, mostly because I've never seen it in action.
I've very skeptical of this, but I think what would make sense, given AOC's other stated beliefs, is that she genuinely drank the Kool-Aid in believing the messaging that men take hot women less seriously and thus adjusted her behavior. Though I'd personally guess that, if any of this was intentional, it wasn't consciously so.
07mk
19hr ago
I saw someone post on Twitter that Jewish hatred is always balanced and at any given time one group hates them and others love them.
Some people believe that the way the relative sizes and distances of the Moon, the Sun, and the Earth are such that both lunar and solar eclipses just about exactly cover the moon/sun is evidence of God's design. Some people believe that the fact that the ratio in size between the observable universe and a typical human being around the same order of magnitude as the ratio in size between 12 grams of carbon and 1 individual carbon atom is evidence of God's design. Surely the greatest evidence of God's design, though, is that history always conspires to make sure that there's always an equal amount of hatred and love directed at the people who claim to have been chosen by Him.
I'm not sure what the best ways to measure hatred and love are, but I do feel like there probably were periods in time where the former overwhelmed the latter in aggregate, though.
07mk
19hr ago
I'd consider the point of being an absolutist to be that one considers the principle to apply absolutely, such that it is just as appropriate to apply to noncentral cases as to central cases.
07mk
19hr ago
Oh, come on. Nine sets of scare quotes to say this movement is unusually prone to contradiction?
That's not what I said, nor is it even adjacent to what I said. Every movement - down to a movement of one individual - has internal contradictions. Usually enough to call it a "mess." Not every movement - certainly not every individual - believes in the fundamental principle that logic, reasoning, and valuing empirical evidence are arbitrary bullshit that ought to be discarded if they're not useful for attaining what one considers "justice." What makes "wokes" distinct from many (not all - though most similarly national/international-level movements) movements is that it specifically flouts logical thinking and doesn't see logical contradictions as something to resolve or to address at all. This is, somewhat ironically enough (though not really), quite Trumpian, in the belief that what is true right now isn't contingent on being consistent with other things that one has stated as being true, a sort of lack of object permanence.
07mk
1d ago
Are you saying that anime women look like men?
A good chunk of them do
From what I understand, they're meant to look like cats (not really).
07mk
1d ago
I'm not sure how "notable" these "peculiar ironies" are anymore, sadly. When one of the core, underlying principles that animate everyone in your movement is "logic, reasoning, and empiricism are inventions by cis/white/male/etc. people whose only function and purpose is to oppress minorities," then it follows that holding opinions that are logically contradictory is no vice. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that it's a virtue, for how it "challenges" the norms of current "hegemony" of "white supremacy/patriarchy" and "queers" reasoning by lionizing "other ways of knowing" over crufty oppressive things like "logic."
Right, and I am saying that just like the tankie's totalizing hatred of "capitalism" (by which he means partly that one asshole boss he hated, partly a media caricature of fat-cat cigar-chomping Gilded Age CEOs), the similarly vague tribalist loathing of "feminism" (=Twitter Karen memes plus that one insufferable lady in HR) is leading people to get the causal arrows very obviously twisted here.
But when the "Karens" are explicitly, overtly saying that they're going into these industries specifically to make them appeal relatively more to females (definitionally appeal relatively less to males), then the causal arrow is very obviously consistent with what I'm claiming.
Furthermore, when we're dealing with an ideology that is specifically unpopular among the demographic we're talking about - i.e. feminism doesn't have a good reputation among young men, relatively - it makes perfect sense that if one had the intent of appealing to that demographic more, then reducing the presence of the totalizing ideology that has taken over the industry is a pretty obvious simple step that's at least worth considering, if not actually trying out.
To use another analogy: if CEO income has increased, and also homelessness has also increased around company headquarters, and both of those things make you sad and annoyed, that still does not mean that "capitalism" is the ideology that "got us there," or that CEO delenda est would restore any meaningful number of homeless guys to happy productive lives in tidy little cottages of their own.
