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.
9mo ago
Is it? That never occurred to me. I don't think that the type of person who is apt to criticize someone for not being traditionally masculine is also the type of person to care much about epistemic hygiene. But perhaps I'm off base here.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I think it was a great top level post. Plus it’s retroactively validated by the amount of discussion it kicked off.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
What I wonder about is how hard it seems to be for American conservatives to believe that there exists a non-astroturf sentiment supporting American liberalism organically.
I think you've identified a genuine sentiment here, and it's related to the accusations of NPCism/groupthink that the right frequently levies against the left.
Other replies have brought up good points that I endorse. I'd like to add that there's a certain asymmetry to these accusations in general which could be taken as evidence of their veracity.
Both sides use plenty of generic insults that are little more than emotive expressions of sentiment. Rightists say that leftists will usher in an age of civilizational decline, that they're only doing what they're doing out of self interest, that they hide their true intentions until the right opportunity presents itself, etc. And vice versa. Precisely because these accusations are symmetrically employed by both sides, they don't reveal much interesting about the actual policy positions of the right/left or the psychology of rightists/leftists. There's little signal to separate from the noise.
The NPC meme, in contrast, is used far more often by the right than by the left. Why is that? If it was just a generic insult, if it was just a synonym for "stupid" or "uninformed", then we would expect leftists to use it too, given that it has proven itself to be a meme of rather potent virility. But they don't - not nearly as much, anyway. And I think that indicates that the left doesn't really believe it to be true about their opponents, whereas the right very much believes it to be true about their opponents. And the best explanation for a widespread asymmetrical belief of that sort is that belief having some actual correspondence to the facts of reality, however attenuated that correspondence may be.
Certainly there are versions of the NPC accusation that are employed by the left - it's common to hear rhetoric about Trump supporters being fascists who all march in lockstep, for example. But the tenor is different. There is a much greater focus on the morally deleterious content of the Trump supporters' beliefs rather than the form of their thought itself (the old "rightists think their opponents are stupid, leftists think their opponents are evil"). I think there's also the implication that the alleged fascist Trump supporter marches in lockstep because of some fundamental moral deficiency which draws them to fascism specifically, whereas the prototypical NPC could be made to follow virtually any ideology if the Cathedral declared it to be The Correct Belief.
All this is a very roundabout way of saying: I'm not going to evaluate the first-order claim that "support for Kamala/liberalism/etc is astroturfed", and at first glance I'd agree that that claim is not entirely fair. But the mere persistence of the claim indicates that there is some phenomenon here that is worth investigating. People don't just make shit up. If enough people are repeating something, there's usually some reason for it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Why does everyone forget that there was a 3 year gap between GPT-3 and GPT-4?
Give it time. At least wait and see what GPT-5 brings before declaring their premature demise.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
No mod actions in the last week! Aside from a couple outright deletions (which I assume were for bot/spam comments or something similar).
What happened? Have all the troublemakers simply been banned at this point? Or have the topics under discussion become more anodyne? I would have thought that things would be heating up with the election approaching.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
BotW sucks. Most open world games do imo, for the types of reasons that you outline.
Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask are far superior to BotW as Zelda titles.
Nintendo is far past their prime. Most people would put their glory days somewhere in the 90s/early 00s. But, there is admittedly an irreducible element of childhood nostalgia required for fully enjoying any of these games anyway.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
Wow - it never occurred to me to frame political peer pressure as a matter of cognitive strain, rather than simply as a matter of personality traits or commitment to principles. I never really considered the fact that it could be physically difficult for people to maintain a set of public-facing lies, and that over time this could have a palpable effect on their actual beliefs. To me, it's water off my back to say that I'm voting for Kamala when I'm actually voting for Trump - I get a thrill out of constructing elaborate lies anyway, I view it as a sort of theatrical performance - but is this the case for everyone? Almost certainly not. It's something to keep in mind, anyway.
And if this does have measurable large-scale social effects, then that's a tough blackpill to swallow, because it implies that any "silent majority" that opposes wokeism will shrink over time, and the perception of wokeism's dominance will more and more become reality.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
(and I do expect her to win in November, as a direct result of the corporate news media being the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party--the fix is clearly in).
The fix was in in 2016 too. What makes this time different?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
To this day, humping my bed remains my preferred masturbation method. But, I already know that I'm an extremely weird individual. Always have been, always will be.
We've ended up in an unusual situation where disaffected libertarians and social conservatives have both been grouped under the same heading of "rightist", simply because that's how the left has chosen to label them, despite the internal divisions between those two camps. It's not a particularly stable coalition. But either way, if the Republican party gets reshaped into the Party of Weird, then I'm more than happy to embrace it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
Lots of leftists, democrats, and others would, as you note, be happy to describe themselves as weird.
...would they? Still, in 2024? Rebellion used to be a cardinal virtue of the American left in decades past, but not so much anymore. They've rebranded as the faction of moral propriety. Less free love, more #MeToo.
Is it really "weird" to be gay or trans now? Is that how the left wants to frame it?
