FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3d ago
This is my new favourite country song. For the full experience, read the lyrics.
FtttG
3d ago
Only half of self identified evangelicals attend church weekly.
On this topic in particular: a survey conducted in Ireland over a decade ago found that nearly two-thirds of self-identified Catholics don't believe that the communion wafer literally transforms into the body of Christ.
Never mind the fact that they're non-observant: from a theological perspective, most Irish Catholics are Protestant in all but name. And that's not even mentioning how many of them voted to legalise abortion and gay marriage.
FtttG
3d ago
It's funny: I know this isn't the first time I've heard of this concept, and yet every time I come across it, I immediately think "is this a Scientology thing?" I don't know why.
FtttG
3d ago
Yeah, that's fair enough. If no one likes you (even if it's not reciprocated), you have no business calling yourself charismatic.
You're right that a disproportionate number of examples in my post were left-coded, which was unfair of me. In my defense, at the time of writing I was sincerely thinking of "identifying as a good person even though you've never done anything good" as a bipartisan phenomenon. When we hear a term like "performative virtue signalling" our mind reflexively goes to AWFL women sharing black squares on Instagram, but it's equally applicable to boomer wine aunts who share posts on their Facebook pages about violent criminals coupled with demands that the UK "bring back hanging". When it comes to slave morality, the kinds of people described in Hillbilly Elegy are just as prone to self-destructive crabs-in-a-bucket begrudgery as the residents of any urban ghetto. And a lurid fixation on the nastiest crimes committed by others (as a means of downplaying one's own moral shortcomings) can and does afflict anyone regardless of tribal or political affiliation.
As for the self-examination piece: well, earlier this year I released a solo album on an actual legit indie record label, and completed an (as yet unpublished) novel — and yet I would still feel hesitant to describe myself as a "musician" or a "writer". (I'm not saying you can't call yourself one of these things until you make a living from it, but it has to be a major part of your lifestyle, not just a hobby.) I have no illusions about having enjoyed a privileged middle-class upbringing (attempting to pass oneself off as coming from a more underprivileged background than you really did — class-Dolezalism — is endemic in Ireland and the UK, and equally common regardless of political stripe), although with the qualification that I did earn a partial scholarship to my private secondary school. In the past I had a very bad habit of really "identifying" with the fact that I'd been diagnosed with depression as a convenient excuse for my various shortcomings (ethical and otherwise), but I don't do this anymore and can't honestly say I've suffered from depression for many years, if I ever did. Offhand, I truly can't think of any way I habitually describe myself without "walking the walk" or meeting the traditional criteria for such a designation.
As for the "identifying as a good person" bit: the main reason I abhor performative virtue signalling of all stripes is because it reduces the preconditions for being a "good person" to simply holding the "correct" opinions, making pro-social actions completely irrelevant to the moral calculus. To give a current example: over the past two years I've donated somewhere in the region of €1,700 to assistance for Gaza (via charitable foundations such as Médecins sans Frontières, Medical Aid for Palestine and Realign for Palestine) — not a vast sum, either in absolute terms or as a percentage of my income, and yet I can only assume it's a damn sight more than most of the people accusing Israel of genocide have donated over the same period, by either metric. (As I've mentioned before, there are few things that infuriate me more than being lectured and scolded about how I ought to do more to help the less fortunate — by a person who is doing a damn sight less to help the less fortunate than I am.) The belief seems to be that, because I'm not terribly sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian statehood and acknowledge Israel's right to exist, I am forever and always unclean, whereas a person who holds the "correct" opinions on this cause is therefore One of the Good Ones, regardless of what actions they undertake. My friends and family members won't actually come out and say that Alice (who has the "correct" opinions on the Jewish Israel Question, but who hasn't donated a penny to helping the people of Gaza) is morally superior to Bob (who's donated a decent chunk of cheddar to helping the people of Gaza, but who acknowledges Israel's right to exist, doesn't think they're committing a genocide [while acknowledging they've committed war crimes], has minimal sympathy for the cause of Palestinian statehood and zero sympathy for Hamas) — but it's abundantly clear that's what they believe, at least subconsciously. It seems at some point the idea that "well, he hasn't done much, but he means well: at least his heart's in the right place" was surreptitiously supplanted with "because his heart's in the right place, he has therefore discharged his moral responsibilities and no longer needs to lift a finger to help others — he is already One of the Good Ones".
