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"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
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1mo ago
At what ages does one normally outgrow Santa belief in America?
18, in my case.
I figured that if God is real, then reality is intrinsically magical anyway, and I may as well keep believing in Santa too.
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1mo ago
Excellent post.
Just wanted you to know that in spite of (or because of*) our stringent disagreements on certain issues, you remain one of my favorite posters here and you're one of the posters who continues to make TheMotte worthwhile, so I really appreciate what you do.
(* Ilforte once told me that my "value system deserves oblivion", and I still cherish that as the nicest compliment I've ever received on the internet. You don't want an interlocutor who's just going through the motions of nitpicking this or that argument. You want an interlocutor who opposes you on a deep spiritual level. That's where the good stuff is.)
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1mo ago
Fair enough! Catholics have always been very tolerant of iconography of Jesus though.
I'll take this in good faith because I think you meant it that way.
Very much so, yes. It's important that we think clearly about what we mean when we talk about "the sacred". And the best way to clarify your concepts is to stretch them to their logical limits, so that you're forced to draw distinctions and clearly demarcate the boundaries of things.
But I don't actually want to just drop a "This is what the Catholic Church says" style response here. THat wouldn't be helpful.
It would be extremely helpful, if it were genuinely a part of your ultimate motivations. I'm less interested in debating policy and more interested in understanding why different people think the way they do, regardless of what those reasons turn out to be. (Sometimes people aren't honest about why they think what they think. Sometimes they genuinely don't know why they think what they think, or they're lying even to themselves. That makes it a difficult endeavor.)
At the risk of channeling the spirit of Helen Lovejoy, I think we should think of the children. Meaning, as a rubric, is whatever the "thing" we're talking about something we would more or less be comfortable with in giving to children?
Sure. But that doesn't really seem to be addressing my question, because this new criteria (about what's appropriate for children) seems totally orthogonal to the dimension of the sacred. The sacredness of the phenomenon or object in question is no longer relevant; we just have to look at whether it's safe for kids (or addictive or whatever other criteria you want to propose) and that will determine what types of prohibitions we need. But the reason I asked the question in the first place is specifically because I wanted to clarify what exactly the sacredness of sexual acts consists in.
I do believe that you (and not just you of course, but many people, both religious and non-religious) correctly perceive that there is a certain type of spiritual power in sexuality, and that this power can be dangerous if left unchecked, and this perception is what prompted you to use the word "sacred". A spiritual power that is not present in booze and guns and etc. We can quibble over whether "sacred" was the correct word choice, or if the category of the sacred needs to be subdivided further in order to account for different types of sacred phenomena, and so forth. But regardless, I think you were at least directionally correct.
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1mo ago
Somebody has to pick the crops and slaughter the chickens and thats a very reasonable principled exception.
???????
That’s not principled at all.
If your “principle” is “no illegals, except for these specific jobs that natives shouldn’t sully themselves with” then that’s just a comedic farce and the left would absolutely have every right to spit in ICE’s face in that case.
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1mo ago
I mean, I think that's the motte and bailey.
I think a majority of leftists believe that their official mission is illegitimate, and borders in general are basically unethical, but outright saying that is still a bit outside the Overton window of mainstream political discourse (insofar as you still care about trying to convince conservatives and "centrists" and put on good optics for them).
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1mo ago
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. These are the kinds of replies that still make TheMotte worthwhile, so I appreciate it, I truly do.
we keep "it" sacred.
No arguments there.
We should make special rules to protect the special things.
Perhaps. But, what kinds of rules?
The Bible is special too. But Christians don't think we should ban the Bible in order to protect it. They think we should disseminate it as widely as possible precisely because it's sacred and it brings people into contact with the sacred. (In fact they arrange regular mass public gatherings where they come together to worship that which is considered sacred. Apply the same logic to sexuality and...)
How do we demarcate the sacred things that need to be disseminated from the sacred things that need to be protected? Do we have a schema outlining the different modalities in which something may be sacred?
To Revive Sex, Ban Porn (paywalled, but it's very short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
To date, 21 US states have enacted legislation requiring pornography websites (websites with over one-third explicit content) to use stringent age verification systems. Yet minors can easily find their way around such age-walls with the use of a virtual private network (VPN), as well as by searching around the seedier corners of the internet. But a new bill introduced to Michigan’s senate by Rep. Josh Schriver on September 11 far surpasses any previous porn bans.
House Bill 4938 would ban access to any “depiction, description, or simulation” of sexual acts, and to punish the distribution of any such content as a felony, punishable up to 20 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. This far-reaching ban includes content designed “to sexually arouse or gratify” (including erotic writing, AI, ASMR, and manga), transgender content, as well as the creation of VPNs.
It goes without saying that this bill, and any equivalent legislation, will not pass, even at the state level (at least not without some more shifting of the Overton window). But given the coordinated attack that is currently being launched on pornography (via payment processors and age verification laws) throughout the Western world, there are clearly a number of individuals who wish they could simply ban porn entirely.
Though the bill is unlikely to be passed, the responses to it have proved revealing. In the eyes of critics, it represents a revival of Victorian-era puritanism. But the idea that these bans will suppress eros is misplaced, because pornography consumption leads not to oversexualization but to de-sexualization. Porn bans are therefore more likely to revive eros than to suppress it.
