BahRamYou
1d ago
Tons of people are influential in their day, but that doesnt mean we have to keep worshipping them forever. Rasputin, for example.
BahRamYou
1d ago
Im not really talking about freud at all, im talking about the people who continue to cite him and use him into the current day, despite him being widely discredited by his own field. And its the same people who are still unreformed Marxists.
BahRamYou
1d ago
In liberal cities, colleges are calling the cops because they don’t want to lose Jewish donors. I think if we have an in-part privately funded university system it’s fair to say “I’m not going to continue to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to you if you tolerate X” and then the university can decide if that matters to them. If it does, that isn’t blackmail, it’s how almost all charity works. If you donate a few hundred million to the NY Phil you can probably finagle some influence over what’s played.
It seems like you're not really contradicting @coffee_enjoyer but simply explaining how the influence works? It's not some shadowy cabal, it's money. An awful lot of the donations for universities comes from wealthy jewish donors. Especially the kind of donations that come in regularly, year after year, with no specific purpose (as opposed to one-off donations from someone who dies and wants a new building named after them- that's nice, but it doesn't really help pay the general expenses of the university). Those donations start off no-strings-attached, but you suddenly see the strings when they call up and demand a specific action.
I don't have any specific numbers, but it does seem like a hugely disproportionate amount of private university donations comes from these wealthy Jewish donors. Probably even more so in schools like Colombia and USC where we've seen the harshest crackdowns on protestors.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Makes sense. I can see how that might be the result of wishful thinking... "the world can't really be this awful, can it?" I've heard that burnout is a real problem for psychiatrists, since they have to listen to so many awful emotional problems all day every day.
BahRamYou
2d ago
but the prospect of playing them felt like work.
yeah, that's exactly how I feel now trying to learn some new complex game. I just don't have the spare brain energy to want to play it. The only games that I actually enjoy anymore are casino gambling games, where it's simple enough that I don't have to think about it, yet there's still a real stake (money) and a crowd of real people.
BahRamYou
2d ago
so, when i proposed building a literal walled city, and you say the homeless people will still get out anyway... are you imagining a gaza situation where they build elaborate underground tunnels? Or is it just the nature of homeless to manifest themselves inside of public libraries, by teleportation?
BahRamYou
2d ago
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is? How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
I'm not any kind of expert myself- just a couple undergrad classes and what I've skimmed from wikipedia. So I'm not trying to do battle with you here. If you tell me that you've studied it extensively I'll believe you.
But, from what I've read, this really doesn't seem like an accurate summary. It seems more like you're talking general phenomenology/theory of mind stuff. Lots of philosophers have talked about that, and it goes back way before Freud. (I'm not sure what the first would be- at least Descarte, and arguably all the way back to the Greeks). Of course it's a hard problem. Still, psychologists have found ways to grapple with it. At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
If anything Freud was the opposite. He seemed to believe that he could accurately diagnose people's subconscious minds and innermost desires, even better than they themselves could. Like he somehow came to believe that all his patients who came to him with horrific tales of being sexually molested as children, were in fact just lying and telling him a fantasy of what they wish had happened. Based on... ? nothing but "trust me, I'm a doctor". He made all sorts of really bold claims about other people's minds.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell. And even better, it's a perverted sexual desire, which most people aren't comfortable talking about. No one wants to have a public debate to try and prove that "actually no I'm not trying to have sex with my mother." So you can win a whole swath of arguments by tarring your adversaries with dark accusations. It's like the Oscar Wilde quote- "Everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power."
BahRamYou
3d ago
The thing about Kowloon Walled City is that it was, you know, walled. Once you go in, it's not easy to go out. The homeless neighborhoods of American cities are just constantly leaking.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I would have said at the church serving free all-you-can-eat warm meals every weekday, when they're serving, but it doesn't make a dent in the people panhandling outside the grocery store half a block away. I asked, and one woman thought for a moment and said that she'd lose her spot if she went to get the free food.
Food is generally one of the easiest things to get when you're homeless in a modern american city. Between food stamps, charities, and dumpster-diving, there are all sorts of ways to get food. The problem is more... everything else. That church won't let you stick around after the meal, not even to sleep, and they're certainly not going to let you just hang out there smoking or turning tricks to earn cash.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Yeah, as I'm reading about it now that sounds right. To be more specific it was this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization which really argued the idea, and it got popularized by the Frankfurt school and spread through all of the postmodern academic humanities. What a trip.
BahRamYou
3d ago
The problem is that cities already have lots of homeless people. Lots of them. And they tend to cluster in the most valuable, desirable parts of the city. So in this example it would be like people are driving at freeway speeds through central park, and the supreme court is hearing arguments about whether there's some fundamental human right to drive as fast as you want anywhere you want, vs the proposed solution of making it impossible for any car ever to exceed a certain speed.
BahRamYou
3d ago
That might be true in some average statistical sense. But would that really help you if you were a typical Indian peasant in 1750? First it would be incredibly expensive to get to England. Then once you got there you'd have to learn English, learn English customs, and learn about how the capitalist economy works. It would be incredibly difficult for them to fit in and get a job, even a low-paying one. There's a high chance they'd just end up worse than they were in India.
I mostly just wish people would take the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
I agree. I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields (economics and psychology, respectively). Not even repudiated, really, it's more like "not even wrong"- they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls. No doubt it was shocking stuff to the victorians to talk about labor revolutions and sex but it's not that shocking today, and we have a lot of real social scientists studying this stuff.
And yet, they're still taken as this huge intellectual cornerstone to the modern humanities. It's like not even questioned, just of course marx and freud* were right, the real question is how do we go beyond their work to update and adapt it for the latest developments. So they take Marx's idea of a class struggle between an oppressive conspiracy of capitalists vs the mass of oppressed proletariats, and mad-libs that to every single other priviledged/underpriviledged group under the sun. it's really amazing. Why can't they read a different book?
