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.
15d ago
Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.
This is not politics. This is an arbitrary list of demands.
Your "politics" is the constellation of principles and cognitive patterns that cause you to demand certain things. (Or, alternatively, as a Marxist might say: politics is the analysis of the material and social conditions that give rise to certain principles and cognitive patterns, which in turn give rise to concrete demands.)
The interesting thing isn't that you like vaccines, it's why you like vaccines (and what makes you different from people who don't).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17d ago
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?
[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.
People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.
[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief.
No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The mature, critical way of approaching art (which actually just turns out to be straight up more fun) is to start from the recognition that the artwork was deliberately constructed as a product of human intentionality. Like all other artifacts of human labor, it was designed according to certain specifications in order to serve certain purposes. So our analysis begins with questions like, why was this created, what narrative did the artist tell themselves about why it was created and is it in any sense different from the truth of why it was "actually" created, what is the background casual chain of social/material conditions that lead to the production of this specific work in the specific way that it was produced, how are its formal features related to the conditions of its production, how do its formal features relate to its conceptual features, etc...
Some works reveal themselves to be richer and more amenable to this type of analysis than others, which is how the term "genre fiction" came to take on a derisive connotation.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
I don't just dislike horror, I don't see the point. It's either jumpscares or unending tension. It boggles my mind why anyone would enjoy this genre.
I've been planning on eventually writing an effortpost here about the horror genre and some of its problems. So I'm glad to see there may be some interest in that here.
The TL;DR is that the "modern horror film" as such has a lot of issues, as you correctly point out, but I think that works that have horror elements are quite fascinating (David Lynch films are a good example).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
Liberalism (meaning, not socialism and not hard right) is the dominant position here, and pretty much everywhere else too. Libertarianism is also popular here.
You were probably looking for a term like “progressive” or “woke” instead of “liberal”.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
I said that I disagreed with the ban (suspension, really, not even a ban).
I have repeatedly argued for "affirmative action" for left-of-center posters here. I think they should explicitly be given more leeway before mods dole out punishments, because their viewpoints are underrepresented.
Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely. And I would not have suspended Turok for anything he's posted so far.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
I'm always in an unenviable position in these discussions, because I'm always trying to bring people to a more refined and complex position than the one they currently inhabit, regardless of where they're starting out from. If I'm talking to stuck-up hipsters who say "well, there's obviously a divide between High Art and 'pop culture', the former being more valuable, more intellectual, etc" then I say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. But conversely if people say, "well art's just about having a good time, I know what I like, you don't have to make it complicated with all that fancy shit", then I just as forcefully say, no no, let's stop and examine that assumption. It's never supposed to be a direct denial of the starting position, but rather an invitation for us to walk the endless spiral of the Hegelian dialectic, together, as a team. But it always seems to come off as a direct denial. That's my fault; I need to work on my presentation.
Now, regarding my own capacity for "suspension of disbelief". I just finished up playing a VN recently. Fun game. I binged it as fast as I could, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for each plot twist, I got weirdly obsessed with one of the girls and wanted to waifu her, I cried when important characters died (yes I am a grown man who cries at video games). So am I incapable of enjoying stories like a "normal person"? Not at all! There's nothing I love more than a good story, it's basically what I live for. But, you know, you eventually want something more, you want to move the conversation forward. So you ask yourself: yes, I had this experience, this particular type of experience, but what of it? Well for starters, we can question the "naturalness" of this type of experience. We can ask ourselves if this type of experience might not be historically and spatially delimited. (Did the Iliad have "fans" in ancient Greece? How was their experience of the Iliad different from how we "experience" "stories" today? On the one hand, I think it may not be as different as some might suppose. But on the other hand, it might be utterly alien.) I had this experience, but what is this experience, really? What does it mean? What is it symptomatic of? Where did it come from, and where is it going?
It's as much about making your self and your own experience an object of critical inquiry as it is about inquiring into the artwork and the artist.
