Yeah, I think there is definitely a danger to escapism, but not all fantasy/sci-fi worlds have a negative effect, at least not on all people.
I've spent many hours with J.R.R. Tolkien's stuff, diving into relatively obscure writings by him, reading other people's theories... but it all tends to have a sort of uplifting, elevating, ennobling quality. I disagree with his moral worldview in which goodness is on a deep level more or less synonymous with obedience to the kind of God who is ok with drowning an entire continent because its people were corrupted by an evil being that He himself created in the first place. But that doesn't stop me from absorbing moral lessons and spiritual ennoblement from his work.
H.P. Lovecraft's writings are very different, and not what I would call ennobling, but from them I've received a lot of education in how to write in an interesting and grammatically advanced way, also in things like architecture and history. And there is something that I find very mystically interesting in his concept of "adventurous expectancy" that he touched on in some of his letters.
On a different note, there is Stephen King... I like his Americana, the noble blue collar workers and artists, the landscape of gas stations, diners, and small towns. It is also just good clean entertainment, there are many Stephen King fans but I've never heard of anyone becoming so obsessed with his work that it began to harm their lives.
Even something like Star Wars, which some people do get obsessed by, has a fun playful quality. It's basically an homage to many different kinds of other real and fictional worlds... tales of knightly chivalry, greaser movies, samurai movies, the Roman Empire, Nazi Germany, etc... but in space, and all put together into one fictional universe. I've spent some hours reading through Star Wars lore, but I've never been tempted to buy Star Wars merchandise or devote more than a small fraction of my life to Star Wars.
There is also reading about actual history, which I've done a lot of. It can have an escapist quality, but one can also learn valuable lessons from it. It would be difficult, I think, to have a reasonable notion of modern politics and geopolitics without having read history. There's something to be said for understanding today's reality from first principles and direct perception, and certainly that has a lot of value, but reading history is at the least a valuable aid, at least if one does not let it bias you too much (and of course one can also become biased while attempting to understand today's reality from first principles and direct perception). I've spent many an hour reading about obscure details of this or that World War 2 campaign, but I've never become tempted to devote more than a small fraction of my life to such activity.
I do think there is a real danger. I was maybe too bookish for my own good when I was a teenager. But I am not sure to what extent the distance that I kept from more direct involvement with reality was caused by my bookishness, and to what extent the bookishness was just what I did while I had that distance from more direct involvement with reality. It is possible that even if I had forced myself to put away the books, I would not have engaged more directly with reality any quicker than I actually did. It's hard to say.
What eventually drove me more out of the books was a combination of things... making friends and getting invited to do things, sexual frustration forcing me to learn how to develop social skills, becoming more rebellious in my attitude toward social structures like school, going away to college and living on my own, also just a deep sense of "there is more to life than just reading about life" and a deep dissatisfaction with a life spent merely on reading.
Some people get caught at some point on that journey and never actualize much further. But if it wasn't for the fantasy worlds, it's possible that they would not necessarily actualize much faster, or at all. I don't know. I just know that for me, the worlds of books have been a beneficial and, I think, not really particularly stunting part of my life. On the contrary, I think that they have probably enriched my life more than they have taken away.
Goodguy
22hr ago
I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.
Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.
As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.
Goodguy
4d ago
I don't think those urban communities are underserved when it comes to abortion. I know you're just being snarky, but I mean, still. I think it makes strategic sense for pro-choice activists to focus their efforts on parts of the US where there are legal challenges to abortion.
Goodguy
6d ago
Depends on how Chad the Chad is and what woman or women he is interested in getting with at the moment. Chad might strategize if it's a question of how to sleep with a gorgeous woman he feels is out of even his league. Chad might strategize if for whatever reason he has become particularly interested in a given woman, if he has started to think about her in more than just a hit-it-and-quit-it sexual way. But when it comes to just run-of-the-mill getting laid, I don't think Chad strategizes much. He just feels sexually confident, playful, and relaxed. This projects out effortlessly from him in his eyes, facial expressions, body language, vocal tone, and subjects of conversation when he is interacting with a woman. He experiences interacting with women as something fun, pleasurable, and playful rather than like an existentially fraught job interview. This too communicates itself to them. Normally I think the extent of his strategizing is to just come up with some "excuse" to start talking to a given woman or women, if an excuse is even necessary. Once the interaction starts, I don't think he's thinking much about what he's doing at all. This all applies whether he's a Chad who is Chad because he looks great or if he's a Chad who is just sexually confident without necessarily having great looks.
