FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
19hr ago
Yeah, before the election I asked my liberal Guardian reader uncle about what Kamala stood for and what made her so promising a candidate, and he said "well, I think she'll do a lot to protect women's reproductive rights".
That was it. More abortions. Nothing on healthcare, housing, education, law and order etc.. Just abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
Last Friday I read the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which I completed at the very end of May and didn't look at for six weeks.
It's... decent. The story is coherent and I think the characters are believable. Right now, I think the main thing that's holding it back is pacing. It's broken up into five acts: I think the first, fourth and fifth are quite strong and very readable, whereas the second act is a little slow, and the third needs to be edited quite heavily to add in a new "hook" that only occurred to me after completing the first draft. Additionally, at the end of the fourth act and the start of the fifth act there are three very long chapters back to back at which the pace grinds to a halt, which I need to cut down very dramatically so the pacing doesn't flag too much.
On Sunday I began work on the second draft, chopping down the first with a goal of removing (per Stephen King's writing advice) at least ten per cent of the total word count. This has not been challenging at all: by the time I finished work on Sunday, the combined word count of the first and second acts was already 24% shorter than the equivalent word count in the first draft (I even cut an entire chapter from the second act I didn't think added much). I've been really enjoying the process. Once I've finished cutting stuff out, I'm going to add in some ideas I had since completing the first draft, again with the goal of my second draft being no longer than 90% of the first draft's word count (preferably shorter). Then and only then will I let someone other than me look at it.
FtttG
3d ago
I have zero interest in debating the "ought". It's not germane to the point I was making. If that's all you want to talk about, fine, but I'm not interested.
FtttG
3d ago
Also, the borderers as a group aren't representative of the broader Scottish society.
That was essentially my point about the selection effect.
“this ten year old died in a fire, and that’s obviously a bad thing that ought not to be”
Yes. The is is the thing that happened. The ought is what we would have preferred to happen instead.
You've freely admitted that the "is" and the "ought" are different things. That's exactly what I'm referring to when I'm talking about the "is/ought distinction". I truly don't understand what you're not getting about this.
There, derived the ought from the is, like everyone always does.
You didn't derive the "ought" from the "is". You stated the "is", then expressed an opinion about the "ought" by assessing the moral character of the "is" based on your existing moral values. Without a moral framework with which to assess the "is" you can never arrive at an "ought".
It is a conceit of philosophers than an ought cannot be derived from an is.
No, it is an accurate belief of philosophers that "is" and "ought" are separate magisteria, and the former has no bearing on the latter. Accurately stating that a ten-year-old died in a house fire does not in any way imply that you think it's a good thing that the ten-year-old died in the house fire.
I think if you honestly ask yourself, you think they ought.
So you are allowed to think the "ought" can be different from the "is" - but no one else is? You're allowed to say "ten-year-olds dying in house fires is bad", but if I describe reality as it actually is, you immediately conclude that that's how they think it should be?
FtttG
3d ago
You're basically saying
A telltale sign that someone's putting words in your mouth. Where did I say anything about the relationship between parents and their children, or parents' desired level of educational attainment for their children sorted by sex? I was talking specifically about the male urge to protect female people from physical harm. There isn't even any contradiction between an intense desire to protect women from harm and a chauvinistic attitude towards female educational attainment.
FtttG
3d ago
The is/ought distinction is not real.
What? You don't see any distinction between "this is the way things are" and "this is the way things would ideally be"? This ten-year-old child died in a house fire through no fault of his own And That's a Good Thing?
FtttG
3d ago
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’.
Is/ought distinction. I never said it's a good thing that most men feel an instinctive protective urge towards female people (regardless of their capacity for bearing children), I only said that they do, in fact, feel this.
FtttG
3d ago
It would also be interesting comparing rates of e.g. grievous bodily harm between Scotland and Scots-Irish-colonised regions of the US.
FtttG
3d ago
Not universal, but widespread. I do acknowledge there are exceptions. I don't think my psychology is representative of masculinity as a whole, and I don't think you should draw the same inferences from your psychology either.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
I think the average man would be far more likely to save the girl than the boy, yes.
FtttG
3d ago
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple.
You can always add more epicycles. At least in my experience, a man striking an elderly woman is widely seen as a more heinous crime than a man striking a wheelchair-bound man.
FtttG
3d ago
They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.
FtttG
3d ago
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.
Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)
I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".
*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.
FtttG
3d ago
not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
Based Todd.
My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder. There is a happy medium between "excessive emphasis on immutable biological traits" and "denying that immutable biological traits matter at all, in favour of self-identification above all else".
I don't think the Birkenhead drill only applies if the women in question aren't barren. Of course the value bestowed upon women is ultimately an evolutionary adaptation to the reality that only women can bear children. But in practice, even barren women are still seen as Wonderful™ in a way that NEET men aren't.
That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us.
Which strikes me as an intrinsically quixotic goal. As you note yourself, even the richest man on earth can't stop people making jokes about his drug problems. Even the leader of the free world can't stop people making jokes about his tiny hands, as much as he'd obviously like to. Even literal authoritarian dictators like Xi Jinping can't stop people sharing Winnie the Pooh memes via WeChat. When I see trans women in floods of tears and rending their hair about how strangers don't see them the way they (want to) see themselves, all I can think is - buddy, join the club.
FtttG
4d ago
I've now finished 18 books this year out of a goal of 26.
I'm one behind you, out of the same target.
FtttG
4d ago
I have little hope that a future Oblivion remake would be anywhere near as good because they will simply sand away all the interesting parts
It's crazy that this was announced and released literally a week after you posted this comment. Did your prediction come true?
FtttG
4d ago
Still on The Secret of Our Success, after getting no reading done over the weekend. It's still fascinating, but I miss reading fiction. Going to read an Agatha Christie next just to cleanse my palate.
FtttG
4d ago
My girlfriend has noticed ChatGPT's predilection for em-dashes, and now she can't unsee it. Whenever she sees a passage of text which uses them, she assumes ChatGPT was involved in the text's creation, up to and including Teams messages sent by her colleagues (which is honestly not an unreasonable assumption, in my view).
But my concern is the same as yours: I do use em-dashes a fair amount (mostly in fiction rather than non-fiction or blogging), and with exactly one exception I've never used ChatGPT as a writing aid. I'd hate to be accused of doing so without cause.
Occasionally you'll encounter albums where the liner notes include a notice specifying that no pitch correction (e.g. AutoTune) was used on the album, or no synthesizers (more common in the seventies and eighties, less common nowadays). I wonder how soon it'll be before the first novel is published which includes a notice in the front matter to the effect of "No generative AI was used in the creation of this novel".
I don't think the DNC is a socialist party, hence why they had to bring out the big guns to stop Bernie getting the nomination.
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