It is prioritising emotional connection over intellectual dissection
Not at all! Not in any way. Not that the two could ever be separated to begin with.
But, you know, this question about the connection between art and what might be called "emotion", it's a highly complex and fraught question. The way forward is not at all clear.
Adorno defined "kitsch" as "art that tells you how to feel". Genuine artworks don't tell you how to feel. Meaning, there's something fundamentally manipulative and coercive about an artwork that sets out with the explicit goal of inducing a certain emotional state. When the sad music plays and the camera zooms in dramatically and all the characters start crying, you know you're supposed to feel sad. The work is telling you to feel sad. We've left the domain of art and we've entered the domain of the "culture industry", the domain of pseudo-art and pseudo-emotion, the domain of mass market objects produced to fit utilitarian specifications. Or so this theory would have it.
Is this the same as saying that art should be "emotionless"? Not at all. Adorno was a great lover of Mozart after all, and Mozart's music could hardly be described as emotionless. But I do think he correctly identified a very real and very serious problem here, namely that an attempt to control the emotional resonance of a work too tightly can collapse into simple didacticism.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12d ago
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.
That's interesting that you say that. I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate). But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship. I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men
A lot of women who are heavily invested in gay M/M content report enjoying it because it feels "safer" and "less complicated" than hetero content. They want to enjoy a romantic relationship in a "voyeuristic" way without having the worry about the imbalanced power dynamics that are intrinsically a part of any relationship between men and women. If the characters in the story are both men, then she can enjoy it without having to worry about the possibility of "self-inserting" as the female character and getting too personally enmeshed in the story, which could dredge up uncomfortable hang-ups about her own real life sexuality. It's not so much about running to the image of an idealized man as it is about running away from the dangers that real men present.
Obviously, it's something that she mostly has to work out for herself. I think the best thing you can do is to just set a good example in your relations with your own family, and if it ever seems appropriate to bring up, be open and honest about your own political views, what you perceive as the deleterious effects of modern wokeness, etc (the danger here isn't so much the porn per se, but rather the fact that the communities for this type of content tend to be filled with radfem and woke types who could reinforce negative beliefs).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
How do I survive in a world where the heuristics people hold holy on both sides end up being wrong so often?
Von Neumann said "you don't understand things in math, you just get used to them". It's similar in philosophy. You never actually solve philosophical problems, but you can outgrow them.
Most of the questions here are ones you'll eventually outgrow, assuming your development is not prematurely arrested.
Regarding the "Why Modern Art is so awful" essay: Luke’s explanation of “it’s a reaction to photography” is too simplistic. Any theory of "modern art" (bit of a vague term but we'll roll with it) has to account for the fact that there are people who really do like this stuff. Genuinely. It's not (always) a scam.
Nancy McWilliams described modern art as essentially being "by schizos, for schizos":
Sass (1992) has compellingly described how schizoid conditions are emblematic of modernity. The alienation of contemporary people from a communal sensibility, reflected in the deconstructive perspectives of 20th-century art, literature, anthropology, philosophy, and criticism, has eerie similarities to schizoid and schizophrenic experience. Sass notes in particular the attitudes of alienation, hyperreflexivity (elaborate self-consciousness), detachment, and rationality gone virtually mad that characterize modern and postmodern modes of thought and art, contrasting them with "the world of the natural attitude, the world of practical activity, shared communal meanings, and real physical presences" (p. 354). His exposition also calls effectively into question numerous facile and oversimplified accounts of schizophrenia and the schizoid experience.
If modern art is primarily produced and enjoyed by people who naturally feel at home in these modes of thought and experience, whereas the majority of the human population does not recognize themselves in this experience, then that could help explain some of the disconnect.
I once posted Klee's Angelus Novus here on TheMotte as an example of a first-rate painting, and was met with disapproval and incredulity. But you'll have to take my word for it that I really do find it to be quite lovely!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
I really hope this was the entire intended post because that would be hilarious.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.