Hell, there's even a term for it: Freudo-Marxism. I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
BahRamYou
3d ago
I mean, i dont really want to live right next to a freeway or industrial zone either, but it works ok as long as its blocked off, and presumably its also cheaper to live there. We make this sort of trade all the time. Its only with homeless that we put them right in the most valuable public property and forbid cities from doing anything about it.
BahRamYou
3d ago
what is the right place to go to be a bum?
Normies would say "go to the homeless shelter, they'll give you the help you need." But that help usually comes at a high price, like: no alcohol, no drugs, no pets, no coed habitation, no noise, and strict hours.
Outside of the park, you can't just go and "hang out" because it's all owned by someone who will kick you out for loitering. Like I can't just go camp on some random person's lawn, even if it's otherwise empty and not being used for anything. You can maybe get away with it on a sidewalk, but you have to keep moving along constantly.
I kind of think what we need is to normalize favela's/shantytowns. Set up a space where the normal laws don't apply, and it's just a giant free-for-all. Something like Kowloon Walled City, but in every major American city. The bums get a place where they can stay for free and do whatever drugs they want. The normies can exile bums guilt free. Everybody wins.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.
I mean, you can. But doesn't it help to have some sort of common activity to bring people together? As an adult I find it really rare that other adult friends would just spontaneously call me up on discord "just to hang out." Made even more complicated by all the different discord servers, so you have to agree on whose server it is, which sort of puts them in charge.
BahRamYou
5d ago
But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.
I think we all agree on that in principle. But in practice it's not that easy to determine whether someone is breaking the law. The banks all default to safetyism, so they debank someone if there's even the slightest chance that the might be breaking the law, or just causing trouble. Maybe we need some sort of government bank account with a "right to banking" for anyone that hasn't been formally convicted?
BahRamYou
5d ago
Ah cool, this is the first I've heard of that. Seems like great tech, but how much adoption does it actually have?
BahRamYou
5d ago
right to engage in any 'legal' transaction
How do you determine this? Is it hooked up to some sort of imagine recognition software that scans the image, determines content (including guessing the apparent age of a fictional 2d character), and then cross-references that with the laws of both the host country and the customer's current location? Sounds complex!
BahRamYou
5d ago
Same. My gmail account at this point is probably more important to my identity than my social security number or driver's license number, at least on a day-to-day basis. It really worries me that this is in the hands of a private company, which could take it away on a whim, or get hacked.
BahRamYou
5d ago
I think it's great that you give donations to your favorite artists. But the original topic of this thread was about how Pixiv is making it increasingly difficult to do that. And they're one of the more permissive sites! So for certain forms of art, it's a neverending struggle to just be allowed to give them money, and that struggle seems to be getting worse as the internet becomes more centralized and enshittified.
You might say "hey, who needs new art? we've still got all this old art!" And to an extent that's true. You can spend a lifetime just reading old books and watching old movies. Except that's a pretty sad existence, not being able to experience anything new, or get any art that speaks to contemporary times. And in this case you'd be talking about pirated old porn, so you'd be dealing with blurry low-res scans, h-games that no longer work on modern operating systems, and movies that are corrupted halfway through. Someone has to pay to host the servers, or at least the torrent trackers, and someone has to store all this old data and generously seed it. It doesn't just magically happen, and when every major corporation cracks down on the few weirdos doing it, it has an effect.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Is there a crypto coin that is actually practical for this? The first one everyone thinks of is bitcoin. But bitcoin is slow, it has huge transaction fees (about $25 right now), and like you said it's not that anonymous. Etherium is better (about $1 now) but that's still not great for a use case where most people just want to tip a few bucks, and fewer people have heard of it. There's probably some altcoins that work better, but I don't know if there's any others that have widespread adoption so that non-technical people have heard of it and will trust it. Plus you have to, you know, convert it back into fiat, because at the end of the day that's still how we pay for things in the real world.
BahRamYou
5d ago
I agree that this doesnt seem like it will lead to a big change in territory. But its bad in that it shows Ukraine's troops starting to crack under the pressure. Thats really the endgame of attritional warfare... bot to take territory, but to degrade tgeir army to the point they cant fight anymore
BahRamYou
5d ago
One thing about "downloading a car" is that car companies tend to be huge, faceless entities. It's easy to think that Ford or whatever won't lose any sleep over me personally taking a car without paying for it. But of course when everyone starts doing that, the company goes out of business and then no one has any cars.
To bring this back on topic, Pixiv is mostly a community of small artists. I don't have any specific stats, but I really don't think most of them make much money. For example this guy talked about how hard it was to make any money at all as a doujin artist. You can talk to them on twitter and they'll respond, and the prices they charge for art are pathetically low. When you're talking to a real, individual person, and you can tell that they're struggling to make a living from their art, it feels rather sociopathic to just blatantly pirate it and not support them in any way. But of course all the restrictions on Pixiv make that way more of a pain than it would be in real life.
I've also heard- anecdotally- that they get most of their money from Japan, because Japan has such a strong culture against piracy compared to the west. Even though their country has less money, they support the artists much more than we do. It really shows how fragile this stuff we take for granted can be. I don't want to see the entire internet turn into the equivalent of a dead shopping mall.
Another bad day for Ukraine: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1784291236188160441.html
This is... starting to look like an envelopment, at least at the local level around Chasiv Yar. Again I don't think the actual battle lines or territory matters that much, but it's another sign that the Ukraine forces are starting to lose their effectiveness and can no longer hold the line like they used to. Let us hope that the latest aid package gives them significant help.
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