Goodguy
6d ago
As to why you can't discuss looks productively with women, it's because attractiveness is core to female self image and requires immense kayfabe to avoid the crushing reality.
To some extent that's true - but on the flipside, there are also many many women (and men) who have an inaccurately low opinion of their own looks despite being attractive. Which is not necessarily a contradiction to what you're saying. The kayfabe is partly a reaction to the low self-esteem, whether that low self-esteem is accurate to reality or not.
Goodguy
6d ago
Do women, on average, kneejerk hate Clavicular for trying to look good? I haven't observed that reaction.
Goodguy
8d ago
You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women.
I suspect that this is probably not true, at least when it comes to the more dangerous forms of violence that cause severe injuries and deaths. The male vs female difference when it comes to this stuff is so large that it makes racial differences seem small in comparison.
But correct me if I'm wrong.
Trump being assassinated would be that, I think it's possible that even @Amadan would be ok with a low effort starter post if that happened. Not sure if a possible failed assassination attempt against Trump is massive enough, though.
Total nuclear war would certainly justify bending the rules, in my book. But then, if you're rushing to The Motte to write a post after total nuclear war starts, you might want to reconsider your competence at making decisions.
Yeah, I'm not sure that any person has been actually hated (as opposed to just disliked) by a greater fraction of the US population than Trump is since Osama bin Laden (which is not to say that the fractions are even close to similar, since my guess is that Trump is probably hated by something like 30% of the population and with bin Laden it was probably at least double that). Before bin Laden, maybe you'd have to go back all the way to Hitler, Tojo, and Hirohito. I dunno, possibly Ruhollah Khomeini in between, as well. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and GW Bush have also been widely hated, but I think also not to quite the same degree of Trump, although it's somewhat close.
Goodguy
10d ago
I agree with this advice. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of women one talks to "in real life" are not ridiculously hypergamous man-haters.
Police tools and surveillance have gotten to a very advanced state in the US. Many murders go unsolved, but I'm not sure it's so much that police can't solve the murders. I note that after Mangione's assassination of Thompson, police went all-out. They take assassinations and terrorism seriously. And there are cameras everywhere. In people's pockets, on the walls of buildings.
Basically, it's hard to get away with any kind of political violence. That reduces the number of people who are willing to do it.
Goodguy
12d ago
I think she did. Sometimes people need somebody to tell them that their emotions and habits are making them do really stupid things, like drink a lot of alcohol every day or regularly interact with a man who has a non-trivial chance of murdering them. That's one of the good things about friendship actually, the ability to have somebody tell you things like that and to help somebody else by telling them that.
Goodguy
12d ago
I don't know if I'm right, but my hunch is that even if that is true, men nonetheless have a higher rate of causing serious damage because they are much stronger than women.
Goodguy
13d ago
I can make a conscious choice to love my wife
I find this to be an interesting statement. Could you please elaborate?
Goodguy
13d ago
Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose
Didn't that happen partly because a bunch of new houses were built?
Some arguments in favor of the US either ending the war or losing the war are the following:
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The war encourages the "imperial Presidency", a dangerous concentration of power in the top of the executive branch. This may have negative effects on checks and balances in the US. Which is not to say that the imperial Presidency is anything new in US history, of course. Trump's version is just the latest in a long line of them. Nonetheless, Trump's extremely broad ability to make sweeping foreign policy decisions feeds into a "populist strongman" image that is appealing to many people but may be bad for the country in the long run. For example, victory in the war could encourage Presidents in general to seek the optics of easy foreign policy wins in order to make up for domestic policies that do not actually do much for the average American.
