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Primaprimaprima

US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%

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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


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%

				
				
				

				

					5 followers  

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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."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If this is the motte, then what’s the bailey?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for September 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
...yeah, if that's all correct then it would be hard to call it Christianity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But can you provide a more detailed explanation?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


On the one hand, Mormons aren't Christians.




...how come?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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?




See here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?




Off the top of my head:  attitudes and practices surrounding religion, childbearing (are you encouraged to even have kids at all, or at you an antinatalist?), cohabitation with immediate family and/or extended family, career choice (are you encouraged to stick with the family business, or do you have an individualist culture where "doing your own thing" is an aspiration?), different types of long-term planning (are you a square if you refuse to blow your paycheck right away, or are you an idiot if you do blow it?), respect towards elders and superiors (how unthinkable would it be to challenge your boss's ideas during a meeting?), freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, sexual ethics, etc.


To be clear, there is no "lived experience of a culture" for a tourist on a one week vacation, that's an absurdity.  The "lived experience of a culture" can only unfold over a lifetime.  A culture is a concrete mode of life, as distinguished from other possible concrete modes of life.


Food is not culture.  Foot binding, widow burning, jus primae noctis -- that's culture.  To the extent that we increasingly find genuine cultural difference to be unimaginable, this is only a statement about the shrinking horizon of our imagination, and not a statement about the nature of culture.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why does it always come back to food?


No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason.  This is a recurring pattern.  I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...".  Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"?  Really?  The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.


Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food.  It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.


(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices.  Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian.  I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I told someone ages ago I was going to write an effortpost on horror and then I never did, but if there are multiple interested parties then that might motivate me to finally get around to it...


Long story short is that the sublime is intrinsically horrific.


Most "contemporary horror films" are pretty bad (for many of the same reasons that formulaic genreslop in general is bad).  But there are many works that have horror "elements" (David Lynch films are my go-to example) that are brilliant.


Even the most hardcore fans of mainstream horror movies tend to look down on jumpscares.  They're fun every once in a while, but ultimately a jumpscare is just a pure physiological response, like pinching someone on the arm; it's the lowest form of horror, there's nothing conceptually interesting about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
…bot post? (Sorry to be suspicious!)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.




There are plenty of other types of academics (in both STEM and the humanities) who are also doing work that has roughly the same level of impact on you and your life (~zero).  Philosophers don't seem to be much different from those guys.  Why single philosophy out for such ire?




Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle?




Several (both online and irl).




It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof.




I don't believe I've ever seen anyone actually do this.  I can imagine what it would look like, but I've never actually encountered it.  The greatest and most common danger is that you run into people who are just kind of dumb and don't have anything interesting to say.  But that happens in everything, not just philosophy.


There are a number of papers in the analytic philosophy literature that try to present themselves as having achieved a "mathematical" level of rigor.  Maybe this is what you're talking about.  But you're incorrect to say that those papers are "unintelligible".  Usually it's just a matter of understanding how the key terms are defined; hopefully the author will define terms that they're using in an unusual or idiosyncratic way, and if they don't, it's probably because they assume that you already know the definition of the term based on prior experience with other relevant literature (physicists do not use the word "work" in the way that people do in ordinary conversation, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to define it for you every time they use "work" in the physics-sense).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies.  The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).


So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is anyone else playing Silent Hill f?  I believe @Fruck expressed interest?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I share Nietzsche's opinion that the OT makes for better reading overall.