Ah! Well, that's certainly an important piece of information that was elided. You should have simply started there and been honest about your concerns and worries, instead of going for the "500 IQ pwn everyone with facts and logic" play. The dialogue is so much more insightful and constructive when we cut the bullshit and just talk about what's actually bothering us.
I'm not unsympathetic to you, because I'm not without my own anxieties about race. Although I've received 99.9% (non-Ashkenazi) European (and 0.1% SSA/MENA/etc) from multiple ancestry tests, my appearance is rather on the "swarthy" end by white standards, which lead to teachers and other kids at school asking me on multiple occasions if I was mixed with anything. It gave me doubts about what I actually was, or if other white people even saw me as white at all.
Combine that with the fact that I never knew my birth father, and I'll never be able to be truly certain about what I am and where I came from.
But in some sense none of that matters, because I believe that the way that white people are treated by modern wokeness is wrong, and I believe that they have the right to have their own political movement, on their own terms. Even if those terms were so strict that they excluded me. I'd still believe that regardless of whether I was black or Chinese or anything.
Now, my situation is different from someone who is knowingly and visibly mixed (especially someone whose "other half" is both non-white and non-Ashkenazi). But the point is, you're not the only one with anxieties, and honest political dialogue starts with facing those anxieties and putting them at the center of the conversation, because they're essentially the major determining factor of your political orientation.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19d ago
My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.
Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.
Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.
Primaprimaprima
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14d ago
Had a friend who got really into shrooms. It basically ruined his life for a while, and he was only able to recover after he fully quit doing drugs. Went into a sustained severe manic state, spent his entire life savings in short order, lost multiple jobs in quick succession due to erratic behavior, revealed to me detailed plans that if acted upon would have lead to severe social and potentially legal/criminal damage. And the entire time he was subjectively convinced that he had achieved enlightenment and his actions were infallible. It permanently put me off of ever trying shrooms and has made me skeptical of all accounts that portray psychedelics as "harmless".
(Full disclosure, this was confounded by the fact that he was also doing massive quantities of THC at the same time. But then, people present THC as harmless too, so you'd think that harmless thing 1 + harmless thing 2 would be fine...)
Primaprimaprima
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12d ago
she should be satisfied with her own personhood
Do you know how many humans (male or female) are "satisfied with their own personhood"?
Not many!
We are all, at all times, engaged in a vain and desperate struggle to alter ourselves in order to solve the riddle of the Other's desire. It's not a woman thing it's a human thing.
"However, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other's desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the phantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to: ‘You’re saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it?' The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for those others?' A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. His father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, fight their battles in his name; the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others, just what kind of games they are playing with him. Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others. This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. What we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it). The crucial feature is that, while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about was her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire."
(From Zizek's "How to Read Lacan")
Primaprimaprima
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11d ago
Clearly on TheMotte, it’s the men who are writing most of the posts about the ills of promiscuity. (I have specific names in mind.)
That attitude may ultimately stem from their Christianity. But there are also a lot of atheist manosphere types who get REALLY upset about female promiscuity. You can’t dismiss it as a purely female concern.
Primaprimaprima
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12d ago
Julian Edelman can be caught in a one-night-stand with a chubster, Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty
It’s quite plausible that they were simply acting on their own preferences!
Primaprimaprima
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22d ago
But increasingly, the only roles which are prestigious in modernity are those of white collar undefined-what-the-value-add-here-is jobs and those of pushing the bounds of theoretical knowledge
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.
Primaprimaprima
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5d ago
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely
Various 20th century artistic practices that are now grouped under the heading of "abstraction" could be described in precisely this way, as an attempt to "look at the magic trick closely". Artists set out with the self-conscious intent of "breaking the illusion", of foregrounding the process of creation that normally remains hidden; in painting this took the form of abstract painting, painting that embraced the "flatness of the canvass" instead of trying to retreat from it into the illusion of 3D perspective, painting that owned the fact that it was nothing more than blobs of colored goo.