At the very least, calling yourself "weird" while also calling your political archenemies "weird" has to incur some serious cognitive dissonance.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
Maybe it's because we've talked one on one, but I'm pretty convinced these are your real opinions.
I have no doubt that these are his real opinions. But the sincerity of one's convictions doesn't preclude one from posting in bad faith.
Count's posts on race/immigration are designed to be maximally inflammatory while not technically violating any rules, in an effort to provoke banworthy responses from other users. It's a more rhetorically elaborate version of "I'm not touching you". Even if that's not his conscious intent, that's certainly the effect it has. That's where the accusations of bad faith posting come from.
Personally I feel it's important that minority viewpoints be protected on TheMotte however. There's nothing about Count's viewpoint in the abstract that's against the rules. So the best thing that people can do is simply not take the bait, and only report posts that contain actual rule violations.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
It's a cogent and civil argument that doesn't come close to violating any rules.
I think that calling your political opponents "low human capital people" and "human parasites" could reasonably be interpreted as a violation of the boo outgroup/waging the culture war rules.
I certainly don't think that Count should be permabanned over this post. But even on a less inflammatory topic, I would expect a post like this to catch a tempban.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
However, I also believe in rehabilitation.
As far as I can tell from all my direct experience and historical research, this is a very historically aberrant notion. The majority of people across time and space support essentially unlimited punishment for anyone who has been defined as a "criminal" (the exact nature of the crimes can vary of course - "criminal" as a category here just means "the bad people" essentially, the bad people who have been exiled from the symbolic order and are deserving of oblivion).
Christian forgiveness was a radical idea 2,000 years ago, and it remains a radical idea today.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
I want to register my distaste for quoting and upvote-analyzing prior discussions
This one doesn't bother me. The sentiment / revealed consensus of TheMotte is a valid topic of discussion for TheMotte, and past comments can serve as important data for many conversations.
ChatGPT summaries of articles
This one I agree with. LLM summaries shouldn't serve as a replacement for your own analysis and commentary, even when they're marked as such.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
Titanic, Beatles, poetry
They probably don’t care that you don’t know about these things.
You’re probably imagining that this is a bigger deal than it actually is.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
Why would this be deep state? I can’t see how this will do anything except make him a more sympathetic figure.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded.
Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.
And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.
If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.
It's reasonable to take Mark's assertion that "X is true" to be strong prima facie evidence of X, if you generally trust his judgement. But surely you recognize that Mark's beliefs are still defeasible, correct? Mark can still be wrong.
If he were to say, for example, that God is real - and that, more specifically, Islam is the one true religion - I doubt you'd be running out to convert to Islam tomorrow. Islam doesn't become true just because Mark says so. That claim still has to be evaluated against the totality of available evidence and argumentation, even though the source is trustworthy.
Or suppose that he told you that a person can be both 18 years old and 36 years old at the exact same time. That's something that you know to be false, just based on an analysis of the structure of the sentence. Mark's statement to the contrary wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) enough to change your mind.
So why not treat Mark's claim that he is actually a woman named Mary the same as those other two examples? At worst, obviously false nonsense, and at best, a highly contentious claim that should only be accepted after a careful examination of the supporting arguments?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
It is an empirical fact that the list of entities which are admissible into our disease ontology changes over time.
We used to believe in medical conditions like neurasthenia and hysteria, but now we don’t. When presented with the same physical and psychological symptoms, we might just say that it’s part of normal variation, or we might just attribute it to a bad episode, or we could bring the symptoms under the heading of a different disease category altogether - either way, the old categories have been abandoned.
Merely being able to identify a clear biological antecedent to a trait is not sufficient for that trait to be conceived of as a medical condition. It’s reasonable to think that the Big Five personality traits have a substantial basis in genetics, but no one thinks that being extraverted (within reason) is a disease. Extraversion is not medicalized.
The ask is that “I’m intersex” should provoke the same social response as “I’m extraverted” - an “oh, I see” rather than a “wow that’s crazy, what’s that like?” It should be seen as part of normal human variation, rather than conceived of as a wholly distinct category.
Whether this is feasible or desirable is a separate question. But that’s how I understand the request.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"
I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo". (At the very least, we can always ask, why this particular memo, with this particular content?)
I was around 20 when all this got started. That's really young! I was naive and I didn't know shit back then. (I still don't, but I hope that I've learned at least a few things since then). So I believed a lot of false/stupid things and I had to figure things out through trial and error.
People aren't born with an innate knowledge of history, politics, and philosophy. It has to be acquired - both on an individual level and a social collective level. Memes propagate through society and help people avoid the mistakes of the past. Social phenomena always happen for a reason - it's a mistake to think "well if people just did X Y Z then we could have avoided all that mess".
Yes, that's a valid point to bring up. A bare link that occasions a fascinating reply doesn't itself become a good post - but I would nonetheless be thankful in retrospect that that bare link was posted, if the reply it solicited was good enough.
It's an earnest and straightforward anecdote about an interesting and relevant topic.
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