Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
You continue to misinterpret my claims.
Love, if it exists, is a miracle. But did I ever say, at any point in this conversation, that you shouldn't believe in miracles? I've said no such thing.
I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that
Regardless of what claims you think I'm making, this would not constitute a legitimate criticism of any of them.
You could almost say that it's the business of philosophical reflection to produce claims (or, plausible sounding arguments for claims, at any rate) that almost everyone rejects. It has variously been claimed by different parties in the history of philosophy that cars and buildings and animals are not real, that conscious experience is not real, that 1+1 does not equal 2, that there exist sentences which can be both true and false at the same time. Almost all humans reject these claims; but this is not taken to be any major impediment. Truth is not subject to democratic rule. The philosopher simply carries on with his business; he is well aware that other people will think he is in the grip of some kind of psychosis. When the propositions of "common sense" are finally subjected to long-overdue critique, the results will unavoidably be counterintuitive.
the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
I mean, you will certainly believe that some people are incorrect and unhealthy and anti-social, but we still all have to try to get along, y'know? Tomorrow it could be you who's getting called incorrect and anti-social.
You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them
I don't agree with the TRP/PUA people at all! I've done a terrible job of explaining my positions if that's what you took away from it.
I'm less familiar with Aella, but I'd probably find points of significant disagreement with her as well.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15hr ago
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin. It doesn't imply there's no such thing as love, it doesn't imply that there's nothing beyond commodification, etc. (There are many complexities here that would have to be addressed, but I probably don't hold the views that you think I do on these questions.)
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution. People seem to think that prostitutes are bad, in some particularly unique way. We're trying to figure out why they think that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Given that you cannot imagine the love that a man and woman would have for one another in a relationship
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
At the same time, there surely exists some threshold where a direct attack on another country’s capital city goes from “potentially just symbolic” to “definitely not symbolic”.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
· Edited 21hr ago
Inb4 “low effort post ban”
One of the reasons this rule exists, especially for breaking news stories, is precisely because the story may be evolving rapidly and we don’t have all the facts yet. Limited/incomplete information is not conducive to producing the sort of high quality analysis that we want to cultivate here. Also the story might just turn out to be a total nothingburger that doesn’t even warrant a top level post. Kinda like the last Israeli missile attack on Iran.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
I agree with you that my initial formulation was an oversimplification, although I don't think any of this has much bearing on what makes prostitution in particular morally problematic. You could reasonably argue that prostitution is inferior to a long-term committed exclusive relationship based on certain metrics; but as I pointed out in my reply to KMC, many other heterosexual relationships would be judged inferior on the same metrics. Being single would also be judged inferior on the same metrics. But no one thinks that being single, or having a series of different monogamous partners, is morally blameworthy in the same way that prostitution is.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
That is not just how it goes.
It's pretty close to how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong.
But people (non-prostitute people) break all of these conditions all the time.
People date without getting permission, they have sex without procreating, they break up, they date new people. That's a very common course for a relationship to take in 2025, and no one thinks that's as bad as prostitution.
There are trads who disapprove of this sort of arrangement of course, but even they don't compare it with prostitution afaik.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
If you want to talk to an AI, there's already a place where you can do that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
And the spot that has bugged me for a while now: how much AI/digital assistance is really crossing the arbitrary line you've drawn?
It's a spectrum rather than a binary, of course. Beating the game on hard mode is harder than normal mode which is harder than easy mode. It's a sliding scale, rather than a single defined cutoff point. And artists have been dealing with these questions long before Dall-E/ChatGPT.
Speaking purely about the opinions of visual artists who work with pop culture:
Generally no one had a problem with simply using digital art as a medium, as long as you actually drew it yourself. There were some ultra purists who thought all digital art was suspect and only trad art showed "real skill", but that was very much a minority opinion.
Then when you started to talk about photobashing, things got a little murkier. Photobashing is the technique, very common in commercial art, of taking a set of existing images and mashing them up in Photoshop using a variety of filters/layers/other tools to create something new. The artist may do some amount of "drawing" as is traditionally conceived, or they may do little to none. Very useful for e.g. concept art where you need to churn out a lot of throwaway images quickly. Although everyone recognized that photobashing did require technical skill, it was generally thought to be kind of lame and "soulless", and it clearly showed LESS skill than actually drawing the entire thing yourself from scratch. The term itself was often used derisively, to distinguish inferior mass-produced studio art from the work of skillful independent artisans.
And then of course once you get to actual AI prompting the reaction from artists was just apoplectic, for the many reasons that have been discussed here previously. To be a proompter is even lamer than being a photobasher. I don't think anyone would actually dispute that out of all the methods discussed so far, it requires the least artistic skill, by design. If you want you can just type in a prompt and use the resulting image as-is. Even without any actual traditional drawing, you can still exercise some control over the process through inpainting, through selecting among multiple results from the same prompt, but, yeah. We're basically in "you just asked someone else to draw it instead" territory.
Make the rule on what is 'unacceptable' AI art and the tech can run RIGHT up to that line precisely to the pixel... then stick a single tiny digital toe over it, daring your to complain.
People have been doing this for thousands of years when it comes to e.g. legal matters. They rarely look as clever as they think they do, because people actually are capable of holding nuanced opinions and evaluating things on a case by case basis.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
They actually don't know what a woman is.
No, they do.
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
You seem to be gesturing at this concept here:
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications.
although I'm not entirely sure what your exact position is here. Do you think there are "thought leaders" at the top of the progressive movement who actually do have an accurate model of reality, followed by a legion of "footsoldiers" who uncritically imbibe the propaganda? I don't think I find this to be very convincing, because even among the "footsoldiers", we can tell from their discourse that they're able to consistently and accurately distinguish between transwomen and ciswomen, and thus they have an at least implicit model of what a woman is, although they may use doublethink to not consciously acknowledge it.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people?
