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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Besides this place, mainly 4chan. /pol/ is a shadow of what it once was but other boards are good. I frequent /lit/ and /ic/. /vg/ for certain video game topics. There are surprisingly good discussions to be had on /d/ if you’re interested in, well, /d/ sorts of topics.


I’m spending less and less time on reddit because most of the subreddits I used to frequent are naturally slowing down and dying over time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Women love shitting on other women who have something they don't. Be it fitness, family, a loving husband, career, hobbies, you name it. There is always some frenemy or judgmental family member whispering evil in their ear, trying to poison them against their own happiness.




I'm not sure how this is supposed to answer the OP's question.  Women are less competitive at sports because they're... more competitive? You seem to be portraying them here as competitive, anyway.




Unfortunately for women who aspire to greatness, or even just happiness and contentment, their higher agreeableness and neuroticism causes them to cave to their haters more often than they reach escape velocity from the crab bucket.




I would agree that "higher average agreeableness" would be a possible explanation for being less competitive at sports, but I don't see how this follows from your first point, and in fact it seems to contradict it.  Women are more agreeable... and that's why they're always trying to tear each other down?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, since we're here.


Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose.  And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it.  Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.


Why make it a gendered thing?  Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity.  Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture?  Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison?  Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience).  So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.


If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat.  If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You know I’m a man right?


Anyway I bear no ill will towards you, so if you don’t want to continue the discussion we don’t have to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


That one’s pretty uncontroversial




Well…


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This scene in particular




Don't take it as a personal criticism when I say that I hate shit like this.


This naive optimism of "rah rah face the pain, ride the tiger, you'll come out stronger for it".  For the most part, this line is only repeated by people who have never faced true terror before.  People who haven't faced up to the gravity of the problem.


Now, I am not saying that we should simply crumple in the face of tragedy, or that it would be better if we could simply eliminate it.  There is a tension that I must navigate here because, as I have intimated elsewhere, my fundamental project is to argue, contra utilitarianism, for the necessity of (the possibility of) pain, even terrible pain, even the worst pain, as a precondition of anything that could be called "meaningful".  But I recognize full well that this is a fundamentally insane proposition, at least prima facie.  Any person with any sense at all should be running for the safety of the experience machine once they comprehend what horrors are "out there", in "reality".  Overcoming this eminently reasonable proposition will require the marshaling of the most advanced and subtle resources at our disposal.  This puerile pollyannaism of "ah, bring it on, I can handle it, because I'm tough!" is simply not up to the task.  There is a limit point where things simply break.  Only beyond this limit does the problem of pain actually begin to present itself.


Consider the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her own father in the basement of their house for 24 years.  She was never once allowed to leave her prison chamber in that time period.  She was raped repeatedly and delivered several children while in captivity.


Would you go to her in that basement and tell her "stay with the pain, don't shut this out"?  Would you tell her "what you're feeling is premature enlightenment"?


She did end up surviving and is doing remarkably well now, but of course she would have had no way of knowing that while the ordeal was actually going on.  As the years ticked on, she would have faced nothing but crushing uncertainty every day, the knowledge that every day could be her last.  And of course she just as easily could have died; there could have been no happy ending.  What then?  In that case, there are no scars to serve as monuments of your victories; there is only a terrible waste of life.




fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. [...] They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show".




As has been pointed out to you multiple times, the policy prescriptions proposed by the far right and progressives are wildly different.  Fascists want to railroad women into being housewives, they want to make pornography and other types of sexual "deviancy" illegal, and they want to build a wall to keep immigrants out.  Progressives don't want these things.  The two camps want to build two different types of societies that are obviously different and would feel different to live in.  Given these numerous disagreements, any assertion of similarity between the two ideologies in terms of alleged shared metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions seems rather moot.


Can you give a quick rundown of what your alternative looks like?  What is your proposed belief system that does not depend on these concepts like "group difference" that you find problematic?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There is a large inferential distance between yourself and most of us… This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking.




The irony here is that this (and I do think what you’ve written here is an accurate summary of Hlynka’s position) is a very postmodern view of knowledge and discourse. It’s something that Foucault or Derrida easily could have written themselves.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The aims are what matter in a political system. People will be more subservient to the aims than to the method. Frequently, one’s choice of method is just a post hoc rationalization of one’s pre-reflective, extra-rational aims.


