07mk
1d ago
Being part of any sacrosanct Noble Cause can do it, if the cause's actually-noble followers are afraid that making ignoble leaders' transgressions public would unfairly reflect badly on the Cause - this works if the Cause includes an "ultimate truth", but it also shows up in non-profits, charitable organizations, environmentalist organizations, police organizations... Even a mundane worry like "we don't want to scare kids away from the Boy Scouts just because of this one bad apple" can do it, for a while.
I pseudo-apologize pre-emptively for bringing up my favorite hobby horse/pet peeve, which is that these so-called "actually-noble followers" are actually not noble, due to their actions, i.e. prioritizing their Cause's optics over justice for the victims of their leaders. As you say, if you believe that the Cause has some "ultimate truth" that supersedes all else (which, IME, applies exactly as well and often to non-profits, charitable organizations, etc. as any other religious organization), you can justify this line of thinking.
However, the issue there is that no truly noble follower of any Cause would be ignorant of the pattern of people who have followed some Cause in the past; to follow a Cause without skeptically analyzing the forces that would lead you to being convinced by the Cause is something I'd consider unambiguously ignoble. And one pattern that any follower of any Cause must notice is that most people (likely almost everyone) in the past who was convinced by a different Cause was wrong. Therefore, anyone who believes strongly in their Cause can't actually conclude anything about the correctness of their Cause; their strong belief in it doesn't provide any meaningful information for determining its correctness.
If God came down and proved His existence and then declared that This Cause is the Correct one, then perhaps noble followers of This Cause would be just in allowing [bad behavior] as a necessary cost for accomplishing This Cause. Perhaps. But, AFAICT, God never did that (and never existed, but that's a different conversation), and so we live in a world where the stupid ignoble are cocksure about their Cause while the intelligent noble are full of doubt about their Cause.
Unfortunately, being unjustly cocksure about something tends to be more attractive than being justly doubtful about something, and so it seems to me that basically any Cause is guaranteed to attract ignoble people near the top.
07mk
1d ago
FYI as of 2024, a sequel to Resurrections was reportedly in the works. Don't know if it's going anywhere, but it seems like they were at least trying to do something more with it.
07mk
1d ago
(hard to believe but as a young man [Vladimir Putin] was something of a pretty-boy).
Considering that, as an old man, he's something of a pretty boy, I don't find that hard to believe.
07mk
1d ago
I see a bunch of essentially "we should" statements, which I interpret as "the world would be better if this were so:" and for your statements, I do agree. I also think the world would be better if we all got unicorns and rainbows and eternal life without illness beyond what's exactly needed to provide just the right amount of suffering and challenge for a good life. If only we could just "we should" into that world!
Now, perhaps such a world you describe, unlike one with unicorns (until we figure out genetic engineering to a sufficient extent), is possible to get to from here. I don't think it's obviously impossible. Figuring out if and how to change this world to that better world are the real challenges, not just "what would a better world look like." And you cannot expect women as a group or on average, to do anything other than be maximally sabotaging to such a project. Because giving men information and feedback on how to be attractive is something that directly harms women's ability to judge them as potential mates. So any project of getting to that better future from here must take into account their sabotage and route around it or through it. Their sabotage is as much a fact of life as death and taxes, so best to just accept it as it is instead of considering it bad or good.
07mk
1d ago
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles. It genuinely now seems like there are fewer such leaders, political or otherwise, in the last 100 years that DON'T have such credible allegations than those that do, now.
I mean, many things can genuinely seem some way without being true. I don't know that what you claim is in evidence, and certainly this one example of Chavez doesn't move the needle one way or another.
However, I do think there's a core truth here when it comes to the modern leftist movement which is and has been for about 1.5 decades, dominated by the movement that has been established as "woke." Not a unique characteristic, but certainly a defining one of "wokeness" is prioritizing identity over their behavior or speech* when it comes to judging the person in specific contexts where their behavior or speech would be consequential to the outcome. Combined with another defining characteristic of "wokeness" - automatic categorizing of all constructive criticism as bad faith malicious attempts at sabotage - this results in massive opportunities for people of the right identities to become leaders while engaging in horrible behavior, as long as that horrible behavior pays off in harm to people you don't care about.
Now, Chavez didn't exist in such an environment. He likely would have benefited in that environment, but he wouldn't have had enough oppression points to just get to the top without legitimate leadership skills. So I think his situation (and any others from eras past) likely had different causes.
* More accurately: having ready-available justifications for why to selectively prioritize identity or behavior/speech based on personal preferences.
07mk
1d ago
If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.
The problem is that if society believes the opposite of that, and they are wrong, then also millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces. There's no safe "false positives are clearly better/worse than false negatives" situation here that makes it easy to just err on one side. This is one of those legitimate Hard Problems that we need to actually do real scientific research to get right.
07mk
1d ago
Sometimes, at the direct one-to-one cost to the male children of other women who aren't related to them, of course.
07mk
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
8d ago
This was like still during the crush, though.
If anything, that makes the "sour grapes" scenario far more likely.
07mk
9d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
16d 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
16d 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
22d 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.
That just the baseline reality that everyone already baked into their model of the world. The question is, why do some ideologies appear to have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others? Of course, that's either a trivial question (answer: because what things appear to you is primarily determined by your biases, rather than underlying reality) or a loaded question (i.e. the question is implying that this "appearance" correlates with reality), and so the "clean" version of that question would be: "Do some ideologies actually have more of this kind of abuser in leadership roles than others, and if so, is there something about the psychology of these ideologies that leads a difference in prevalence of this?"
Which is an interesting question to at least speculate about, though any actual conclusions would be completely unwarranted.
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