If capitalism was an ideology whose principles and whose strongest, most influential proponents were explicitly, overtly calling for increasing CEO income at the cost of increasing homelessness, you might have a point. But it isn't. The actual specifics of these concepts matter; you can't just swap some labels around an argument, show that that version doesn't make sense, and claim that that demonstrates that the original doesn't.
Furthermore, if someone had a plausible argument for why capitalism necessarily results in more CEO income at the cost of more homelessness, then it would absolutely be incumbent on anyone who wanted to reduce homelessness (or lower CEO income or both) to consider burning capitalism to the ground as one of the steps in a potential solution. Otherwise, they would be obviously an ideologue who prioritizes ideological commitments over actual meaningful goals and thus has no credibility in judging possible solutions.
EDIT: As for that superstimuli and vices business, if you're claiming that such things have some quality about them that makes them immune to margins and trends, and that modern video games fit into that, those are a couple of extraordinary claims. We live in a world where, right now, millions, possibly billions, of people are balancing superstimuli and vices like video games, gambling, heroin, meth, porn, cheesecake, etc. with their everyday responsibilities and also other non-superstimuli entertainment (e.g. chatting with a friend, going to a park, watching a baseball game) in a functional way, despite having near-trivial access to these superstimuli/vices at their fingertips. This points to the idea that superstimuli and vices are things that vast swathes of the population are capable of managing in their everyday lives, such that they're not purely slaves to it, i.e. they can modulate their use of it based on the potential consequences. If they can modulate it, then there will be a marginal effect from affecting their positive/negative qualities relative to alternatives.
07mk
1d ago
Yes, I think enabling this via the use of pseudoscientific language around things like "systemic racism" and "privilege" and all those other terms is the great innovation of Wokeness in updating bog-standard tribalism to a Modern Audience who would reject something that was overtly purely based around selfishness. The gloss of the false claim that The Science - which is objective and universal and True - supports Wokeness is what allowed such naked, self-serving tribalism to appear just not-tribal enough to fit into the egos of people who consider themselves beyond good and evil above all the old tribal nonsense due to their modern, enlightened sensibilities.
07mk
1d ago
Smart people can and do do very stupid things, sometimes quite often, to such an extent that they have a reputation for it. One could accurately say, e.g. Musk behaves very stupidly when it comes to certain things such as politics or ideology, and that he has a pattern of doing so. But to claim that he's stupid means something else, and it's to ignore all the other pieces of evidence around him. And, ironically, accurately noting his intelligence is a greater moral condemnation from anyone who confidently disagrees with his politics or ideals, because, unlike a stupid person, a smart person has no excuse for not reaching the correct conclusions.
07mk
1d ago
I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't.
It's the same phenomenon as calling Elon Musk "stupid," which is basically dogma in some parts of the country, including where I live. People, even educated, intelligent people who went to academic institutions purportedly meant specifically to disabuse people of that notion, really love the idea that people they disagree with also have other negative characteristics that realistically ought to have minimal - if any - correlation with conformity to one's own personal set of ethics or ideals. So damn physical reality, since I don't like AOC/Musk, then s/he is unattractive/stupid. To be fair, the latter set of people often openly admit to rejecting empiricism as a tool of oppression by White Supremacists, so they're living up to their stated principles there.
As an aside, I'm apparently in a tiny minority in considering Zendaya not only attractive, but one of the most attractive women in Hollywood right now, but also I do find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing not hard to understand. She has bodily and facial features which are not what I'd consider screaming in femininity.
07mk
1d ago
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
Even calling it "dormant" seems to me to be far overselling the state of things. At best, I'd say it's baiting, by creating the appearance of weakness which allows it to gain an advantageous position such that it can impose even greater strength than before. Perhaps one can argue that a key component of what defined "woke" was the appearance of strength and so conceding that appearance is, in itself, a retreat, but I'd say that's pretty weaksauce compared to the very real policies that have been locked in and still influence people's everyday lives just as much in 2026 as in 2021.