To be a good person, you have to do good things: people's lives are saved with bandages and splints, not retweets and vibes.
FtttG
4d ago
By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people.
True, and weirdly enough, these people bear a strong familial resemblance to those people who seem extremely invested in their IQ score or MENSA membership, as a substitute for their paucity of actual intellectual achievements. Genuinely smart people don't care about their IQ score or what fruity little club they're a member of: they demonstrate their intelligence through their actions.
Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense.
My favourite critique of this concept came from Malcolm in the Middle:
Ida: Your pretty words don't hide your fear.
Malcolm: What?
Ida: You are afraid of the next trial because it is a test of intelligence. You are afraid to find out who is really the smart one in the family. He goes around with his nose in a book, sucking in facts. He doesn't have what we have. You and I have street smarts.
Malcolm: Oh, here we go. Every moron who's willing to act like a criminal is loaded with street smarts. Well, let me tell you something, Grandma, you're either smart or you're not. Saying you have street smarts just means you're willing to do things that smart, sensitive people are too decent to do. That's not a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's not!
FtttG
4d ago
The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends
I mostly agree, but I don't necessarily consider these two in tension with one another. Consider the archetypal charming psycho-/socio-path in fiction, who could maintain friendships and relationships if he wanted to, but doesn't see any value in doing so, and yet is unquestionably adept at charming and manipulating people in the short-term (e.g. con artists, cads, politicians with shit-eating grins).
I suppose this hinges on the question of what "charisma" means. To take a stab at it, I'd say it means the ability to make people like you, feel at ease around you, trust you — and especially the ability to do this in a very short timeframe. When considered as a goal-oriented skill, it's the ability to get people to do things for you because they find you prestigious rather than dominant. I see no reason why a person couldn't be good at this (even exceptionally good at it) and also have no use for friends, approaching every interpersonal relationship as a mark to be exploited.
FtttG
4d ago
Even if we were to grant that your thesis were true, there's the weird human psychology thing where telling people it's true can have certain self-fulfilling prophesy effects
You mean stereotype threat?
In any case, I'm sceptical about whether the extremely mentally disabled people I'm describing are even capable of the reasoning required to understand the concept of being unintelligent on multiple axes, never mind fall victim to the self-fulfilling prophecy it implies. If you're referring to 90 IQ people who read this comment and decide there's no point in trying any more, that's not the category of person I'm referring to.
FtttG
4d ago
A quick Google led me to this article. A study of 11,399 adults of varying diets were recruited from a representative group of Americans. Five out of six people who give up meat eventually abandon vegetarianism. Vegans are less likely to backslide than vegetarians (70% vegans, 86% of vegetarians).
But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.
This idea of "you are smart even though you don't do anything smart" reminds me of a book Freddie deBoer reviewed, Amy Lutz's Chasing the Intact Mind. From reading the review, Lutz's thesis appears to be that the parents of severely mentally disabled children often seem to believe (explicitly or implicitly) that, while their non-verbal autistic or cerebral palsied etc. child gives no outward appearance of engaging in high-level cognition of any kind, somewhere inside there's an "intact" mind which is fully conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level reasoning. Their desperation to communicate with this "intact mind" leads them down a range of garden paths, such as pseudoscientific nonsense like facilitated communication: a technique wherein a non-verbal person can purportedly communicate through an intermediary. Countless studies have demonstrated that facilitated communication is bunk, the product of wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect: the non-verbal person is effectively being used as a Ouija board. The belief in an "intact mind" residing somewhere inside the body of a non-verbal or even vegetative person amounts to a modern form of mind-body dualism.
(Some people might be tempted to point to the existence of people with locked-in syndrome, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, as a counter-example. The difference here is that Bauby was unambiguously capable of high-level cognition prior to the stroke which caused his condition, living an entirely independent life; and after the stroke his communication did not need to be "facilitated" in the manner described above. Contrast this with a child who has never given any indication of higher-level brain function.)
