ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Care to speak plainly? The rhetorical questions are getting tired.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
It's too good not to post:
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I think it can go over quite well, but you have to own it completely. I've told crying women "I'm sorry you're upset, should we continue this conversation later?" to which they responded by turning off the waterworks or by doubling down and lashing out ("How can you be so insensitive about X!?"). The key in the latter case is to maintain frame and not be provoked, but instead simply make a mildly concerned, sympathetic expression as you allow her rage to pass over and through you. If she tries to drag you in by demanding a response, just calmly repeat the question.
I've never suffered any lasting social damage from this approach, but you really have to be rock solid in your frame.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I would guess** that his idea is that yes, ironically enough, they want to overthrow society to create a Just World where rule followers and Hall monitors gets justly rewarded for their superior virtue. This idea has echos of "Wokism as mutant, cancerous Christianity." In the Christian age you suffered the indignity and injustice of being a rule follower in this life in exchange for treasure in the next. But if there's no afterlife, you need to create your utopia on earth so that you can collect your reward before you bite the dust. There are vague parallels in a lot of Enlightenment-descended ideologies actually.
**I'm not sure if I'm fully convinced of the above myself.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I've watched a lot of R&M, but only because my enjoyment just barely outweighs my disgust for the show and its characters. And even then not always, there are times when I've had to turn off the TV because the episode was just too disgusting/crass/ugly/nihilistic.
Every season they make the family do even more horrible things, and each time the r-slurs and spergs cheer. At this point it's as if the creators are just trying to see how fucked up and cruel they can make the actions of the family before the audience finally decides that yes, these are clearly not rolemodels or anybody to look up to, but that moment never comes. That moment likely will never come, because for that moment to come there has to be some self awareness, some capacity to self reflect, and perhaps the success of Rick and Morty for all the wrong reasons is the final proof, that this country has lost its way, and there is nothing left except mindless consumption followed by death.
I don't think it's because people don't have the capacity to reflect. They can, they just subconsciously stop themselves from doing it because people under 40 are heavily irony-poisoned and can't handle sincerity. One hypothetical reflection could go something like this:
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Rick is an immoral, egotistical, cynical nihilist
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It's a bad thing to be an immoral, egotistical, cynical nihilist
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Immoral, egotistical, cynical nihilists are not role models or heroes; we should not emulate them or cheer for them
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All the R&M characters are like that
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Why am I watching this show about evil depressing people
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I'm going to watch something more edifying
I don't think most viewers can get past step 1 because step 2 requires making a judgement which it totally lame and uncool and, why are you taking it so seriously bro? And anyway (here come the rationalizations) it's just a cartoon, and what's wrong with portraying imperfect and broken** people? Aren't we all broken to some degree? Should we only portray normal and healthy people?
I have an undeveloped thought about how a lot of modern TV is just the evil twin of 1950s black hat/white hat cowboy movies. Back then the good guy was squeaky clean and always beat the bad guys by virtue of his superior courage and moral rectitude. It was all very "just world." But now, with shows like R&M and GoT it's not more nuanced, it's just an inversion of "just world" into "unjust world." Everyone is evil, sadistic, cowardly. The good are crushed by the bad. Fans try to tell me that it's full of nuance, but I'm sure you could tease nuance out of a John Wayne film if you tried hard enough.
**I can't stand the word "broken" the way it's used to describe moral failings or "traumas," but that's a rant for another post.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Kind of a shower thought, but could it be that it's just really hard to write an interesting, unique badass hero nowadays without being excoriated for toxic masculinity and being retrograde? Indiana Jones and Han Solo get grandfathered in as endearing classics of a bygone age, so you get a pass if you recycle them (although you probably have to pay some tribute to wokeness in the form of retcons and script changes).
Perhaps also there's also a suspension of disbelief problem. Millennials and zoomers are permanently on seven layers of irony and have grown up on endless trope subversion. How could you write a straight action hero who would appeal to such an audience?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
There's a bit of a dogpile here in the vein of "Well why do we still celebrate ${holiday commemorating event}??" which I think doesn't grasp the point you're trying to make.
Pride Parades used to be more in-your-face, freak out the squares squares type events that were held as protests. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!" Now that everyone's either "used to it" or afraid of drawing the wrath of HR and/or Twitter mobs, there should no longer be any need for protests.
But Pride Parades turned out to be great opportunities to siphon off bit of the heady nectar of the latest "civil rights victory." If you're queer, you can go there and celebrate defeating bigotry and bask in the righteousness of the cause ("Fuck hate! Love conquers all!") If you're normal you can go there and enjoy the same as an "ally." As mentioned in this thread, corporations got involved to sell stuff and also to get a little of that civil rights glory for themselves, likewise for the city government. And so it is no longer a protest, but a big, well-funded party where you can have a blast and showcase your righteousness.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Being Catholic is a choice in a way that being black or ethnic Jewish is not.
