Welcome to the Venn crossing of sports and venerated subclasses; the scandals are made up and the truth doesn't matter. For additional interest, see this week's story of the Bay Area sports media losing their minds over a laughably overrated YoungBlackMan getting replaced at quarterback by a White dude working his ass off.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.
Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?
I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?
I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.
EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:
[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.
[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.
[teal] You are the player.
[green] Wake up.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.
But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
I think that part of the reason so many of us have difficulty with self-controlled weight loss is the rarity of examples like your uncle; that's an incredible story that can serve as a powerful "carrot" for many who know him. 90% of adulthoods are descents into overfed and underactive lives, so I imagine many people lack the evidence that such a transformation is even possible.
A literally incredible turn of events in the Jonathan Majors case.
His accuser, no doubt taking note from her many predecessors, had attempted a tamed rewrite of her accusations, reducing battery and restraint to Majors having “pushed her into a taxi” and “pulled her middle finger.”
Predictably, the NYPD soon thereafter uncovered solid evidence that she was, in fact, not only the perpetrator of the abuse, but a kleptomaniac to boot, taking souvenirs from Majors’ apartment after he had enjoyed her services as a (ahem) “dancer”* movement coaching.
One wonders if, among the few patches of the populace where the light of this truth will break through, there might be a few unexpected corners noticing (weaponized term intentionally deployed) this cascade of catty copyists. But the chances of even a hundred more such cases causing so much as a hint of open skepticism in the Dominant Cultural Ideology? Methinks the lady doth be wonderful too much.
*@ecgtheow rightly points out that this is the rare tabloid case where The New York Times is obligated to use a favorite euphemism for its literal definition.
Four Questions of the Culture War After the Campaign Announcement of Dr. Cornell West
1. How viable is Dr. West as a third-party candidate?
I was fortunate to meet Cornell West when he visited Penn State around 2016; having known nothing about him at the time, I was struck by how viscerally he resurrected the images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, effectively combining the biblical fire-and-brimstone tonality of the former and the political fire-and-brimstone of the latter. Yes, the black people of America are a uniquely oppressed people-group, he asserted, but they are not the only such group, and the Democratic Party is as a "Good Master," happy to have blacks in their company, but always keeping minorities in their proper place.
If I, not a person of recent African descent by any measure, could be emotionally captured and intellectually moved by his lectures, how much more must they work on his target audience? And if his many soapbox sermons which are undoubtedly to come gain a viral following among both the subjugated races and those true believers of the Woke Ideology who didn't realize they weren't actually supposed to believe what they were told, I wonder if we might see a percentile impact beyond that of any similar candidate in recent memory, perhaps even chipping at that of Ross Perot. After all, Black Americans make up (as many a rightist could tell you) more than twelve percent of the populace; even a minority of that minority could shift the movement of greater tides.
2. Are viral speeches still the greatest arm in an Outsider Politician's arsenal?
Much - indeed, maybe all - of West's power in the 2024 presidential race rides on his ability to create viral bits of speechmaking; neither his fame nor his name are quite potent enough to make up for the steep paths he will have to traverse. Trump's impact in 2016 certainly had something to do with him simply being famous and not an established party member of either warring titan, but the viral bits of speechmaking really made the difference; even the gaffes were proof that he was getting under the enemy's skin. Perot, Sanders, and Nader had the speechmaking, but not the fame, name, or party acclaim (or, I suppose, the luck of going up against a detested old-timer). If speaking is still powerful in the future we're living in, then I suspect that West will fly high. I wonder, though, if his ideology might be a tad too grand to fit into TikTok bites and YouTube got-'em compilations, too academic for the vox populi, too rooted in the real history of the Civil Rights Movement to swim in heavily-chlorinated intellectual waters.
3. Will this campaign introduce trepidation in the academic veneration of Black Americans?
The 2024 presidential race will put the Ivy League in the uncomfortable position of having trained two detractors of their party-ideology; one who could be seen, easily enough, as a mistake of the distant past that has been corrected and overcorrected for in DeSantis, but another who, very inconveniently, took advantage of the scales balanced in his favor for the express purpose that he would strengthen their cause, then turned around and had the gall to openly disagree with them in West. Their mistakes in McWhorter and Sowell were repressed and erased to the best of their cultural ability, but West presents a new problem: he could actually, really kneecap their cause on the scope of national humiliation, with the enemy in 2024 being potentially far more potent than they were in 2016. One wonders if, with language undoubtedly lacquered in a thick veneer of "continued anti-racism and justice," the idea of sola pellis might be modified into something with a smaller, controllable aperture.
4. What new ideological platforms will be introduced to navigate the thorny task of denigrating a formerly sacred opponent?