I wonder if there's a less extreme version of the same phenomenon going on here. Much as proponents of the "intact mind" believe that every human being is equally conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level cognition, and some people just need more accommodations to express themselves than others — perhaps by the same token there are people who believe that everyone is born equally intelligent, and some people just need more accommodations to express that intelligence than others (or they're only intelligent in a nonstandard domain unrelated to verbal or numerical reasoning).
There are several obvious retorts to this worldview:
- If Bob takes three hours to do what Alice can do in two; or if Bob can score a C in an exam provided he is allowed to sit it in a quiet room containing only himself and an invigilator, while Alice can ace it while sitting in a noisy exam hall surrounded by hundreds of her classmates — then Alice just is more intelligent than Bob, almost by definition.
- "Multiple intelligences" strikes me as something of a motte-and-bailey argument. No one disputes that some people are bad at maths and good at music, or shape-rotators but not wordcels. I think the degree to which talent in one domain is orthogonal to talent in other domains has been vastly overstated: I think you would have a very hard time locating someone who scores in the 90th percentile of numerical reasoning but the 10th percentile of verbal reasoning. (The whole concept seems very prone to Berkson's paradox.) Likewise, we can debate how many distinct "intelligences" there really are: while social skills are definitely a thing, I'm sceptical of how useful a category "emotional intelligence" is, and I've even seen straight-faced claims that "spiritual intelligence" is a meaningful concept in an undergrad psychology textbook. But even if we grant that all of the proposed intelligences really exist and are not strongly correlated with one another (such that you can be good at one and bad at another): the law of averages nonetheless dictates that there are bound to be people who are unintelligent on every possible axis. Bad with numbers, bad with words, can't sing, physically uncoordinated, lacking in social skills, lacking in self-awareness and so on and so forth. I say "the law of averages dictates" like I'm describing some statistical certainty I've never personally observed, but obviously if you want to see the kind of person I'm describing, you just need to walk down to your nearest school for developmentally disabled children. None of these children will be winning Nobels, Grammys or Olympic gold medals any time soon, no matter how many accommodations we make for them.
FtttG
4d ago
You could try a magnesium supplement shortly before bed. Don't overdo it though, maybe twice a week at most.
I hope this isn't an obvious suggestion but have you tried cutting out caffeine? I once went a month without drinking any caffeinated beverages: the first week was a challenge, but after that I felt no less alert and focused during the day, and slept like a baby through the night.
Avoid drinking anything an hour before bed, just in case you feel the urge to pee during the night.
In the winter months it gets dark here no later than 4:30. My girlfriend was feeling the pinch of seasonal affective disorder more than I was, so we bought a sun lamp. It's about the size of an iPad and sits on your desk.
I cannot believe how effective it is: the impact is (if you'll pardon the pun) night and day. I try to sit in front of it for as little as half an hour (longer if possible) and it makes a huge difference to my mood, energy levels and focus. Well worth the expense if you find yourself feeling run down in winter. Will update with the specific model tomorrow morning.
FtttG
4d ago
My point is that the misuse of the labels is not always exclusively due to TLP's narcissism theory.
Agreed, and I didn't mean to imply that it was. I was using it as an example of a once-strict identity category for which the boundaries seem to have become more porous over time.
FtttG
4d ago
To be fair, I had a boomer coworker who claimed to be a vegetarian despite eating fish ("I consider fish to be vegetables").
Is it @thejdizzler who's vegan except for oysters?
so there's presumably a variety of reasons that meat eaters call themselves vegetarians besides virtue signalling.
Regardless of their motivations, calling yourself vegetarian when you eat meat is simply a misuse of the word, surely?
FtttG
4d ago
In that case, why are the buttons right-aligned on mobile? Left-aligned was haram?
In one of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter Edward Teach)'s articles, as an exercise, he challenged the reader to describe themselves without using the word "am".
Given that English speakers habitually describe their professions this way ("I'm a fisherman" rather than "I catch fish"), completing the exercise can be surprisingly difficult.