Revive what, exactly? And suppress what?
To take one of the most basic consequences of a blanket ban on all content designed "to sexually arouse or gratify": pornographic art depicts a number of scenarios and ideas which are impossible to physically realize. These include but are not limited to: mind control, body swapping, magical gender transformations, transformation into animals, transformation into inanimate objects, inflation and shrinking, petrification, nullification (of the entire excretory and digestive system), exotic anatomy (authentic male pregnancy and birth, people with far more limbs than would ever be practical, etc), aliens, angels and demons, and undoubtedly many more that I'm forgetting.
Plainly, all of these concepts (insofar as they are presented in such a way that their sexual dimension is made manifest) would be straightforwardly suppressed by any blanket ban on pornography. We would end up with the curious consequence that they could find no expression in material reality whatsoever: neither through the act itself, nor through fiction. Which raises the obvious question as to why people would be so afraid of something that's impossible to begin with.
Pornography kills the subtlety needed to maintain erotic tension. “A lot of people are now learning about sex from porn,” Anne says. When they enter into a sexual encounter, “they already have a set of ideas and moves that are ‘hot,’ and are what they think they want in bed.” Porn teaches people to follow a predetermined script rather than to read the cues of their partner.
Man.
I gotta teach these kids about subtlety. They know nothing.
"Subtlety" is when you're sitting in front of the fireplace with your girl on a brisk Autumn afternoon, her head resting gently on your shoulder, everything going perfectly right with the world, the demonic forces that are constantly threatening to tear you apart have finally abated for once. But you realize -- and "realize" isn't even the right word for it honestly, because "realize" implies a definite instant where something leaps forward into consciousness and makes itself manifest for the first time, whereas the phenomenon we're dealing with here is a lot more indeterminate, it's something that's "always-already" (I hate that word but it is useful sometimes) hovering on the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, caught between two modalities, but we'll still use "realize" because it's the best word we've got -- you realize that as much as you love this girl, she will never be a 100 ft tall dragon who will take you into her dragon womb, connect an umbilical cord to you, and genetically rewrite your body so that you too become a dragon. And you have to live with that. It's something that you'll just have to deal with going forward. One day at a time. This is, we can hypothesize, if not a "subtle" feeling itself, then at least something that could aspire to be a gateway to subtle feelings.
It’s worse for porn actors, a class that is expanding as more people create pornographic content. Erica, a former porn actress, told me that the process of filming porn is “mechanical and exhausting”—and hard to forget. Even after she gave up acting in porn films, the memory of recording porn became “a barrier to being present” while having sex with her partner. She ended up having to force herself “to conjure up sexual images in her head” because she was unable to respond to the sexual stimuli presented by her partner.
If someone is experiencing physical sexual dysfunction, then they should of course address that.
But if you're feeling moral guilt over not being fully present, then my good ol' fashioned practical advice would be: stop. I give you permission to stop beating yourself up over it. "Full presence" is a mythological construct, a yearning for an unmediated pre-linguistic experience that can never be realized. So just don't worry about it anymore. (Perhaps dissolving some of these worries will dissolve some of the animus against pornography as well.)
Mystery has been further steamrolled by the imperative to select from a pre-packaged array of sexual identity labels on offer today. Their increasingly mimetic, cookie-cutter-like quality spares one the drama of having to wrestle with the complexity of sexual desire.
Sure. But that's wokeism's fault, not the fault of pornography as such.
We might go so far as to suggest that the complexity of desire as such is best brought to the foreground in art, and not in "reality".
There lies the paradox of our society, which celebrates porn while being anxious to prove we are on the right side of history. We are averse to confronting the gray areas of human nature, which are precisely what make life fascinating. The chances are slim that House Bill 4938, even in the unlikely event it is signed into law, will stop Michiganders from consuming porn. But if there is any hope for making America sexy—and a little less boring and predictable—again, we need the imposition of restraints that force us to revive our collective imagination.
Yes, the gray areas of human nature, like bizarre and objectionable pornographic content, so why are you trying to ban it?
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1mo ago
This is a verbatim quote from one of the screenshots:
“You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert’s children would die”
JAY JONES: “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy”
The meaning could not be more clear. This is all from one screenshot, so these messages were not presented out of order, unless you think the screenshot was fabricated.
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1mo ago
Are you really splitting hairs on "he only said that he hoped her children would die so she would change her mind on policy, that's different from saying that her children should be murdered"?
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1mo ago
In general I support the basic tenets of PUA/TRP but I think they kinda get it wrong here.
Women actually love men who are nice*. The lovable himbo who's good around the house and would take a bullet for his beloved is a common enough trope in female-gaze content. The issue is that being nice on its own is not enough. You have to be nice and also attractive. Where "attractive" is a combination of 1) physically attractive (enough) and 2) a certain je ne sais quoi which is not strictly reducible to confidence or competence or dominance and etc, but is clearly related to them in some intimate fashion.
