FtttG
User ID: 1175
I sincerely doubt that there's are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend.
I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on. This article was staggeringly evasive. "Yes it's bad that everyone is coming out as trans and we should try to understand why it's happening, but people who investigate why it's happening have had their brains broken by the issue, and the fact that two of the parties in a seminal court case on this issue have silly names means that you're silly if you pay any attention to this issue. Yes it's bad that confused teenagers are undergoing irreversible and disfiguring medical procedures they will likely come to regret, but the precautionary principle demands that we should allow them to even though the evidence base is so weak. Even if it doesn't pan out, in the scheme of things when it comes to medical malpractice it's not that big a deal, and the fact that so many European countries are taking steps to prevent teenagers from undergoing disfiguring medical procedures is just proof that they're all Stalinist nanny states. Anyway I'm not an expert on this so take everything I say with a pinch of salt" - when has "not being an expert on something" ever stopped Scott from expressing a definitive opinion on a contentious political issue, whether it's Covid treatments or rape culture or sociology or criminology or...?
There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.
FtttG
4mo ago
He all but admitted to being a HBD enjoyer when reviewing Freddie deBoer's book The Cult of Smart: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
Freddie deBoer drew a comparison with Huberman too: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/maybe-this-is-why-you-shouldnt-have
FtttG
4mo ago
I've never heard of this before and I like Douglas Adams, thanks for the recommendation.
FtttG
4mo ago
But this protection wasn't unique to married women. Shotgun weddings were a thing not so long ago.
Scott mentioned this in a links post years ago. A bunch of people campaigned to ban paid toilets, working on the dubious assumption that it would result in toilets being made available for free. Instead the only alternative was restaurants and cafés where the toilets were for paying customers only, and the cheapest thing on the menu is usually significantly more expensive than whatever the fee was for the paid toilets.
FtttG
4mo ago
Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore:
The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all those qualities.
FtttG
4mo ago
You said you were envious of Gaiman, who allegedly did all of these things. It seems a reasonable inference.
FtttG
4mo ago
The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.
Yeah, this is a difficult one to square. I definitely think the basic thesis (that people should be more willing to trust their gut and not "rationally" explain away their instinctive discomfort or apprehension) is sound. But I also suspect that if I surveyed a bunch of people who'd been scammed by a con artist (or whose romantic partners were unfaithful to them or otherwise suffered some kind of betrayal), there would be a significant number of people who insisted that they never suspected a thing, that they trusted the person in question completely and were wholly blindsided by their betrayal.
FtttG
4mo ago
Demanding a woman lick her own faeces off your dick? Eat her vomit off the couch?
Jesus
FtttG
4mo ago
edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not.
I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?
Soothing, nurturing euphemisms. Environments in which dissent is prohibited and the word of ethnic and sexual minorities must be accepted without question (provided they are orthodox in their opinions) are referred to as "safe spaces". The move to instate an intellectual monoculture in which heretics are shunned and sexual and ethnic minorities are systematically elevated over other groups is referred to as "diversity, equity and inclusion". Maoist struggle sessions are described as "accountability culture". Profoundly unpopular policies such as housing male rapists in women's prisons or performing mastectomies on female teenagers are made more palatable with emotionally manipulative thought-terminating clichés like "protect trans kids". Mastectomies, penectomies, vaginoplasties and hormones are collectively referred to as "gender-affirming care".
I feel the same way. One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.
FtttG
4mo ago
Basic bitch choice, but Orwell, in large part because so many of his essays have aged so gracefully. "Politics and the English Language" and "Notes on Nationalism" should be required reading for anyone interested in history, politics or journalism.
FtttG
4mo ago
I have never seen an animation style like it
You may like Waking Life by Richard Linklater. He used a similar style for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, but Waking Life is vastly superior.
The first one that comes to mind is François de La Rochefoucauld, whose discomfiting aphorisms about the human condition seem just as relevant in the social media era as ever:
We often pride ourselves on our passions, even the most criminal ones; but envy is a timid, shamefaced passion, which we never dare to acknowledge.
If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.
It seems that nature, which has so wisely arranged the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the pain of knowing our deficiencies.
To gain status in the world, we do all we can to appear as if we had already gained it.
Nothing is less sincere than the procedure of asking for advice and giving it. The asker seems to display a respectful deference for his friend’s feelings—though his only thought is to get approval for his own, and to make the other person answerable for his conduct.
Will reply when I think of two more.
FtttG
4mo ago
every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together.
I would encourage you to decouple "person I dislike" from "person who could pose a threat to me personally", for the reasons I outlined here. I agree with you that when you take an instinctive snap dislike to someone, no amount of "evidence" is likely to dissuade you from said judgement. But I don't think that instinctive snap judgement offers much useful guidance on whether they're likely to pose a threat to you or bring you harm. There are people I consider morally upstanding individuals who I happen to personally dislike for reasons that have nothing to do with their moral character. Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likeable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).
I'm reminded of an article I read on Cracked years ago, in which one of their staff writers made a list of five concepts for which no word currently exists in the English language, but for which a word is required. He describes a scenario in which you meet someone and take an instant dislike to them for some trivial reason (annoying laugh, inability to correctly pronounce the word "specifically"), but you're aware that this is kind of silly. But then some time later, you learn something about them that proves they're a shitty person (cheated on his wife, assaulted someone), and you feel vindicated that your instinctive snap judgement of them steered you so well.
I must stress that I don't often find myself in a situation in which I would have a need for this word: to reiterate, there are plenty of people to whom I took an immediate dislike who have yet to give any indication of being anything other than honest, decent people. I think decoupling "I like him" and "he's a good guy" (and by extension, "he poses no threat to my wellbeing") is a sorely underpractised skill, and one which just about everyone would do well to better interrogate.
No, but "gender dysphoria is a very recent phenomenon almost entirely parochial to the West" contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology. I don't think hardcore trans activists (who are a penny a dozen in the circles in which Scott moves) would appreciate the nuances of a statement like "gender dysphoria is probably a culture-bound mental illness, but that doesn't mean trans people aren't deserving of respect and shouldn't be entitled to do with their bodies as they please", and I think Scott knows this better than anyone, which is why he's so cagey and evasive whenever the topic comes up. People have been smeared as transphobic bigots for much less.
I think a more accurate gloss of his position as I recall it is "HBD therefore UBI". I appreciate that there's significant overlap between socialism and UBI, but I don't think they're interchangeable or that one necessarily implies the other. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" was a popular slogan in the early Soviet Union, after all.
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