I've long thought that there has never been an interesting sentence beginning with "I identify as", but Teach's writings illustrated to me that such a framework can be not just tedious and navel-gazing, but actively harmful to oneself and those around you.
When I criticise sentences beginning with "I identify as", I am of course referring to our modern fixation on "identities" in the sense of "identity politics" ("I identify as a QPOC agender neurodivergent...") but also in the sense of "identifying as" something wholly removed from any corresponding action associated therewith. As you point out, being a musician is seen as high-status in a way that selling insurance isn't: there are innumerable people who still call themselves musicians (namely in their Instagram handles) despite never having recorded a single note of music or having gone years without playing a gig (if ever); likewise for people calling themselves "writers" without having written anything, never mind published. This worldview is starting to affect more traditional identity categories as well: a majority of American women who call themselves lesbians have had sex with at least one man (6% in the last year); there are sexually active people who call themselves asexual; there are self-identified vegans who subscribe to a non-standard definition of veganism. "Inclusivity" has become so valorised and "gatekeeping" so stigmatised that it's seen as poor form to tell a meat-eater that they aren't vegan; a person who's diagnosed themselves with autism that they aren't really neurodivergent; a chronic masturbator that they aren't asexual; a bearded, penised male in jeans and a t-shirt that he isn't a woman. Identity has become wholly uncoupled from essential rule-in criteria or adherence to a standard of behaviour (broadly defined): vague, unfalsifiable "vibes" are the order of the day. I wonder if you could draw a bright line between the relaxation of academic standards you outline in your post, and the relaxation of standards of behaviour for who is and isn't a "lesbian".
"Why are you getting so incensed, @FtttG? It's just some kids on college campuses – who cares if a woman with multiple male sexual partners and zero female ones calls herself a lesbian?"
But I actually think it's much more insidious than that. I think the relaxation of standards such that anyone can call themselves a musician (without playing a note of music) and anyone can call themselves queer (while exclusively pursuing hetero relationships) – and that anyone who calls them a fake and a poseur is an exclusive elitist gatekeeper – can lead to some extremely toxic habits of mind, ultimately causing people to "identify as" the only thing anyone should aspire to be: a good person.
Because if you don't have to write anything to call yourself a writer, and you don't have to adhere to a plant-based diet to call yourself a vegan – if it's all just vague, unfalsifiable, unquantifiable vibes – it stands to reason that you can "be a good person" without once doing anything good, without once doing anything to improve the lot of the people around you. How does that cash out in the real world?
- Obsessive fixation on the cheap talk of good person signifiers (when admonishing people to be more woke, woke activists sometimes point out that it costs nothing to put a Palestine or pride flag in your Instagram bio, or your pronouns in your email signature. They're right: it costs nothing, meaning it's a cheap signal easily exploited by bad actors);
- Obsessive fixation on all the bad things you haven't done, with a corresponding effort to downplay or undermine the positive achievements of others;
- Obsessive fixation on the bad things other people have done that you haven't (the more cartoonishly evil, the better*);
- Periodic paroxysms of performative self-loathing after a particularly atrocious instance of bad behaviour, followed by immediate resumption of business as usual (including said bad behaviour); and
- A hypertrophied fundamental attribution error mindset, in which exculpatory circumstances for every bad thing you've ever done can always be found or confected (but every person who hurts or upsets you in any way is a toxic narcissistic abuser who's just going out of their way to hurt you out of sheer bloody-mindedness)
As Teach pointed out, the last bullet point is particularly unsustainable for forming a real sense of self and personal identity. In principle, one could take full responsibility for all of one's impressive achievements while refusing to take responsibility for all of one's failures (moral and otherwise), but most people are no good at that kind of compartmentalization. If you've gotten into the habit of refusing to take accountability for your fuckups, it's only a matter of time before your positive achievements don't really feel like "yours" either. Thus, impostor syndrome.