Immediately in the wake of Hegel’s death you had left Hegelians, who ultimately spawned Marxism, and right Hegelians, who were politically conservative. Both claimed to be following Hegel’s dialectical method, but they had radically different aims. Any analysis that claimed that the left and right Hegelians were somehow “the same” because they both claimed to be inspired by Hegel would obviously be missing the point. They’re obviously not the same, because one side wanted a communist revolution and the other didn’t.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Can you list some examples of real-life tasks?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design.




I’ll ask you the same question I asked Hlynka: what is your alternative, an alternative that avoids these problems that are allegedly shared by progressivism and fascism?


I don’t really understand what your comment is getting at here, but maybe you can help me understand by giving me an example.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The smart approach is to ban low quality and low effort content, whether AI or human generated.




Speaking for StackOverflow specifically: when it comes to technical questions, there's no easy heuristic that a non-expert can use to distinguish between a low effort post and a good post.


Posts that look good on the surface can still be bad.  You can supply a 50 line block of code that compiles and seems to work, but it can have subtle problems that won't present themselves until later on.  Or you can write a post that would be perfectly good in another context, but it's the wrong approach to this particular problem because of X Y Z non-obvious reasons.  And of course LLM-generated answers can have these sorts of problems.


The site is based on a relationship of trust: if the post looks good, and it's upvoted, and the user has a high amount of karma, then the post was probably written by a human expert who is aware of the sorts of pitfalls I mentioned and knows how to avoid them.  If you just have a blanket policy of "yep, AI is 100% allowed, go nuts", then it starts to erode that relationship of trust.  More non-experts come to the site who start posting AI-generated answers without understanding them, they accrue karma, it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise.


In the limit case, human experts get disincentivized from posting because, well why go through the effort of spending 30 minutes writing a detailed answer when the AI posters will post 5 different (equally long and detailed, but perhaps subtly incorrect) answers in that time and the OP will probably just accept one of those answers anyway.  That's the fear.


Whether a total AI ban is actually enforceable is another question.  But this is the reason why people would want a full AI ban, instead of just a "low effort post" ban.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Obviously we don’t want people to do that either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, sure, but:


    

  1. 

    You could say the same thing about aesthetic claims. But if your friend told you “hey I know you think the new Marvel movie was good but I think it sucks, let me tell you why”, you wouldn’t tell him “first we need to decide on a framework for aesthetic evaluation”. You would just hear him out, and you would assume from the start that it’s the sort of thing that you two could have a reasonable conversation about, and that he is capable of giving reasons that you may be responsive to, reasons that may ultimately cause you to change your position.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    People’s moral psychological profiles and modes of ethical inference are more similar than is generally assumed. Almost everyone agrees that theft is wrong for example, and if you give an argument that purports to show that some particular act is isomorphic to theft (e.g. “I can’t take your ice cream cone without your consent, so why can the government take part of your income without your consent?”), then people won’t just blow it off: they’ll feel compelled to either accept your argument, or point out some relevant difference that causes the isomorphism to fail.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


All porn is cuckhold porn.




Is every fictional story a cuckold story?  Whenever I enjoy a work of fiction, am I getting cucked?  If I read Harry Potter for enjoyment, am I getting cucked?


If I can enjoy Harry Potter without being cucked, then why can't I enjoy porn without being cucked?  We can subsume both experiences under a single general process of experiencing fiction.  The fact that one is more likely to make me ejaculate than the other does not seem to me to be an essential difference.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


An aspect of male heterosexuality is wanting to see his female partner, whether temporary or long term, degrade herself sexually [...] ball-licking, rimming, gagging throatfucks, anal, facials, and the like




It's hard for me to conceive of such garden-variety acts as degrading.


I think we should be quite careful to distinguish submission (in its most general sense - in the sense of taking on any sort of relatively lower status for any length of time) and degradation.  The former need not imply the latter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s crazy how radfems deluded themselves into thinking that all sexually submissive desires must be imposed from the outside by a patriarchal conspiracy.


Do they not know how many sub men there are?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Cuckolding (as in the fetish) is a purely male paraphilia.




You know that there exist women who get off on watching their husbands fuck other women, right?  Obviously it's more rare than male cuck fetishists, because all extreme fetishes are less common in women than they are in men, but it's not unheard of.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this focus on (the possibility of) self-inserting while reading literature, the idea that literature primarily exists to represent pleasant states of affairs, is misguided.  It ignores whole genres that represent states of affairs that no one would want to experience: horror, true crime, surrealism, etc.  It also ignores wide swaths of poetry and other types of non-representational writing.  What would it mean to self-insert while reading Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land?