While the Ivy League merely finds themselves in an uncomfortable corner, the Woke-Liberal-Progressive alliance will again be forced to test the unquestioned ideological "upgrade-ability" of their constituents with West in the race. While this has been deftly executed in the past, and the /r/politics clan sees no paradox in throwing West overboard, none of Cain/Powell/Rice/etc. had a substantial black following, certainly nothing that would have caused a ripple in the enemy camp. How, though, will the left respond to a candidate that can't be dismissed as "ain't black" or "white supremacist" due to the risk such a claim would run in alienating one of their prized demographics? The "single vote away from losing to fascism" rhetoric doesn't hold up as well as it used to, and I'm genuinely curious at the language that will be contorted, revised, or invented to solve this problem.
Ex_Nihilo
24d ago
Two questions about American colleges:
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What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
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Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
sure.jpg
It's interesting; despite the "Sophia Loren" reputation attached to Italian women, imo most have the much more nuanced attractiveness of the girl in the video. While Eastern European and Scandinavian women have major surface appeal with relatively uninteresting/utilitarian minds, Italians are truly wild... manipulative, creative, unpredictable, and worldly-wise. The tradeoff occurs in their design - rarely gifted with golden-ratio faces and generally ambivalent to cosmetic surgery, with extreme ranges based on their ancestry (north vs. south vs. Sicily/Sardinia). In total, they're extraordinarily interesting but difficult to ever pin down (leading to the Italian society we see today - committed, married couples routinely engaging in "side quests").
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
If it’s any comfort, most people pick up this tic simply by being immersed in leftist academic or professional environments, not necessarily by being a leftist themselves. Compared to some of the other answers in this thread, the rhetorical “right?” is a sort of “hidden indicator,” not necessarily a conscious change of vocabulary.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
Is eating 100 calories and walking two miles (supposing that, at my height and weight, one mile walked burns an additional 50 calories above TDEE) chemically the same thing as eating nothing and doing nothing? I'm in the middle of a weight loss campaign and love to walk, but am continually baffled at the futility of "exercising to lose weight."
People (especially women being egged on by their friends) have easily-altered memories when they are either 1) socially pressured or 2) socially incentivized to reinterpret events they barely recall and barely care about outside of group status. Majors’ accusers, like many cascades of catty copyists before them, all suddenly remembered him being a very bad boy the second they saw another woman gain social status and the potential for a financial windfall from doing so. Majors’ “long-standing reputation” did not exist at all until our “dancer”* movement coach decided to create it, after which many women who had most likely bragged to their friends about having once known him (probably some, to be fair, in the biblical sense) turned toward the other endzone and joined the dogpile.
*see top post
Great post.
“Thot,” in my understanding, is much more complex than “slut” or “easy” or “loose” - it carries a subtle gentlemanly warning that the woman in question is a honey-/thirst-trap whose attractiveness and/or complexity (and/or complexion) is only profile-deep.
Ex_Nihilo
8mo ago
Mouth-to-mouth is unusual, but cheek kisses are very common in Southern European countries when a player is substituted off after an extraordinary performance, not unlike the ass slapping on the sidelines of NFL games.
Ex_Nihilo
11mo ago
I have found one of the strongest subtle clues to indicate that someone is a leftist (or mired in leftist ideology) is their use of the rhetorical “right?” to end statements of dubious fact, or just statements which they know are unacceptable to refute, mostly things “we all know, right?”. It’s like a tic where they can’t stop doing it even if they tried.
The Vice-Joy of Football Manager
Today I re-purchase, for the third time in as many years, a device I had discarded only weeks earlier out of ludd-ish frustration with my perceived lack of productive potential: the self-built PC gaming rig. This time around I at least possessed the clear-sightedness to hang onto my graphics card and RAM, but all other components - including the SSD, the CPU, the motherboard, and the housing itself - were either dissolved, deconstructed, or defenestrated (only through the window of the dumpster, of course) in an act of feverish discontent with my personal failings.
This cycle of destruction and renewal, while somewhat costly, has its surprising upsides: the exchange of forceful self-loathing for the excitement of building a new machine, the clean restart of what was once a cluttered device, and - most notable to this post and this thread - appreciation for the role gaming plays in the tapestry of my life, only perceptible when its reprieve has been torn out of my daily regimen.
As I get older, I've learned the value of whimsically enjoying the ups and downs of my own decision-making, appreciating the oddity of the battle between my (animal) brain and my (human) mind. While I do occasionally step into other Steam offerings, my preferred dalliance from an otherwise meaningful life is Sports Interactive's masterpiece Football Manager, the greatest simulation game ever built. FM is my version of Tolkien's pipe-weed, Lewis' drink, Disney's cigarettes, Flynn's exploration of the female pudenda (thanks to @George_E_Hale for your very enjoyable posts): my own private Idaho; an alternate reality I can step into in an unhealthy manner and enjoy for that very reason. For the other Elect out there, I'm specifically reminded of Eugene Meltzner's addictive use of Whit's Imagination Station in Adventures in Odyssey. Eugene was chided by Mr. Whittaker for losing hold of reality, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing - for either Eugene or myself.