07mk
1d ago
The talk about "peak woke" as if it was in the past or "woke 1" as if there was some sort of stopping of "woke" where it would make sense to say that some new "woke" thing is "woke 2" instead of "woke continued" reminds me of the 2024 POTUS election when people were breathlessly trying to establish consensus that there had been a "vibe shift" among Democrats who were finally getting excited again and lining up behind the young(er), energetic Harris compared to the decrepit Biden or calling Walz's insult of Vance as "weird" as some brilliant bit of marketing. I can understand both why people who dislike Woke would have wishful thinking that it has receded and why people who like Woke would want to act as if they're powerless, but I think the fact of the latter should make people in the former highly suspicious that they're falling into wishful thinking. From where I sit, there's more overt pushback to Woke than ever before, but that's akin to there being more pushback to Nazis in 1942 compared to in 1932. it's not an indication of the Nazis' lack of power, influence, harm; rather, it's the exact opposite.
07mk
1d ago
I see the tendency to group the Woke with such things like the 60s left or the French Revolution, but I don't think that quite captures it. Woke is actually just the latest iteration of identity-based tribalism. 10,000 years ago, it might have simply been "Grog looks like he's one of those guys from the tribe across the river; let's kill him and steal his stuff," and 300 years ago, it might have been "X people intrinsically belong in chains due to their nature, while Y people like me intrinsically belong to the ruling class above them due to our nature," and today, it's "X people have been oppressed by Y people throughout history; therefore, individuals who belong to groups X and Y deserve privileges/disadvantages to counteract this historical effect, which we know as a FACT had some unfair and unjust effect in the lives of these specific individuals." People have been coming up with rationales for why unfairly discriminating against people they dislike is actually virtuous and even obligatory forever, only changing up the rationales based on what the current population would be receptive to. Wokeness is the version that's been most perfectly evolved for modernity.
Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.
The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.
Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.
More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).
07mk
2d ago
I've always liked books, but looking at the younger guys and boys I know, it's mostly video games. Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory.
This looks like a perfect opportunity for some synergy across different demographic lines. If all the people who loudly claim some version of "literature industry is catering to men just fine, men are simply choosing other things" decided to partner with the people who claim "video game industry is catering to women just fine, women are simply choosing other things" and shout down all the people demanding that any particular industry be gender-equalized by hook or by crook, it might actually have some effect!
If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.
Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.
I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.
I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.
07mk
2d ago
You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.
This portends an interesting future where essayists, novelists, poets, and other professional writers intentionally make an LLM generate recognizable LLM-isms as a way to spruce up their writings, like how a rock guitarist might intentionally hold up his guitar to the speaker to generate feedback as an intentional part of the music they're making. Imagine an entire genre of writing where it's not surprising for the writer to paste in LLM generations without notifying the reader, but intentionally produced to appear overtly LLM-generated, communicating to the reader that it's LLM-generated without explicitly saying as such, in order for the reader to enjoy the text for its obviously LLM-generated qualities that the author intentionally wanted to add to his writing, like how, again, feedback is used in some musical performances.
And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.
The girls' books seem stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to girls' interests, in a way that boys' books aren't. That's the interesting question here, why book publishers, despite their monetary incentives, seem immensely terrible at appealing to boys in a way that they aren't when it comes to appealing to girls. Why is it that they're publishing the kinds of stuff directed at boys that they are now and declaring that they've tried and just lack the ability to force boys to read, instead of analyzing whatever underlying assumptions and ideologies that are directing them towards making bad decisions when it comes to publishing books that are stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to boys, like they're successfully doing for girls now?
07mk
6d ago
I'm not sure if this is not also just an ideological commitment to "beauty" that goes the other way and therefore also kinda extreme.
Maybe! It sounds strange to say that liking beauty a lot is ideological, but I admit to being extreme in it. The longer I observe the world, the more beauty I think it could use.
Like even Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn who I think is the poster child for the outcry, she's fit, redhead, bright demeanor, instant top 10-5% if transported inside a train carriage in NYC during commute time.