The idea was to ask whether it was possible to construct an art without illusion, an art that would endure even when the magic trick was ruined. Surely you can agree that this is at least an interesting question, even if you think it must ultimately be answered in the negative?
Primaprimaprima
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17d ago
I want to know whether [...] is someone's kink
The answer is always yes.
Primaprimaprima
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19d 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
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4d ago
Uchikoshi overall wrote less of it than Kodaka did, but he had a block of routes in the back half of the game where he had free rein to do his own thing. So if you’re willing to tolerate the Kodaka parts to get to the Uchikoshi parts then I’d say it’s still worth it.
Primaprimaprima
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4d ago
It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
I kinda think that's just true though! The artwork doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
Walter Kaufmann said of Kierkegaard, "there's no other author in world literature who gives me such a strong impression that my soul has been placed on the scales, and found wanting". I think that's what great art should aim to do. There's something fundamentally anxiety-inducing about it.
Of course, if the work serves literally no purpose whatsoever, aesthetic or otherwise, then yes, by definition we would have to question what the point of making it in the first place was. But it's actually quite hard to find a work that meets that criteria; maybe impossible. You know, even something like Joseph Kosuth's "Art as Idea as Idea" where he would print placards with dictionary entries on them and hang them up in an otherwise empty room... even something like this produces an aesthetic experience. It has its own kind of texture, it induces its own kind of perception. It's more subtle but it's there if you can grab onto it. He probably didn't even want that work to induce a "classical" kind of aesthetic experience, and yet it does, because it's inescapable.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
I've loved Danganronpa ever since SDR2 first released in English but I never really interacted with the community, so I was surprised to see what a big tumblr/fujo following it had. I suppose it was a result of Danganronpa being relatively "gender neutral", and having some pretty boys like Nagito to latch onto. Although I was even more surprised that the fujo contingent showed up for Hundred Line as well, because that one is much more unabashedly targeted at a straight male audience.
Which one?
I want Hiruko to step on me!
V'ehx is close though, god damn they did her dirty by giving her such a short route...
Primaprimaprima
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4d ago
I would drop immaturity from the conversation entirely if you want to avoid getting people's hackles up
Yeah, I have to work on my presentation. But at the same time, I really do have to ask my readers to suspend certain pre-existing conceptual and emotional associations they have around certain terms, y'know? Not erase, just temporarily suspend. Otherwise we can't make any progress.
There was a conversation here a few weeks ago where I said that love is impossible. That got a few people upset. But did I ever say that people shouldn't do things that are impossible? Did I ever say that there's no place in the world for impossible things? Not at all. Similarly, did I ever say that a certain amount of immaturity is not warranted? Not at all. (I suppose the Hegelian way of talking about it would be, you have to go through maturity to arrive at a mature immaturity.)
which VN btw?
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
It feels like you are trying to intellectualise that away by referring to 'emotions'
Not at all! "Intellectualize"? Goodness gracious no.
an artist shouldn't try to manipulate the viewer, what they should do is try to express themselves
We're in complete agreement that there is an intimate link between art and what might be called "emotion". But this phrase, that an artist should "express themselves", makes me nervous, increasingly nervous, for reasons that I don't fully understand myself and have never been able to entirely articulate. There's clearly something right about it, and yet we should also be cautious. Taking a shot in the dark, some of the reasons may be:
- It implies that the principle modality as issue is expression, as opposed to alternative modes of thought and comportment.
- It implies that the work is about the artist and what he wants to express, as opposed to being about other things.
- It implies that the artist knows what he "thinks" or "feels" well enough to "express" it. (Derrida wrote some of the only good commentary that's ever been written on Nietzsche -- "the truth of Nietzsche's text is that there is no truth of Nietzsche's text". He was quite correct about this. And yet Nietzsche's text simultaneously contains an overwhelming plenitude of truth, it contains too much truth. This is what the authentic work aims at: "expressing" something while at the same time undermining what it expresses and pointing beyond itself.)
I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
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