Well, how would you?
(I don't actually know how I would do it without sounding a bit mean, while also being honest and avoiding overly romanticized depictions. I suppose the most brutally honest and concise way of putting it is that "woman was fashioned by nature for one thing, man for several".)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
One of my theories is that modern relationships and friendships have been so hollowed out that writers just don’t have material from their own lives to work with when it comes to deep romances. It’s something you have to actually live in order to recreate in your characters.
They also don't have direct lived experience of giant green mutants, alien invasions, Infinity Stones, and so on and so forth; and yet they're still able to write stories about these things in a manner that people find appealing.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
Didn't Clair Obscur receive funding from multiple sources? Allegedly the list of backers included Microsoft, a French government program, etc. Not exactly "indie".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17d ago
What exactly are you looking for here?
Do you just want people to tell you that it's hopeless? Very well then. It is hopeless. I agree that you should give up hope. Do with this what you will.
If this is a prelude to arguing for certain policy proposals, then it would be more interesting if you made the case for those policies directly, instead of gesturing angrily at the stats and insisting that something (what, exactly?) must be done.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17d ago
I don’t really get the point of dooming about dating.
There are lots of very unremarkable men who have sex and even get married and have kids. Yes, even in “hyper competitive” 2025.
If they can do it, you can do it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18d ago
seeing two conventional men interact sexually is one of those; actually, I suspect this is also true for [obligate] gay men
Nah, no way. Otherwise they wouldn't, you know, spend so much time having sex with men, often times in semi-public places (bathhouses, orgies, etc) where they also watch other men interact sexually with each other as well.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Yes but it's only correlated with those things. It itself isn't really a bad thing. Much like how a college degree is correlated with professional skill, but it's not equivalent to professional skill, which is why it's not unheard of (especially in say, tech) for people to get hired to highly-skilled positions without degrees.
(You also don't need to measure single motherhood by proxy. It can be measured directly. The child has a correlation of 1 with itself, and the absence of children has a correlation of 1 with the absence of children.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18d ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
This seems like the first criteria that you'd want to relax.
I don't actually understand why other men care so much about body count. I mean, I can understand it on an intellectual level, but not on a visceral level. Perhaps that's just a side effect of my general pattern of sexual deviancy. I also have no instinctive revulsion towards incest between consenting adults, for example, although many other people swear to me that they most assuredly do.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
23d ago
Oh sure. But with ethical/political questions, you can keep going round and round forever with new arguments because there's no hope of ever reaching a final settlement.
AI capabilities are largely a straight empirical question. We can know exactly where AI will stand 10 years from now. We just have to wait 10 years to find out.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
23d ago
Funny, I was just looking at this a few minutes ago.
What do you think of this current crop of news?
Talking about AI, especially with regards to capabilities advancement, feels kind of pointless right now because the battle lines have clearly been entrenched. Any discussion of the shortcomings of current models or potential limitations of deep learning is met with "ahh, but just wait 1/5/10 years, then you'll be sorry!"
Very well then, let's wait 1/5/10 years. I'll check back in 2030.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
24d ago
I think if we're talking about the classical antecedents of modern leftism -- the anarchism of Proudhon, or the work of Marx and Engels -- I don't think that stuff can be described as anti-natalist or anti-life. I think the humanist tendencies in Marxism are generally underestimated and underappreciated by critics of Marxism. But it's clear that now, today, there's a strong link between anti-natalism and leftism: you can't have kids because it's destroying the environment, you can't have kids because it's racist and colonialist, etc.
It's harder to think of examples of anti-life attitudes on the right. Maybe you could talk about the sorts of Gnostic and neo-Platonist Christian sects that were popular in late antiquity and the early middle ages: you must abhor the flesh, abhor reproduction, abhor pleasure. But were they really "rightist" just because they were religious? Does religion automatically make you a rightist? Or is the left/right spectrum inadequate to describe their views?
And then there is Nietzsche [...] he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.
Nietzsche was by most accounts what we would call, in modern parlance, a "weirdo autist". His few romantic advances towards women were rejected. (Famously, a woman named Lou Salomé spurned him in favor of their mutual friend Paul Rée.) Allegedly he was once alone with a prostitute and he fled from the room when she exposed her genitalia, although that story may be apocryphal. In his later years he seems to have consigned himself to the fact that he wasn't marriage material:
"Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition."
In the opening pages of Twilight of the Idols, he addresses your central question directly:
"You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, who are an interested party, a bone of contention, even, and not judges; not by the dead for other reasons. - It is an objection to a philosopher if he sees a problem with the value of life, it is a question mark on his wisdom, an un-wisdom.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
-- Lenin
Sex (or, to generalize and be more precise, "access to a woman's body" - this includes sexual contact in general and childbearing in particular) is important to men. To the point that it's a necessary component of romantic relationships. Not the only component, but a necessary one. I know this from my own experience of being a man, from my experience of having male friends, from the fact that dating advice (TRP, PUA, etc) and dating apps are a multi-million dollar industry with a mostly male clientele, and just in general, from everything that's ever happened to me in my life. Sex is what men are seeking.
Female bodies are more valuable than male bodies. Women are acutely aware of how in-demand their bodies are. She knows that merely being granted access to your body is not adequate compensation for her granting you access to her body. So she typically wants something else from you as well. Thus the very generalized heading of "goods and services". (To be clear, relatively abstract things like "personality" and "companionship" could also be considered "goods and services").
This does not cover every possible configuration of human interactions. I was careful to qualify that this is only a typical and average type of exchange.
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