No, it's not. There's a difference but it's much smaller than people imagine. Is being "atheist" a choice? People don't choose their convictions the same way they choose their clothes. I'm a Christian. Sometimes I wished I weren't, because Christianity is very demanding and because it's low status among my peers. But I'm convinced of its truth for the time being, so whether I like it or not I remain Christian.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades.
As someone on a work visa, no, not really. They knew what they were getting into. I've been living in this country for many years with my wife and kids and the.government of this country could tell us to fuck off at any time, as is their right. It's a risk a I consciously take. If I decide I no longer want to take that risk, I can just go back where I came from.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Housing in Japan isn't affordable. Houses are small, probably roughly half of the sqft you'd get in most of the U.S. for the same dollars (my "huge" house in the countryside that shocked my co-workers was just over 1400sqft and it had 4BR, lol). The construction quality is shit, very poor insulation, crappy building materials that degrade significantly in the first 10-20 years. And all this for the low prices of 30,000,000 to 45,000,000 JPY if you want something new, or 25,000,000 to 35,000,000 if you want something used. And get ready to live in a 1000sqft "house" with maybe 1-2 meters of "land" surrounding your house, if that. (Yes, even in the countryside -- they build houses 1 meter apart even in the midst of massive open spaces.) AND! You get to pay for it with your Japanese salary, which PPP-adjusted is worth about half of an American salary.
As for why this is, the most plausible reasons seem to be that
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Brain drain to the cities is extreme and WFH hasn't taken off nearly as much -- most people are still trying to cram themselves into Tokyo
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Home construction is a racket -- There are a handful of massive national level builders that sit on top of a truly insane byzantine network of contractors, sub contractors, and sub sub sub contractors so that building even with shitty materials becomes horribly expensive due to the sheer number of parties taking their cut. This also makes QC'ing your house nearly impossible because there's no single "contractor" to hold accountable, it's buck-passing all the way down
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Penalties for sitting on land are very low -- the attitude towards owning property here seems to be "sit on it and hope you win the lottery." I personally know people who own land in the countryside and who have zero plans for it -- it's just there, it's costing almost nothing, and maybe someday someone will want to buy it, who knows? And of course there's the famous inheritance/ownership problem, where a piece of land gets passed down to half a dozen grandchildren, only some of them cannot be located (and might even be purposely avoiding being located in order to dodge taxes) so nothing can ever be legally done with the land and it just sits in limbo forever.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Where do you go on the internet to have fun in 2023?
I used to frequent the chans back when there were many small ones, read a lot of SA, Fugly, iMockery, even early Cracked and some Maddox, among dozens of other small sites. Then there was Stumbleupon which was like magic to me when it came out, and I came across all kinds of weird and interesting sites while using it.
I've outgrown a lot of those sites now -- they were a lot funnier when I was 15 -- but I haven't really found any new sites or communities that scratch the same itch. I usually check this place first for interesting bathroom reading, then if there's nothing new I check a few subreddits, and if I'm truly desperate I'll open 4chan, although the noise/bots/spam seem to finally have killed any originality that was still lingering (except for during the rare major Happening).
Help me avoid reading books and going outside by recommending a few fun, funny, and/or interesting sites to read.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
HBD is even weirder as probably at least sort of real science that Blue doesn't dare to acknowledge the existence of, and even Red mainstream shies away from.
Blues generally have a worldview that is very uncomfortable to reconcile with HBD, so that makes sense.
Reds' aversion to HBD is a little harder to figure out. My theory is that conservatives as "progressives driving the speed limit" is broadly true, but that mainstream conservatives don't realize that they've absorbed many progressive axioms and that, consequently, they have sabotaged many of their strongest arguments against leftist programs like CRT. When you're a conservative who believes in deeply in Equality, hates Racism, and believes in Women's Rights (but all "only to a certain extent and not as far as those crazy libs take it!") you've already given up the game.
So while a conservative from 1963 might have been comfortable with HBD, a conservative from 2023 has ceded too much ideological ground to feel comfortable with the idea.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I googled the Lizzo and thing and all the top articles have one of "racists," "racism," or "dogwhistle" in the headline. My inner conspiracy theorists wonders if these are written before the event even happens and then auto-posted the day after. Or maybe even GPT'd.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Is it fear, or is it just business sense? Toy Story was a hit in part because it used a setting and characters familiar to an American audience (suburban childhood life, old fashioned cowboy toy, newfangled spaceman toy, slinky, green army men, Mr potato head). Ghibli movies are universally loved it Japan because of all the very-Japanese details and cultural references woven into them (likely both intentionally and unintentionally) -- see Totoro, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, or My Neighbors The Yamadas. I think the term "love letter" is trite when describing a movie, but these films are love letters to the childhoods and shared experiences of their respective audiences. They target a specific culture and a specific slice of space and time.