Learning character archetypes, learning more about oneself through reading, trying to predict what happens next, etc.




I wouldn't phrase it in these terms, but I would suggest a concept of general aesthetic experience that goes beyond mere self-inserting or mere delight in mimesis.  And I contend that this sort of general aesthetic experience can be applied to at least some works of pornography as well.  Some porn is wildly imaginative (mainly in the sphere of written erotica, indie comics, and the like - not your average studio production) and shares the sorts of salutary properties and features that you find in other quality works of art.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


there's a quite vocal segment of people who play pornographic video games that claim any presence or implication of a male sexual partner in their game that is not the protagonist is cuckolding




Or heck, even the presence of non-human, gender-ambiguous tentacles.  Thus the rivers of ink spilled over whether Muv-Luv Alternative counts as NTR or not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.




Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean… one of the people on board was the CEO.


Seems like he had a net negative impact on everyone who went on this particular expedition.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I have previously read comments from people on The Motte lamenting that modern people are too afraid of their mortality and unwilling to take risks. I've felt it too, the desire for adventure, for glory, and lamented that the Earth now feels too small to support those things.




As someone who might have made one of the comments you're referring to: it's important to keep in mind that context is everything.  You can risk your life for a good reason, or you can risk your life for a stupid reason.  Going to see the wreck of the Titanic in a sub that, apparently, any experienced engineer could have told you was unsafe, seems like a stupid reason to risk your life to me.  At the very least, I don't see any particular glory in it.


And anyway, there's nothing particularly adventurous about going to a place that other people have already gone, using technological means that are already well understood.  In general, adventures aren't waiting for you "out there" somewhere, in some special place, waiting for any old person to just stumble upon them.  If we can speak of such things as "adventure" or "glory", then we must recognize that they arise out of the network of relations that one finds oneself embedded in.  The adventures of Napoleon or Caesar weren't grounded in their location in a particular point in space, but rather they were grounded in who they were: what they meant to other people, what they could command of other people, the way they influenced the structure of (symbolic) events that took place around them.  It's not the sort of thing you can find by just looking in the right place.


The upshot is that there is absolutely no shortage of adventure to be found on Earth today.  I mean my goodness, we're watching the suicide of an entire civilization in real time!  People willfully not reproducing, sterilizing their own children, effacing their own culture... it's fascinating.  And you know, if the optimists have it right, we stand on the precipice of the automation of all human cognition (i.e. the obliteration of all value and meaning).  What could be more adventurous than all of that?  It's certainly more interesting than any rock in space, or any hunk of metal at the bottom of the ocean.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It was the norm from the early 1800s




What does this mean though?


There was simply much less stuff to DO before the 1800s, and certainly before say, the 1600s.  It wouldn't have made sense to let people deploy new LLMs without regulations, or let factories pollute as much as they wanted, or let people go diving in untested carbon fiber submarines, because there was no AI and no factories and no submarines.


And for what scientific research did exist, there were certainly norms that regulated it.  Dissecting dead bodies was taboo in various times and places, for example.  Or, you know, the whole Galileo kerfuffle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You should read Nietzsche.  It would give you a more nuanced way of thinking about these sorts of issues.


Start with Twilight of the Idols:




But Socrates suspected even more. He looked behind his noble Athenians; he understood that his case, his idiosyncrasy of a case was not an exception any more. The same type of degeneration was quietly gaining ground everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end. - And Socrates understood that the world needed him, - his method, his cure, his personal strategy for self-preservation . . . Everywhere, instincts were in anarchy; everywhere, people were five steps away from excess [...] When people need reason to act as a tyrant, which was the case with Socrates, the danger cannot be small that something else might start acting as a tyrant. Rationality was seen as the saviour, neither Socrates nor his 'patients' had any choice about being rational, - it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all of Greek thought threw itself on rationality shows that there was a crisis: people were in danger, they had only one option: be destroyed or - be absurdly rational . . . The moralism of Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathologically conditioned; the same is true for the value they give to dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness only means: you have to imitate Socrates and establish a permanent state of daylight against all dark desires - the daylight of reason. You have to be clever, clear, and bright at any cost: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards . . .