Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
And how does this make a meaningful difference? Bad policy as a response to bad policy is just more bad policy.
The meaningful difference is that there is not just a policy conflict. There is also a relationship conflict. The relationship conflict is more important than the policy conflict.
Imagine for instance if the response to leftist rent control was a rent floor rather than not enacting price controls to begin with.
Imagine what the response to leftist rent proposal might be if the standard conduct of of the leftist advocate coalition pushing / advancing / defending the policy in the decade prior did not also make public attacks on the moral and personal character if their opponents, upto and including ruining the career prospects of individuals and defending such action of their coalition peers. Imagine if the leftist coalition did (or did not) have a contemporary (or multi-decade) reputation of lying about policy concessions only to renege on them, and then accusing the opponents of being unwilling to compromise or actively being tyrants for insisting on- or enforcing- the earlier compromise.
It would matter relatively little what the current policy proposal is. Significant skepticism, suspicion, lack of trust, and warning to others would be warranted on the basis of past behavior.
The patters of past behavior are what establish a relationship, not just a policy, dispute.
Organizations, in being controlled and owned by people do in fact make decisions. Organizations are just a group. If the group members (or owner of the group if it's legally theirs) makes a decision, then the group itself can be said to have made a decision.
Congratulations on not recognizing the common attribution error, and the implications that has for recognizing the differences in impersonal and personal relationships with groups of people that shape how people respond to actions by that group.
Your relationship with a [committee] of people you don't know, and with a [committee] of people you do know and have a relationship history with, are fundamentally different.
Of course if the people in it change over time, we expect the group itself to change but it's still just that, reflective of the humans within it.
If we equivocate degrees of change, or great deal of incredibly significant social dynamics such as the nature of a group's selection bias and internal enforcement dynamics. Why you would want to ignore such dynamics which are very relevant to political faction hostility is not something we agree on.
For example, we don't actually expect a group to meaningfully change itself if the group is actively engaging in self-selection and ideological compliance actions for its induction of new members. A hobby group can remain a hobby group by recruiting and retaining members of the hobby. This, however, is a completely different organizational culture- and survivorship bias- than a organization that engages in ideological policing of its members. The more prone a group culture is to self-selection and ideological purity spirals, the stronger the survivorship bias can be expected to be, and the less relevant the changes are to central issues (as opposed to largely irrelevant non-central changes).
A organization which applies and maintains self-selection and internal indoctrination is over time going to be composed of true believes, willing conformists, or cynical grifters. 'The group will change' based on the relative composition, but the change on the willingness to act in line with the true believers does not change until outside pressure creates conditions so that the grifters see a deal elsewhere, and the conformists are willing to conform in a different direction.
That outside pressure, in turn, is [hostility].
Ok I agree that when leftists implement bad counterproductive and unhealthy policies like high corporate taxes or price controls or whatever other economically/freedom damaging policies, it's understandable to react negatively. But I don't see why that would lead to the response of joining in on the self harm.
Because you avert your eyes and do not acknowledge conflict beyond a policy conflict, and do not listen when people tell you there another sort of conflict taking place, and thus do recognize when different types of responses that are appropriate in different types of conflicts are appropriate because there is a different type of conflict going on.
See no issue, hear no issue, understand no issue that warrants issue-dependent response.
If leftists are stabbing the nation, why grab a knife and join in on the murder? Your comment doesn't answer this,
And nor should it, because my comment is that your chosen paradigm, [vengeance/murder], is false and misleading. You do not challenge a false and misleading framing as such on the framing's own grounds, you contest the framing.
In turn, someone's insistence on false and misleading framings can itself be a 'knife' that can be used to 'join in on the murder.' After all, a willful framing that implicitly accuses the dissenters of being equivalent to Bad People- say an immoral murder- is a form of accusation. An accusation can be true or false, but if it is publicly repeated when false, it is not a just a lie, but slander.