Modern family films don't really seem to do that anymore. Everything is either engineered to appeal to the widest possible audience (gotta appeal to the East Asian market) or, when they do try to set a film in a specific culture, it's a theme park version created by outsiders (Coco, Moana, new Mulan) that is still designed to be widely palatable. In both cases the end product is sometimes entertaining but never beloved as it doesn't connect with our own memories or experiences on more than a superficial level.
If you're not convinced, try this -- imagine a 2024 Disney remake of Totoro, complete with the newfangled 3D animation, the gender roles updated, the clothing modernized, interiors of the homes genericized, still vaguely Japanese (in the way a Japanese-American from California might imagine "Japanese") but mostly just anodyne and inoffensive, Totoro's wood has been expanded to cover a huge expanse of land and Catbus has a new origin story, and now Mei has a cute comic relief Makurokurosuke sidekick that hangs out on her shoulder (merchandising!). It would probably make a good trailer or two and I bet it would make some money at the box office, but a lot of the themes, images, and dare I say SOVL would have been lost in the quest to broaden appeal.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Regular PSA: Do not trust Google search to be unbiased.
Searching "Died Suddenly" on Google gives me a news widget and 9 results. Of the 9 results, 6 are negative articles about the documentary, one is a YouTube video defending the doc (that got slipped in by mistake due to its negative sounding title), and the other 2 are IMDB and RottenTomatoes. The adjectives used in the negative article headlines are:
debunked x3
conspiracy
anti-vax x3
false x2
unfounded
bogus
Doesn't really seem like there's much room for debate in there. Yandex in contrast gives 6 links to the actual film itself including a YouTube link that apparently isn't allowed to show up on Google's first page. The Yandex results include one apparently even-handed in depth review, and another mildly negative review. Both have much more content than the "four legs good, two legs bad" Google articles.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source?
As an average Joe and non-academic, I just assume that a sizeable chunk of papers and citations are just made up and I look on requests for "source?" and quasi-religious appeals to "peer review" with an increasingly jaundiced eye. I think that a lot of this is probably not malicious, since I too have copied quotations from second or third hand sources without checking the original when writing undergrad papers, but that doesn't make this any less of a problem.
The usual retort is along the lines of "it might not be the perfect system, but it's the best one we've got." I'm not sure I agree. A tabloid magazine article claiming something outrageous is easy for people to evaluate and accept, reject, or suspend judgment. In contrast, a published study filled with impressive sounding words and using complicated statistical methods appears cloaked in a mantle of authority, expertise, and erudition has much more power to simply overawe plebs into accepting its conclusion.
This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above. A great analogy is "The Book" from Anathem:
Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance.
[...]
There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.
Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed-but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks-and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time-after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter 9 would emerge permanently damaged.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Learning that universal suffrage was universally regarded as insane prior to the mid-19th century (and even then, the only change was in the U.S.!) is one of those things I can't "unsee." It just explains so many liberal democratic dysfunctions (see Legutko's book).
Fair point about not being able to read minds. I don't want to take my original point too far; I don't think that the people I'm talking about are literal p-zombies. Of course they have an inner life and (IMO) share with me the inherent dignity (in the old sense of "honor and duty") of being made in the image and likeness of God. But maybe they shouldn't be involved in the political decision making process.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
As @Bleep and @RandomRanger point out, you need to go further back in time and learn about the late 19th/early 20the century roots of the conflict. The tl;dr is Palestinians and a few Sephardic Jews were living in Palestine. European Jews were feeling pressure to assimilate or leave due to rising ethno-nationalism in Europe, and so a bunch of rich and/or ideologically zealous European Jews orchestrated a migration to Palestine where they dispossessed the locals of their land and rights using salami slicing tactics. Tensions flared but the British usually came down on the side of the Jews who had high level advocates in the British govt and had way better PR. Some zealous Zionists and Jewish Communists came from Europe and formed a hard core of Jews willing to push back against Palestinian attempts to take back their land. And then the violence escalated higher and higher on each side until you had Palestinians bombing markets full of Jewish families and Jews blowing up school buses of Palestinian children. And so on for the last 7 decades.
