ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
Thanks for sharing. But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?
I don't understand people who write books on these themes in 2014. Is there even the thinnest residue of stunning bravery to be mined and exploited by speaking truth to a (long vanquished) power? I have to imagine that even blue tribers would yawn at yet another Holocaust tear jerker or To Kill a Mockingbird clone, "don't they know trans persecution or MAGA terrorism are where the points are scored in 2023?" And even dispensing with the cynicism, is there really anything interesting left to say on these topics? I'd wager that nearly any book you could write on them has already been written.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
It wouldn't work. What constitutes "prejudice" or "discrimination" doesn't in practice follow coherent principles, it's merely "who, whom" because anti-Catholics (in a broad sense) control all media by which the message would be delivered and can thus mute o, even better, skew or taint the message.
It is a highly effective strategy. When I think of someone on TV complaining about anti-Catholicism, I think of some crackpot or blowhard that has been brought on as a slow news day sideshow, and I'm a practicing Catholic who believes anti-Catholicism is a serious problem! I know for a fact that there are many highly articulate priests and professors who could give an excellent rundown of anti-Catholicism on TV, I've personally seen many of them speak. But they would never be allowed on air for fear that they might actually sway some folks (look up Fr. Coughlin), so instead you get Bill Donahue.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
I'm increasingly against the concept of "asylum" in general. A lot of discussions about immigration seem to take it for granted that we must let in a nonzero percentage of "asylum seekers," that this is just some sort of given, or law of physics or something. It's not. The number of asylum seekers we have to take in is zero.
It must suck to live in a place controlled by warlords and gangs. But life sucks in a lot of place and in a lot of time periods. Sometimes it even sucks within the borders of the U.S. I don't believe I or my countrymen have a special moral duty to shelter every single person who shows up at the border with some unverifiable story of persecution. The idea sounds good in theory, but in practice it is one of those ideas that seems unstable in its theoretical limited form and which inevitably decays into its more stable degraded, excessive, unlimited form (see also college financial aid).
Even a midwit like me can tell that there are simply too many people in LatAm and the 3rd world for the U.S. to absorb without impacting the living standards of Americans, so I have to suspect that "taking care of asylum seekers" is really a pretext for serving some other ideological belief, like "increasing diversity" or "destroying white hegemony" or "free market absolutism." I guess there are a few true believers among the suicidally altruistic (religious charities come to mind) but I wager that they're a minority and are mostly the "useful idiots" that the ideologues in power use to further their ideologies.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"
I've always thought this was a ridiculous question. The answer is clearly "yes" and I don't think this would have been difficult for most people before WW2. Indeed, Ecclesiastes said millennia ago:
Men are born only to die, plant trees only to displant them. 3 Now we take life, now we save it; now we are destroying, now building. 4 Weep first, then laugh, mourn we and dance; 5 the stones we have scattered we must bring together anew; court we first and then shun the embrace. 6 To-day’s gain, tomorrow’s loss; what once we treasured, soon thrown away; 7 the garment rent, the garment mended; silence kept, and silence ended; 8 love alternating with hatred, war with peace. 9 For all this toiling of his, how is man the richer?[1] 10 Pitiable indeed I found it, this task God has given to mankind; 11 and he, meanwhile, has made the world, in all its seasonable beauty, and given us the contemplation[2] of it, yet of his own dealings with us, first and last, never should man gain comprehension. 12 To enjoy his life, to make the best of it, beyond doubt this is man’s highest employment; 13 that gift at least God has granted him, to eat and drink and see his toil rewarded.
The human condition is the indignity of being an eternal soul bound to a finite body, trapped in a fallen world filled with suffering. Even non-Christians feel a similar void. I'm no Nietzschean but I sympathize with him when he says:
“If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Therefore, there are no gods.”
The default experience is to "struggle alone," to wrestle with the apparent fact that life has "no goal, no ambition, no purpose," feel that one is "buried alive" by the hideously mundane, tedious, and exhausting demands of daily life.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
My reactions to reading your synopsis:
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This sounds like a social justice fantasy so outrageous that it borders on pornographic
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This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped (and sure enough @Folamh3 says it was; do you have a link to the case?)
To your prompts:
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"No" to all those questions. Alabama in 1996 is much closer to Alabama in 2023 than to Alabama in 1926.
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Not very differently. Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays. Alabama today might actually be slightly less tolerant than Alabamians in 1996, since back then they were on board with "colorblind" race relations as a sort of truce. Now, racial identity politics and tribalism are on the rise, but I still don't think it would be enough to change how the trial would be handled.
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Light sentence for the murders of the two scumbags, and whatever the standard sentence is for unintentionally shooting someone.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
10mo ago
Edmond Dantes was in deep despair while imprisoned in Chateau D'If for an unspecified crime on the accusation of an unknown person. Only when he finally deduced what his "crime" had been and who was responsible for his wrongful imprisonment did he regain his will to act.
I think this is an accurate reflection of how many people internally experience oppression by a specific person with intelligible motives versus oppression by an impersonal, alien force to which they are merely unnoticed collateral damage.
"Why is my rent going up this month? Isn't there anything you can do?" "Nope, sorry, the computer system says your rent goes up $125 this year. Corporate sets the rules, there's nothing I can do."
Indeed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Without a "why," the "how" is often unbearable.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
11mo ago
For me it was the police's ability to hold anyone in custody for up to 23 days without charges. I avoided police, and in the rare case I had to interact with them I was exceedingly deferential and polite.
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
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
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
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
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 could have written this post, I feel the exact same, the whole thing made me even more cynical about the average person. But what creeps me out the most is
What does this phenomenon really tell us? To me, the implications are quite disturbing.
When I've gone around loudly proclaiming to be right about something (online or IRL) and then turn out to be wrong, I feel highly embarrassed when I get called out after the fact. In my better moments I respond with humility, and in my worse moments I respond with rage or misdirection. But the point is that I respond somehow, I feel something.
But a lot of the covid fanatics seem to simply not care at all that they were wrong. When you call them on it, you might get a shrug and a "things were different then," or even just a vague confused stare -- why are you still talking about that? Don't you know it's $currentyear? Haven't you heard about Putin?
When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument. But was I wrong? Were the vast majority of people literally just making mouth noises that simply signalled their alignment with the current Correct Opinion? I'm not being metaphorical here -- the Covid hysteria makes me wonder whether a large majority of our population just parrots slogans to jockey for status without engaging their thinking brains at all (outside of status calculation I guess)? If so, this would explain their apathy about their argument being wrong. "What argument?" they might respond.
Yes, it's not news that the average person is not a deep thinker. Everyone here is aware of that. But to me, the above implies that many people are not just "not deep thinkers." If they were, that wouldn't bother me much -- they and myself would be essentially the same in that we both think, just to different degrees.
But maybe these people are not just shallow thinkers, but non-thinkers. The difference between thinkers and non-thinkers is huge, and I am weirded out by the idea. It almost feels like sharing a society with a bunch of p-zombies (EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually think these people are literal p-zombies). Recent memes about internal monologues and "The Breakfast Question" come to mind. If this model is closer to the truth, it changes my outlook on many things.
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