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The war encourages the growth of an unhealthy fusion between American, Israeli, and Gulf Arab elites, a fusion that I think likely involves shady corruption and motives of personal enrichment and might even include intelligence agencies working together to bypass their theoretical legal restraints. Israel at least is a democracy. The close cooperation with the Gulf Arab elites is of course not new, but Trump's policy is likely to bring them even closer to the US-Israel fold than they were already, and since Trump probably doesn't really care much about democracy, he is unlikely to pressure them to reform their political systems. It is geopolitically understandable why during the Cold War the US supported any brutal dictator it could find who was willing to fight communists, although this policy partly led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths - however, such close ties between the US and authoritarian governments are, to say the least, unlikely to help the political health of the US.
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The US seems to lack the political will to do whatever it takes to overthrow Iran's government, something that might in fact require a ground invasion. As a result, continuation of the war causes the Iranian people to suffer without actually giving them a better government. This also affects future US foreign policy: in the future, people who are being encouraged by the US to rise up against their governments may have second thoughts based on what is currently happening in Iran.
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It is possible that the overwhelming military success in the war could cause US foreign policy decision makers to become overconfident in confrontations with China, which could potentially increase the chance of a mutually devastating war between the two countries.
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The unilateral and gangster-esque way in which the US and Israel have been conducting their various military operations (kidnapping, surprise assassinations, threats to send another country into the Stone Age, etc.) allows the two countries to achieve short-term wins but at a high reputational cost. Given how Iran acts, I'm certainly not going to argue that such conduct is one-sided. I'm pretty sure that the Iranians would like to assassinate Netanyahu and Trump and bomb US and Israeli civilian infrastructure on a large scale the second they could do so, it's just that they don't have the capability to do it. And Israel's massive military response to 10/7 is understandable. However, people expect ruthless conduct from Iran, whereas the US has spent decades attempting, often successfully, to depict itself as the champion and linchpin of a "rules-based international order". So such conduct from the US deflates American soft power to some extent and complicates relationships with normally friendly countries, for example in Europe. It also reduces the US' ability to make moral arguments against, for example, Russian foreign policy. If history is any guide, it is also likely that long-enough continuation of such unrestrained power flexing will encourage the growth of counterbalancing anti-US blocks.
America already basically controlled Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan for all serious intents and purposes before Trump, in the sense that in any serious geopolitical situation before Trump, the US could have decided to drop pretenses of diplomacy and instead directly dominate those regions just as effectively as it could do so now. An alliance with Indonesia is largely irrelevant, I think. The power of the US navy is the key thing whether there is an alliance or not, and that power has existed for a long time.
That said, I do agree that America probably controls the Strait of Hormuz more now than it did before the war, even if it does not necessarily look that way right now, because it has destroyed significant portions of Iran's ability to close it, even though significant portions also still remain. The fact that the Strait was not closed before the war is irrelevant in that sense. The important thing for the US foreign policy establishment's long-term goals is not whether Iran is actually deciding to keep it closed or not at any given moment, but rather the degree to which Iran is capable of closing it at any given moment.
Goodguy
14d ago
In the case of short-term war plans like the date of a surprise attack, the US as a whole is better off if the government can keep secrets
Not necessarily. That depends on what the intention of the surprise attack is and who it is meant to attack.
Goodguy
14d ago
I believe that the demand for active, violent white racism probably outstrips the supply here in the US. However, I don't see how that applies to the SPLC case. Paying informants money with the hope of getting information is not the same thing as paying them money with the hope that their racism justifies your existence.
Goodguy
14d ago
The only ways I can think of in which groypers help any elite groups is that they stir infighting among right-wingers and make it easier for some groups to raise money under the guise of fighting extremism.
However, both of those things could also be explained by the simpler theory that the groypers are genuine in their political beliefs, so I don't know why the theory that they are controlled opposition would be more credible.
Goodguy
14d ago
If you've heard of a "white supremacist", odds are good he's being promoted by teh glowies.
Whether that's true or not, I don't think it applies in this case, since the SPLC's definition of "white supremacist" is probably so broad that it certainly includes large numbers of people who are not glowies.
Goodguy
14d ago
I'm no fan of the SPLC, but... I don't see any contradiction between claiming to fight right-wing extremism and funding extremist informants.
If they broke laws while doing it, that's a different matter, but I'm not understanding the framing that they were hypocrites or something.
Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.
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