Though both sides are covered in blood at this point, to me it's clear that the Jews showed up and essentially invaded Palestine. Was it done "legally?" Probably. But I don't think I'd just shrug my shoulders if my government decided to sell large parts of my city to, say, a bunch of rich Chinese looking to settle new land. The end result would be the same, regardless of legality.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Not to dogpile, but all of this presupposes that there are no "bad" people, only bad actions, and that nobody would rationally choose to commit an evil act (let's lay aside how unevenly applied these ideas are based on the racial/sexual attributes of the person in question). I reject this premise, and so it makes complete sense to me to inflict vengeance on her so that at least some imperfect justice can be achieved. There is a cosmic disharmony due to her actions that must be corrected. This is an idea that comes naturally to all people (just watch how children behave when arguing or fighting) and is only deadened or destroyed by the WEIRD education system. I want her to be punished not because it's good for her, but because she must suffer in return for the suffering and evil she caused. Deterrence and rehabilitation might be an added bonus, but it should definitely a secondary aim.
Also: obligatory short C.S. Lewis essay on rehabilitative justice
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Did they want western-style atomizing individualist freedom in the first place?
There is freedom in social obligation and in existing in a definite hierarchy. You are free to focus on things in life outside the culture war, freed from an obsession with the political that has seeped into every aspect of western life, even into the formerly sacrosanct household, poisoning the most fundamental human relations (man/woman, parent/child).
Likewise there is a sort of slavery in western "freedom." Slavery to vice born of anomie. Nothing matters, all choices and lifestyles are equal. Many people experience a sort of analysis paralysis and just choose the past of least resistance. Not to mention the nigh-mandatory participation in politics; as they say, you may not be interested in it, but it is interested in you, and it's not going to leave you alone (and some true degenerates engage in it willingly, even spending their free time furiously refreshing a certain CW thread...).
Consider that your definition of "freedom" is one among many.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Are there synonyms for international or global that start with “T”?
Transnational?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
I don't come to The Motte for wiki links and one liners. That's Reddit-tier discourse. If someone has a point to make, they should state it explicitly so the countours of the argument are plain.
Thank you. I would argue that they would have been fully justified in not fighting for a state that had been actively persecuting them. In hindsight they seem virtuous and heroic because public opinion ended up reversing course on Japanese internment, but they couldn't be sure that that would happen two decades before the Civil Rights Act. They would have seemed foolish in a different timeline where the U.S. had remained a country where Japanese were seen as un-American and alien.
Same goes for black soldiers in WW2. Why volunteer to fight for a country that sees you as a subhuman? I think black draft dodgers during WW2 would also have been on solid moral ground.
I'm not denying that they were courageous, optimistic, and virtuous, but simply that their virtue was beyond what could be reasonably demanded in the circumstances. And so I think a young white British man would be perfectly justified in giving the finger to a system that apparently actively dislikes and seeks to diminish his kind. Pinging @Gdanning.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I took would like more examples of "hostile occupation of conservate Christians." I agree with FC that this just sounds like people being mad that their parents raised them in a religious tradition that they no longer believe in (likely because mass media and public education converted them to a rival religious tradition).
"Hostile occupation" sounds to me more like Francoist Spain where you needed letters of recommendation from your parish priest for a government position, or where the school curriculum is designed and monitored by the Church, or where major retailers wouldn't even consider a "Pride Month display" for fear of boycotts or falling afoul of the law.
Conservative parts of America have Pride displays at big box and book stores, their school curriculums are implemented by a body of teachers who are as a group quite woke, and although you don't yet need a letter vouching for your good character from your local DEIB commissar, if enough people learn that you're a heretic who opposes woke teachings you will be blacklisted from many government institutions and powerful corporations.
Given the above I have a really hard taking people seriously when they claim to have escaped a conservative hellhole because their parents made them go to church on Sunday and disapproved of their gender identity and oh yeah one time at a bar a drunk guy called them a faggot.
I don't really understand the concerns scattered throughout this thread about Musk suppressing criticism of his companies. The problem with pre-Musk Twitter censorship was that it was aligned with most other large platforms censorship policies, making it genuinely difficult to discuss or mention and handful of tabooed topics with more than a small audience. I don't think Google or Reddit employees (or for that matter, the employees of Twitter itself) have the same zealous ideological commitment to defending Musk's business interests that they do for Stopping Hate and Protecting Trans Kids and Black Bodies, and in fact many seem hostile to Musk. So I doubt he would be able to censor criticism successfully even if he wanted to.
And secondly, why would he want to? People have been shitting on him and his companies for years and it doesn't really seem to have mattered. He's recently positioned himself as pro free speech. Why would he (1) contradict his stances and lose a bit of moral high ground in order to (2) censor criticism that doesn't really affect him, only to (3) fail at censorship because his underlings hate or are apathetic toward him? None of that makes sense.
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