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.
11d ago
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
No, I know what he's talking about with that one. (Not because I've ever been on HRT, but because on this particular point he's just describing how I am by default, and this point seems to be a persistent and noticeable difference between how I experience things and how other people experience things.)
The simplest way I could describe it would be something like, "the impression that sensory perceptions carry semantic content that extends beyond the boundaries of what is literally contained in the sense perception". Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc. I think that everyone is familiar with these types of experiences to some degree (could be something as simple as, visiting a place you haven't been to since you were a little kid and triggering nostalgic memories as a result), but some people have these types of sensations much more frequently and intensely than others, and from a wider range of stimuli. But the point is that it doesn't have to be attached to traditional "centers of meaning" like new projects or new social relations.
It could also be described as "a strong natural resistance to depression". Typically when I hear people describe depressive moods they use language like "feeling empty", feeling like everything has been "drained of meaning", feeling like "nothing matters", and... I've never felt any of that. Like ever. It's hard to imagine feeling like that when everything is so damn meaningful all the time! (On the flip side, I am extremely prone to anxiety, so it's not at all the same thing as just having a clean bill of mental health.)
This is how my perception has worked since early childhood, so I can confidently say I'm not describing the effects of psychedelics or other foreign substances.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
Nah. People have been trained to see “we should do nothing” as being equivalent to “we should support the oppressors”, it’s a tactic that they’re very used to dealing with.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.
Because Israel is white and neo-colonialist. In their view. And that's pretty much the worst thing you can be.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
It’s possible that the THC was the principal culprit. I have witnessed THC inducing acute psychotic episodes on other occasions before. Bit counterintuitive since most people would think of THC as being less “intense” than psilocybin but I suppose the whole thing is under-studied. I’m surprised that the risks of THC haven’t really permeated cultural consciousness.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
No it’s… not?
There’s pretty strong agreement on that from all sides of the political spectrum.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
Final Fantasy
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
It’s not going to work in the US because the ship has simply sailed. We’re in far too deep.
The most we can do is try to give the US a smooth controlled landing and encourage European countries to not go down the same path.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13d ago
a hateful, developmentally stunted man who picked his wounds in public
So you mean to say, he was an artist!
The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree. In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).
Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed. It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc. But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.
Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice. I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them? What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value? What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc. Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access. And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.
Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.
I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
Quizno’s deserved a better fate.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
28d 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.
24d ago
· Edited 23d 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.
12d ago
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.
I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).
One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.
She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.
Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.
Totally agree with your description of puberty. It was a nothingburger, way overhyped.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
OP’s a woman
Yes but this is a topic that comes up with some frequency and there are certain male posters who have strong opinions on it as well.
they’re more upset that the women aren’t being promiscuous with them
Yes but the point is that they care about it at all, regardless of their motivations. (The motivations are at least somewhat complex and multilayered. Yes at the end of the day it’s really about “all the women should belong to me” but I think there’s at least some genuine pro-social concern mixed in as well.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11d ago
Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people?
You could ask the same of many "terminally online" types of people.
They don't want you to hate them. But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground?
Ideally, predictive power.
The original paper on the autism-schizotypy spectrum that was cited in the blogpost didn't actually have anything to do with gender. The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction. All other differences in cognitive and personality traits were taken to be downstream of that criteria.
This could be cashed out in terms of predictions about e.g. how subjects will perform on tasks related to attention and context-switching, and how those results will be correlated with personality traits.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8d ago
What's your favorite Nietzsche book?
(If you say Zarathustra or WtP you're a poser.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
24d 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.
24d 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.
10d ago
It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion.
It's a good question!
All humans are familiar with the experience of impulse control, and the failure thereof. You should start that project tonight, but you don't. You shouldn't eat that donut because you're on a diet, but you do. You know that rationally you should be able to control your impulse, and it would be better for you if you did, but that often doesn't help much in the moment. These are universal experiences. The only difference with men is that they experience particularly strong sexual impulses, of a variety which many women find foreign. Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).
Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations. The ones who are cursed with a sufficiently deleterious combination of high impulse intensity / poor impulse control are the ones who become criminals.
The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane! Their insanity has been the engine of so much death and destruction throughout history. But it's also been the engine of so much beauty and goodness. Things in life have a habit of working out like that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11d ago
I've also noted one instance of an AAGP in the wild (a woman who wanted to be a man who wanted to be a woman)
I will admit that the inverse of this has crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
This isn't necessarily directed at you in particular, but it seems like a good excuse to talk about it:
I often see sweeping generalizations about "prestige" on TheMotte that betray a very particular kind of coastal, Blue Tribe, upper-middle-to-lower-upper class perspective on what counts as prestigious and why. But not everyone in "society" shares that perspective. Ask yourself, the types of guys who are actually working these trade jobs, do they know about your concept of prestige? Do they know what you consider prestigious or not? And if they do know, do they care what you consider prestigious or not? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm legitimately asking. I don't exactly have a foot in that world either.
Think about a black teenager growing up in the projects in inner city Chicago. He's a part of "modernity" too. What does he consider prestigious? He may be aware to a more or less vague degree that people think that being the President is prestigious, or that being Elon Musk is prestigious. But what he considers most viscerally prestigious, his "revealed preference" for prestige if you will, is being the local drug dealer, or the most feared local warlord. That's what actually matters in his world. Or maybe he could aspire to be a major rapper or athlete; those are things that "society at large" finds prestigious as well. Those positions are certainly compensated well enough. But even then, they're the sort of thing that the more well-to-do Blue Tribe perspective might look down upon as "tacky". Note that a couple comments here have already given their personal shortlist of what they consider prestigious, and "being Jay Z" and "being Tom Brady" haven't made any of the lists so far.
I once read a comment here that said "being a doctor is one of the most prestigious things you can be". And I just thought... really? Really? I mean it's an important job, don't get me wrong. Thank you for your services. I'm happy for them that they're making a lot of money. But at the end of the day it's, from my perspective, still just another job. Doctors are, modulo individual technical skill, fungible, and fungibility is antithetical to prestige as far as I'm concerned.
Now, if I were in the same room as say, I dunno, David Chalmers or Slavoj Zizek, I might find myself stumbling over my words in a vain attempt to make a good impression, because those people have achieved social positions that I do consider to be highly prestigious. But this is hardly a universal opinion! Many educated and well off people of good repute have never heard those names; and if I were to explain to these same educated and well off people that they were philosophy professors, a common response (particularly from those of a more conservative bent) would be "well they're just parasites who are stealing our tax dollars and filling young peoples' heads with nonsense, so why the hell would I think they're prestigious?" (In fact your reference to the "philosophy of fartsniffing" indicates that this would likely be your response!)
The TL;DR is that there are almost as many conceptions of prestige as there are people, so before we say that the prestige of such and such a thing is motivating people to do XYZ, we should establish what model of prestige the individuals in question are actually operating on.
More options
Context Copy link