"Being nice" gets a bad rap because the types of low value / socially awkward men who make "being nice" their primary conscious sexual strategy 1) tend to have a poor model of how social interaction works to begin with, so they interpret perfectly benign actions (like mild negging, or well-timed sexual advances) as "being an asshole", when actually those actions are perfectly as "nice" as any other and are interpreted as such by the woman in question, and 2) the men who go all in on "being nice" unfortunately tend to not be attractive to begin with. There's a certain type of sperg who naturally sends out waves of female-repellent radiation. It's a je ne sais quoi of its own, but it's a negative vibe rather than a positive one. For these unfortunate men, "being nice" is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Their fallacy is to blame their failure on the fact that they were too nice, rather than on their own intrinsic unattractiveness.
(* Of course there's a wide range of tastes, there are hybristophiles, etc, but that doesn't detract from the basic point that both men and women enjoy interacting with people who are pleasant to interact with, almost by definition.)
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1mo ago
If this is the motte, then what’s the bailey?
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1mo ago
The correct grammar comes across a bit robotic though.
You know, this comes up surprisingly often. X will say to Y "no I want you to show me your true self" and Y, with a look of befuddlement, will reply "...but I already am showing you my true self". People have a hard time grasping that the "true self" can vary so wildly among different individuals, or that the "true self" within a single individual can take on such a fractured and polymorphous nature.
This is just how I naturally think and speak. What you see is what you get. My posts on TheMotte are a fairly direct mirror of my own internal thought process (or at least, they're an amalgamation of fairly accurate representations of various internal thoughts of mine, rearranged for the sake of presentation). Even in my most intimate and unguarded thoughts, to the extent that they're verbalized internally at all, their grammar is always "correct", because I'm fuckin' nice with it like that. I take pride in maintaining at least a minimal semblance of order.
In environments where social pressures dictate that I have to lower my manner of speech, I feel like I'm able to express less of myself, I have to put more of a mask on. I value TheMotte precisely because this is one of the only discussion forums where long-form writing is actually valued, and I can count on the audience here to possess a certain degree of intelligence, so that I don't have to constantly abase myself for them.
the reflection was started by the quality contribution about holocaust denial. I think it was a bit of a condescending and angry reply, and I imagine that people upvoted it because of that.
There appears to be a bit of a tension here.
On the one hand, you're decrying self-censorship, and you want people to take off their "masks". But on the other hand, you're uncomfortable with the fact that someone wrote an "angry" comment. It appears that you can't have it both ways? Anger is an authentic emotion too. If you want people to be authentic, then that is going to, at times, involve them getting authentically angry. Especially given the nature of the topics we tend to discuss here. (One of the few ways in which TheMotte actually does force people to put a mask on is that, due to the cordiality rule, people have to bite their tongues on certain issues and not express the full extent of their ire. But I think this is a perfectly valid tradeoff. If you want a literal free for all then just go to /pol/.)
For my part, I think the spirit of the old internet as exemplified by Erik Naggum is perfectly alive and well on TheMotte -- probably more alive here than it is almost anywhere else, with the exception of 4chan.
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1mo ago
Can you write emojis like "^.^" without feeling extremely uncomfortable?
Yes. ^.^
I want to stay focused on the central issue here rather than turning this into a huge quote reply that nitpicks a bunch of little points. What do you want to be able to say or do here that you're not being allowed to say or do? What "mask" do you feel like you're being forced to wear on TheMotte?
The rules here are relatively lax, all things considered. Outside of maintaining a standard of cordiality, restrictions are minimal. I have fond memories of getting banned from multiple forums in the 00s, so I can assure you that the concept of the moderation of internet discussion forums is not a particularly recent invention.
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1mo ago
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
You should certainly make an effort to study philosophy then! It's right up your alley. (The tradition of philosophers tearing down Platonic ideals goes back to at least Plato.)
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1mo ago
It does not feel outside the panopticon, it doesn't feel like a place where one can take off their 'mask'.
I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
For this feeling to go away, every layer of the structure will have to be unrelated to something that I consider hostile to myself
But this is just a phantasm that can never be realized, in particular because people are actually much more hostile to themselves than they realize.
Do you forgive yourself for being an imperfect human? Probably not, to be honest. But then, why would you expect anyone else to do it?
All you can really do at the end of the day is pick your poison.
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1mo ago
Nah. It's not a format I'm interested in. I like the community dynamic here, and I like the spontaneous back-and-forth arguments that emerge.
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1mo ago
this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong
I am pretentious.
I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds
I only ever post with the intention of blowing everyone’s minds.
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1mo ago
Be the change you want to see. Share some hot takes.
Talking about the same thing (the CW) for 10+ years gets old eventually.
I enjoyed the discussion we just had about Mormon theology. That was interesting and informative.
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1mo ago
...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.
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1mo ago
I was looking for examples of specific theological beliefs or other aspects of Mormonism that might render Mormonism incompatible with Christianity as it's traditionally conceived. Looks like Quantumfreakonomics has it covered though.
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1mo ago
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?
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1mo ago
On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.
...how come?
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1mo ago
Can I ask where you live and your cultural background?
I live in America and I like anime.
This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.
Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)
What other lens would they use at that point?
I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.
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