I suspect you would concede, if pressed, that dissent to your preferred way of political conflict is not equivalent to murder. I think you would also concede that slandering your countrymen (and women) is an attack on the country that is composed by them. But by making the framing, you are already grabbing a knife and giving another jab yourself.
it just assumes that saying "bad relationship" explains why I should want to harm our nation and our future.
It makes no such assumption that you should 'want to.' It is expressing that "bad relationship" is the harm.
Your nation is a collection of individuals in multitudes of relationships. Your collective future is in turn entails both the character and the consequence of those relationships. If a community has strong and positive relations, then it can overcome even great disasters. If a community has weak and negative relations, it will fail to unite over even common challenges.
There is no common interest without commonality of the people with interests. Commonality of this sort is not categorical or imposed from the outside (or above), it is cultivated and perceived through the relationship people have with each other. It is what separates a nation from an accident of geographical proximity.
If you break down that sense of commonality through negative relationships- regardless of whether that's actively attacking your opponents, or 'merely' turning a blind eye to the attacks by others because it doesn't interest you- then over time your opponents will learn that their interests are not so common with you, and stop perceiving such a strong relationship of commonality with you in turn. This manifests in things such as declining social trust, lower trust in shared institutions, and so on.
Whether you 'want to' end in a low trust society is irrelevant. It is a product of relationships whether you like it or not. In turn, you can ruin a relationship as much be neglect or dismissal of other party's concerns as anything else. A knife is still a knife.
Why political revenge narratives don't make sense to me.
I submit it's because you subscribe to a revenge framing in the first place, as opposed to a relationship framing. So long as you adopt a misleading framing, you will continue to be misled.
For example, when you give this paragraph-
After all if you care about the country, I would assume you want good and effective policy. If you see the left's policy ideas as bad and harmful to our future, it's not a great idea to join in on the self-harm. Unless you're a traitor and hate the country, you would be pushing for what you think is the best policy. Now people might disagree on what is best for growth, what is best for the people, and what is best for the country but we should expect them to pursue their ideas in the same way if they care about America, towards ideas they think are good.
-this leads off with abstractions ('the country', 'the left'), but no acknowledgement of a relationship. Even the traitor allegation is framing it as treat to the abstraction (hate the country). Even that treats the action as an initiation, as opposed to a response, as if treason is a state of being unprompted at odds with a natural/healthy state of behavior.
This is wrong in the same way that 'the organization decided to do something' is wrong. Organizations do not make decisions. People in organizations make decisions. Political parties do not try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, parts of the population. People within political parties try to appeal to, or deliberately offend, other people in the population. The tolerance / encouragement of such behavior is not conducted by The Party, but by the consent / support of other people within the party.
When people make a series of decisions over time in regards to, and affecting, other people, this connection is a relationship. Sometimes the established relationship is amicable, and sometimes the relationship is hostile.
People responding negatively to a hostile relationship are not traitors. Nor does their response to hostile relationship come off as them never believing the words they were saying.
...unless, perhaps, the only paradigm you can conceptualize for responding negatively to a hostile relationship is 'revenge' against abstractions.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Japan has its own demonstrations of the trope. Not as often as the leading main character, since those tend towards being crouching moron-hidden badass tropes. The Irresponsible Captain Tylor is about the only one I can loosely remember that played the 'could actually be incompetent' card... mostly straight?
Still, the 'incompetent but presumed hypercomptent' is a bit more common in supporting cast characters. One of the most famous examples is Hercule Satan from Dragonball Z. An actual legitimate world-class martial arts champion... who is hopeless in the context of the super-human saiyan power scaling. (And yet, is also the only person to survive fighting both of the end-game DBZ arc villains.)
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girlbossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.
Ageism!
Or rather- I wanted to pull from relatively recent characters, while Ripley and Connor were much older (as in, pre-2000s) characters who might be filed under a 'well, writing was better back in the day.' Newer characters with still-younger audiences make a stronger point on current audience-reception dynamics.
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Well, uh... awkward. And a bit embarrassing. But glad it resonated, and thank you for answering.
Cheers!
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Mercedes Lackey... is mixed. Valdemar is Very female, even by the standards of Telecoms
...huh. Wasn't expecting to see a link to one of my own old posts.
Mind if I ask what prompted you to keep a link to it?
Dean
Flairless
19d ago
Wasn't that the one where the male passes on the romantic opportunity with a pretty girl in favor of his horse or something?
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
Nah. One Punch doesn't work on Cultivator tropes, for most of the cast at least.
I'm thinking something like a genre-adapted version of Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, whose reputation is wildly exagerrated beyond his actual skills. Which aren't inconsiderable, but still fall in the 'runs away into glory.'
For a cultivator parody, I'd imagine it being someone who is so clueless/innocuous, the cultivators around them think they are so OP that they're just pretending to be weak and clueless. And thus, the caution of all the cultivators around them convincing more cultivators to be on guard / cautious, leading to more unchallenged innocuousness.
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
Is there a parody yet of the fake-hero archetype, in which everyone around the main lead thinks they are an amazing cultivating power-scaler, and in reality they're a bumbling fake?
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
I am both dispirited by the increasing influence of Chinese cultivator tropes, and cheered by the reminder that, yes, people are people (and often have bad taste).
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
I am fully open to the conspiracy theory that Iron Heart had writers who were self-aware and actively rooting for its downfall. It's hard to believe anyone would lean into Riri's 'Tony Stark wouldn't be Tony Stark without the money' when the 'Tony Stark made this in a cave with a box of scraps' was one of the stand-out lines of the early MCU foundation.
You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her
Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't want them in her life.
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters. These aren't solely male fantasy waifu audiences either, and had strong female fandom components as well. They run a gauntlet from girly-feminine to tomboy, unabashedly straight to gay, supporting characters to show leads, and so on.
But they all also have very clearly dear personal relationships with men in their life- and not even necessarily romance fantasy waifu stuff either. Ahsoka is the apprentice for (secretly married) Anakin Skywalker, and it's a mentor-mentee relationship with no sort of romantic tension between them. Katara was the center of one of the larger (fan-insisted) love triangles of its time on television, but she's also a sister who simultaneously gives sass and cares for her brother and is almost defined by her consistently demonstrates compassion for strangers female and male alike. Vi is punk-butch aesthetic and unambiguous lesbian, but one of her closest relationships- and deepest regrets- is regarding her surrogate father-figure Vander, and her regret at getting him and her adopted brothers killed. Gwen may be in a tragic/doomed romance trope with Spiderman-Morales, but the emotional crescendo of character conflict/character arc in the second movie is her reconciliation with her father.
None of these characters are defined by their romantic relationship with the main man of their narrative. However, they also all have close and personal relationships with the men in their lives, the sort of thing that they worry/anger/fear over and would fight for. They wouldn't fight beside / for the men in their life merely because 'it is the right thing to do,' but because it's personal and they care and if someone threatened to take the men they cared about away from them, it would be visceral.
By contrast, what sort of personal male relationship does Brie Larson's Captain Marvel treasure enough to fight for? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, what is Rey's emotional connection with Finn, her co-lead and the series larger self-projection male role? In Rings of Power, who is Galadriel's male emotional connection... besides the awkward love interest of the Dark Lord himself?
These aren't characters who show any particular desire / want / interest with an emotional relationship, romantic or otherewise, with the men in the setting who might serve as an audience proxy. Captain Marvel is stoic and most personal relationship is an abusive one she destroys the moment she girlbosses harder. Rey is... hard to place, since she's somewhere between oblivious / stuck in a fated romance / the trilogy was a thematic mess. Galadriel's indifference towards her own subordinates spawned sociopathic comparisons in her first episodes.
But note that all three of these characters have romantic love interests! It's forced / non-central / etc., but the nominal titulation is there if that was all that it took to get male investment. Captain Marvel got ship-teased with War Machine. Rey and Kylo Ren are having sexy abb scenes in the second movie. Galadriel and Sauron are the bad boy trash.
But I doubt much of the male audience could see themselves having a warm or interesting conversation over dinner, let alone something more. Polite discussion at best, maybe, if not barely restrained impatience / apathy. Oh, sure, they'd Do the Right Thing and save you if you were in danger, but only with the same emotional intensity as stranger #XYZ.
Compare that to a character who might not be a lover, but who might love you as a brother, or a mentor, or a friend... how many Strong Female Characters would extend even that?
Dean
Flairless
20d ago
I enjoyed the charming quaintness of the argument that expanding the House to 11,000 people would require fewer, not more, staffers to keep up with the magnitudes more institutional relationships such a reorganization would imply.
Holdo also had the sin of being a terrible leader in general. Going from assuming command to a mutiny in a matter of days, when the mutineers are experienced and committed believers in the cause, says far more about the commander than the mutineers.
Plus, it was frankly poorly thought out on a thematic level. 'Defer to people in positions of authority and do as you are told even if they appear incompetent' is not only contrary to the themes of much of Star Wars, but anathema to a lot of the cultural convictions of the more individualist/egalitarian West. In turn, it created tonal confusion for the major themes of the movies, while also flagrantly demonstrating the lack of concern for the verisimilitude of the broader IP.
Gundam? Pokemon? Dragonball Z? Half a dozen other major Japanese IPs?
Even if we limit to within the Anglosphere, I'm fairly sure that- various efforts to the contrary- franchises like D&D, Warhammer 40k, and most fighting/strategy genre video games are more popular among men than women. Each of these have had merchandising, novels, movies/TV series, comics, spinoffs and emulators, and so on.
Sure. Names will be withheld to protect the guilty innocent, but yes.
Why not 'neither is quality?'
The question of a reason is neither answered or addressed by pointing to a boo group. Even if we were to agree that the boo group is not [good quality], it does not imply that the alternative is thus [good quality]. They can both be [bad quality].
I also gave you the elaboration paragraph, which you did and still ignore.
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Is there a reason to believe a cross-section of the society that has been causing the replication crisis for the professional careers of most of its members is 'quality?'
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
Do you have any reason to think that @magicalkittycat is not, in fact, just a principled liberal?
Sure. Principled liberals have battle scars from running into reality, and magicalkittycat is neither indicating or claiming any, while repeatedly rejecting other people's observations on sophistic grounds in ways that classical liberals aren't exactly known for, even as he denies or ignores historical dynamics that principled liberals were publicly conceding for decades.
MKC speaks as a leftist assuming the mantle of a liberal, which has been a standard dynamic for decades, not as a classical liberal.
Dean
Flairless
22d ago
You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.
The government was already- as in, for decades pre-Trump- using Title IX against universities for what individuals were doing. This has repeatedly withstood the scrutiny of courts, bipartisan elected official review, and even the approval of academics like Terence Tao. Your own citation concedes that 'Real discrimination deserves a real response,' it merely quibbles what [real discrimination] should be bounded at, while presenting a false dilemma that has already come to pass.
Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?
This overall topic is about who the democratically elected government chooses to spend money on. Even if you consider free speech dependent on federal subsidy, which would be wildly at odds with the premise of natural rights, there are always people not getting money. There have always been conditions for getting the money. These incudes the previous administration's insistence on DEI-support speech in applications and proposals, the reversal of which is the basis of the OP's quoted objection.
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
Sure. Appeals not to generally devolve into special pleading that are categorically rejected in other contexts.
Kolmogorov complicity is still complicity, and it was specifically complicity with, for, and for prestige within one of the worst authoritarian/totalitarian states of the 20th century. Kolmogorov is not morally absolved by being a stellar mathematician who advanced the field. He has the same sort of moral onus of gifted scientists of other totalitarian regimes, who are routinely condemned.
"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word... Bullpup."
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