I am a writer by trade, and so the bulk of my working hours are spent in a desperate act of escape from the nonfiction in which I am enmeshed towards the greater pursuit of grand fictions; stories that follow avenues through which I myself am often surprised, but which must retain a clarity to the perception of my fellow nonfiction-dwellers. Perhaps, in this third loop of the re-making of my alt-world, I see that my nonproductive addiction has a usefulness all its own: Football Manager itself weaves grand fictions of the sporting kind using only the names, data, and histories found in our "real world;" spinning the threads of past Champions League comebacks, Premier League relegation battles, and yet-unknown Southeast Asian urban rivalries into a controllable telling of infinite futures (or alternate pasts, given the right database).
And so, rather than shake my head at my own misguided self-discipline (which, naturally, will look like the wise choice a year from now when the cycle turns again), I'll laugh at my own foolishness, re-calibrate the hours to which I'm one with pen and paper, and joyfully tumble headfirst down the rabbit hole in the hope that the water-pipe of Manchester United's 2023-24 season is soon filling my lungs again.
Ex_Nihilo
9mo ago
This is still the case for me in my thirties. The idea of being 55 and well-established, or 70 and retired, or 80 and physically worn, are impossible to tangibly imagine.
Ex_Nihilo
10mo ago
Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.
That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.
Ex_Nihilo
4mo ago
A great story; I appreciate you recollecting it here.
A Christian-specific invocation is definitely a surprise (and, I imagine, will be “prepared for” in the future by the admins who were in attendance), even if it shouldn’t be given the fanbases and location. One of the most interesting dichotomies of the modern culture war is the differing reactions to public displays of Christianity based on whether the zealot in question is black or white.
Black Christianity, despite being far more charismatic, superstitious, and money-grubbing, gets a pass in the public sphere for two reasons: 1) soft bigotry of low expectations and 2) its platform elevates Blue Tribe politicians rather than Red ones (I’m reminded of Barack Obama putting on an AAVE affect on the few occasions when he discussed Christianity in a non-academic way).
But even the congregates of American Christianity seem to understand this dichotomy without the framework of PMC/Media Culture; Sunday mornings are one of the last remaining public displays of (voluntary) racial segregation. Indeed, I wonder if the Black Church (perhaps along with the leftist safeguarding of Islam) is the one poison pill guaranteeing the survival of White Christianity in a progressive society… at least until the day that the bold partisanship seen in the last week in the courts of Maine and Colorado finally feels confident enough to openly enforce racist practices limiting constitutionally-protected exercises of faith.
I give it a year.
Ex_Nihilo
5mo ago
Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:
Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.
Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:
Inspiration is the act of drawing up the chair to the writing desk.
And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.
Ex_Nihilo
6mo ago
I'll mention Thomas Merton as a (sort of unexpected) voice of spiritual clarity for the modern world. While a committed Catholic monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he pursued intellectual and theological connections with the world of Buddhism, spawning new ideas about both religions in the process. He's very candid and "human" in his writings (two qualities largely absent in theological treatises); while The Seven Storey Mountain is his best-known work (and his "official" autobiography), I prefer his smaller collections of essays titled Love and Living and Contemplative Prayer - they each approach the paradox of belief with honesty and open questions.
Ex_Nihilo
9mo ago
Completely agree. He revolutionized his and all other - by way of gesamtkunstwerk - art forms. He was as much a renaissance man as there’s ever been, and the power of his vision (and his ability to execute that vision) is rivaled by a sparing handful of aspirational entrepreneurs: Ford, Disney, Jobs/Gates, Musk. His pamphlet on Jewish Music is an overblown non-scandal due to its later admirers; his views were absolutely standard for his day - more charitable even, in parts.
Fake Outrage for a Fake Crisis
In one of the most annoyingly misguided media crusades in recent memory, the soccer world (read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once) has fixed its laser gaze on Luis Rubiales, head of the Spanish FA (the top soccer organization in Spain; representing all club and national teams in the country). His crime, for which he is demanded to give up everything he now has and ever had, was a kiss.
After the Spanish National Team won the Women's World Cup last week, a traditional trophy presentation was held. In his jubilation, Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso, just as thousands of soccer personnel have done thousands of times in moments of great triumph. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, Hermoso laughed it off on camera as a passing awkward moment. In the days following that recording, I assume Hermoso has come to see that one moment of blasé honesty as a crucial tactical mistake (not that it matters; the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles).
What Hermoso failed to realize in that moment (but has very much seized upon since) is that she had been granted the gift of victimhood. Not just as a woman, not just as a woman at the hand of a man, but as a woman footballer (one of the venerated subclasses, as elaborated upon in one of my past comments) at the hands of T H E P A T R I A R C H Y.
This one meaningless moment flashed overnight into an international dogpile, with consequences as wild as Rubiales' mother enduring a hunger strike. Unfortunately, Rubiales is experiencing firsthand that racism is not the only demand in excess of its supply, and that even a hint of raw meat, especially in the entirely invented space of "women's sports" "inequality," will be devoured, even if it was just shoe leather all along.
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