I suppose it could be worse: identifying as a good person hasn't yet become wholly uncoupled from consistent pro-social behaviour. Believing you're a good person because you've never set a cat on fire is a low bar, but it's a hell of a lot better than thinking there's literally no difference between someone who sets a cat on fire and someone who doesn't. Insincere performative virtue signalling still acknowledges that there is a thing which exists called "virtue"; aspiring through one's actions (namely insincere performative virtue signalling) to be seen as a virtuous person still acknowledges that virtuous behaviour is a precondition for being a virtuous person. Reflexive invention of exculpatory circumstances to explain away one's bad behaviour still acknowledges that said behaviour requires explanation. "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue" and all that. Still, two decades ago anyone who called himself autistic without having ever consulted a mental health professional would have attracted a lot of funny looks – nowadays it largely passes without comment. (Indeed, the concept of "social awkwardness" no longer exists: every such person is reflexively assumed to be "on the spectrum".) I worry about where this train leads. Will we end up with innumerable tautological Templars running around, who no longer even feel any need to explain away their bad behaviour; who sincerely believe that, as a PoG (person of good), everything they do is good, because they did it?
Anglophone Gen Zers were raised in a discursive environment which tells them they're smart (even if they've never done a smart thing in their lives); which tells them they can be queer (even if they've never done anything queer in their lives and have no desire to); which tells them they're beautiful – even, dare I say, a certified bad bitch (even if no one wants to have sex with them); and, most toxically of all, tells them they're good, even if they've never carried out a single selfless act, maybe provided they parrot a catechism of cookie-cutter woke catchphrases they don't even understand never mind positively endorse. No wonder they go into adulthood with no idea of who they are, what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they want from life, how they come off to other people, what makes them them. They can list off all the identity categories they fall into like a math nerd reciting digits of pi, but they couldn't begin to tell you who they, personally, are. No wonder they report unprecedented rates of mental illness**, sexlessness and social isolation. How can you begin to make friends based on common interests if you don't have any interests (besides rotting in your bed watching Netflix), and neither does anyone around you? What does it even mean to be attracted to another person if you've been consistently told all your life that all bodies are equally attractive? How can you form a relationship with another person if you don't even know what you want out of life? How can you and your partner have shared relationship goals if you don't have any goals of any kind?
*I used to occasionally read an online article which I found so insightful and perceptive that I felt like the author had cracked one of life's cheat codes: this was the first time I can remember it happening. One of the most recent times I had such a feeling was when I read the TLP article linked under "periodic paroxysms" above. The second time was when I read my first post of Scott's, "The Toxoplasma of Rage". And he succeeded in inducing that feeling in me again, and again, and again – and now he mostly sucks. Nothing good lasts forever.
**To bring it back to the subject of the OP, I have no doubt that this is partly an artifact of young people or their parents attempting to game disability frameworks to secure carve-outs and accommodations – an extra hour in an exam for a student diagnosed with anxiety or depression is a low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. But I don't think that's the whole story: I think there's a real signal of Gen Z being miserable in a way and at a scale that previous generations weren't. Yes it's the phones, but it's not just the phones.
FtttG
4d ago
META: The upvote/downvote etc. buttons underneath comments display correctly if the zoom on the browser window is set to 100% or lower. If I zoom in to 125% (as I normally do, my eyesight not being what it once was), the buttons appear right-aligned (screenshot).
FtttG
5d ago
According to this article, 80% of artists on Spotify have fewer than 50 monthly listeners
It's good to be above average.
FtttG
5d ago
Do we have any native Russian speakers here who might like to lend me a hand with a small creative project?
I agree that "street smarts" means more than that, traditionally referring to métis (in the Seeing Like a State sense), in contrast to we "rationalist" mistake-theorist quokkas who can't quite believe people would go on the internet and tell lies, or try to take advantage of others.
But it's surprising how often the term gets used in a manner indistinguishable from the usage Malcolm outlined above. It sort of reminds me of those people who "discovered this cool life hack", which amounts to them lying and cheating other people and abusing the social contract. "I discovered this cool life hack: if you print off a fake handicapped parking permit, most people won't bother to check and you can park in the handicapped spaces." Hate to break it to you dude, but the reason we aren't doing that isn't because we didn't think of it.
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