I think that we're talking in top 10-5% numbers instead of "practically beyond top 0.00001%" like, e.g. the Dead or Alive girls or the aforementioned 2B/Eve, for the protagonist of a major AAA (AA?) Sony franchise is unfortunate.
Maybe we can think of it that attractiveness of characters is, like other aspects of any work of a video game, can also be a bar and once cleared, it's good enough and can move on to other things. TLOU definitely didn't need the characters to be top 5% pretty to sell itself in video games.
Indeed, no one needs these video games to be beautiful, or to have video games at all, or to have beauty at all. I haven't played most of these games, but I'm sure, e.g. TLOU2 is a very good game, thanks to its many positive qualities that have nothing to do with the (non-)beauty of its protagonist(s). I just think the world would be a better place if these video games had been more beautiful.
I suppose attractiveness is fluid and anime/catgirl/2B "shape" is not the only way for someone to be "attractive".
Indeed, and think of all the creative, varied, distinctive, never-before-seen ways of being attractive that we could have seen in this nearly limitless medium of video games if the character-design portion of the thousands of talented devs and billions of dollars that went into AAA games had been focused on exploring just how attractive they could make their characters, instead of meeting ideological commitments about challenging beauty norms or not appealing to the male gaze or etc. Losing out on that is what I find really sad.
07mk
7d ago
The problem is that the affordability crisis has been complained about, acknowledged, and attempted to be fixed for at least 2 decades now. I remember that the insane cost of housing and schooling were major political issues in the mid-2000s, and even after the 2008 crash, housing continuing to inflate to such an extent that they stayed flat instead of going down like most other things was basically common knowledge. The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things. They could probably do better, but a generic "address the affordability crisis" gives little to work with, and it's like going to a medical research center and telling them to "address the death crisis." They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time. It's just background noise at this point.
So that just leaves the other, more specific parts, which are comprised greatly (not your post, but certainly the posts you are alluding to) by complaints like the burrito thing. So that's what's being addressed. And I think it's especially valuable, because bad arguments in favor of good positions have a way of discrediting the good positions themselves if those bad arguments are left standing too long without being cut down by the people who have those good positions. And complaining about the cost of prepared food is a very bad argument when the affordability crisis is the topic.
07mk
7d ago
First dean of Cambridge would surely fit right in with his illustrious list of other accomplishments. Perhaps he could be the first king of the USA if Trump doesn't get there first.
07mk
7d ago
Also, how often would his father go for a burrito? Not in cases where it's logical (like when travelling, or something unexpected happened) or as a social occasion, but just "I don't feel like cooking, or I don't feel like eating what we have at home, I want a restaurant burrito"). Compared to OP himself. I dunno for him, but ordering or eating out due to simple laziness or "cravings" was something that happened on a yearly basis to my family growing up.
As a geriatric millennial, I feel like I saw a transition from restaurant/delivery-is-occasional-treat to restaurant/delivery-is-alternative-of-near-equal-stature-as-home-cooked in real-time growing up. Especially having spend much of my initial childhood in Korea, which was further back compared to America in development, especially in the 80s/90s. In Korea, we basically ate the same home cooked meals with very minor variations in side dishes every single day, and America was little different in the 90s. But as I grew up, getting takeout or delivery for dinners just seemed more and more common. Nowadays, I've seen people claiming that eating the same country's cuisine two days in a row - to say nothing of the same meal - is just unacceptably boring and a standard that no one should be subject to, which I find a ridiculous standard; a clean, warm, predictable, nutritious-enough, and fairly palatable meal every day is a standard I'd consider quite good enough for everyone of any class. Of course, most people don't go to such extremes, but I see that sort of attitude of bare-minimum-expectations-creep a lot.
This isn't true, though. Wokeism has a lot of similar principles, but it also attaches to it its own set of faith-based claims about reality. That's what makes so many people call it a religion (including myself, as far back as 2015 back when it was just called "social justice" - though, quite honestly, this should have been obvious even as far back as the late 00s, by my estimation), rather than merely an ideology. Its core tenets rely irreducibly on faith to support claims about how certain individuals are oppressed by other individuals in society.
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