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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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24d ago
Level 1 MBTI is horoscopes for Korean people.
Level 10 MBTI is like... imagine you're standing on the sidewalk on a busy street, dazed and with a vacant look in your eyes as you stare off into the distance, while throngs of people pass you by. You've been deprived of any stable reference point for unifying the sensory manifold before you into a single coherent "experience". You (half consciously) perceive other people, but you have no way of knowing if any of them are even sharing the same reality as each other, or if the fundamental constituents of their phenomenological experiences are at all commensurable. We may indeed be condemned to a fate of Leibnizian monadism. What was fantastical has become mundane, what was trustworthy has become suspicious.
A passerby notices you in your silent reverie, and asks if you're ok. You're vaguely aware that they uttered a sentence, and that that sentence was composed of words. But what even is a "word", and what even is a "sentence"? The raw sensory impressions have already denatured themselves into their basic indissoluble components. The world has been deworlded, to use Heideggerian terminology. You're still not sure if the scene unfolding before you is a memory or a dream, or some as yet unnamed phenomenon that is more properly to be located in the crevices between them.
You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
(Speaking of Heidegger, Michael Pierce and Renaud Contini had a fascinating exchange regarding the typological implications of Being and Time in the comments section of Heidegger's PDB page.)
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24d ago
Well that’s the Hegelian dialectic of freedom innit?
“I think everyone should be free to do whatever they want.”
“Ok then I’m free to make you my slave.”
“Wait that’s not what I meant.”
Of course recourse to a “nonaggression principle” already admits that 1) there are certain other “natural” principles that must be allowed to impinge on the purity of absolute freedom, which leaves open the possibility that there are further “natural” principles that remain undiscovered, and 2) we are in want of a definition of “aggression”, which of course immediately drags us into hopeless complications and confusions.
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24d ago
Fetishes are spiritual (shoutouts to Skimmerlit, he's a real one):
Fetishes are like your own spirit schemas. Your own spirit schemas. It's a tool and a religion. This is the method by which you'll do your most important analysis of the world. This is the religion you belong to. Frankly, this is probably the way you'll interact most or best with your deity. Do not mistake fetishes for simple perversions.
Those who already perceive the resonance of duty within themselves, those who already walk a "path" -- be they adherents of traditional religious tendencies, or woke activists, or TRP/manosphere/MGTOW types, or even certain garden variety authoritarians -- correctly identify pornography as a portent of an alternative spirituality, an intrusive force from "somewhere else" that encroaches on their market share and threatens to de-sediment what they have worked so hard to bring together under a certain conceptual regime.
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26d ago
How I wish I were a man! I'd be smart and active and heroic and achieve things in the world!
Haha, yeah exactly haha…
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26d ago
The other side scares us. Our own side doesn't.
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27d ago
I wonder what answer would run the highest probability of ick-induction in a manic pixie programming girl. Excel? SAS? SQL? An actual but boomer-coded programming language like COBOL?
What would be the likely reaction to Common Lisp?
(It has to be CL, none of that Scheme or Clojure shit.)
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27d ago
It's especially useful when you're writing reusable framework code, e.g. your UI library will probably have something like register_callback(Function f, Widget w) so you can perform action f whenever button w is clicked. But if you're just writing "app" code as opposed to "framework" code it may not come up as often.
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27d ago
It blew my mind when I first learned about it too!
In some sense this is the same sort of mental gestalt shift that is at the basis of all scientific thought, and is therefore a useful experience for everyone to undergo.
What if a function were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of operations, you can pass it around, access its properties, etc.
What if the human mind/body were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of physical laws, etc.
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27d ago
It's interesting to ask why it should be bothersome when you feel that someone is "monopolizing" the site with posts you don't like. It certainly is bothersome, I won't deny that. But it's not clear why it should be. The site has an in principle unlimited amount of server space. It's not a zero sum game. One person posting a thread you don't like doesn't prevent you or other people from posting threads that are more to your liking.
There are certain popular genres of threads here that bore me to tears (mainly the policy wonk posts, and the posts that get into obsessive minutiae regarding current events). But I know that by the same token, there are people who hate the types of posts that I like to produce and read as well (borderline schizophrenic free associative rants about philosophy and psychology). If I start harping on people for writing posts I don't like, then I know that they can just turn that around and say "well we don't like what you're trying to turn themotte into either". So I generally just try to keep my mouth shut when there's a post I don't like and I just ignore it or collapse the thread.
I suppose that although the site in principal has space for an unlimited number of threads, it only really has space for one dominant culture, and in this sense it is more zero sum. The fear could be that threads you don't like will attract the types of posters that you don't like, which will over time shift the culture in a direction that makes the site less valuable to you.
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27d ago
Trying to tackle Of Grammatology for like... the 4th time in my life? Maybe this time I'll actually finish it. Gonna try to just plow through even if I feel like I don't have all the "prerequisites".
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29d ago
Call me crazy, but I'm starting to see recurring themes in the cases you choose to present.
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30d ago
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).
It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.
Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.
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30d ago
Black Americans have been here for hundreds of years, I suppose we can throw out the term “black” too and just talk about the American race from now on?
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30d ago
it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women
Huh...
This makes me think that FtM transsexuality and MtF transsexuality are actually a lot more symmetrical than I previously realized.
Someone here once mentioned that FtM transsexuality was driven by an urge to "self annihilation", which I thought was great and accurate. Although it did make FtMism out to be a rather different phenomenon than MtFism, since MtFism is pretty clearly driven by positive desire.
But if we instead think that the key issue underlying all forms of transsexuality is the individual's relation to femininity. FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity, MtFism = attraction to and desire to possess femininity. Then we can start to conceive of the two forms as being separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
I happen to agree with the radfems who claim that men are the "default" gender and women are a deviation from the default. Although I might disagree with them over the specifics. Rather than conceiving of femininity as a "lack" of masculinity, it's relatively clear to me that femininity is something that one possesses in addition to the "default" human state. And this is exactly what we see expressed in the two distinct forms of transsexuality.
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30d ago
If the term "white" is too contentious, we can start saying "ethnic Europeans" instead. That would probably be for the best. It's less ambiguous. (Romani are a mixture of European and non-European ancestry.)
Frequently when people try to frame Romani or MENA rapists as "white", the political angle is that they want to deprive European peoples of the language for distinguishing between themselves and ethnic outsiders (even though wokes have no trouble distinguishing between white and non-white people in contexts where it's more beneficial for them to do so). But these are attacks being perpetrated against Europeans by ethnic outsiders, and Europeans have a right, arguably a duty, to frame their self-understanding in this fashion.
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30d ago
What else is there to even say at this point?
Looks like the shooter went out of his way to piss off as many people as possible and make it hard to pin down his political orientation. Non-negligible chance of a psyop.
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1mo ago
That moment of dawning realization when you understand that your enemies are humans just like you, and you're a human just like them.
Not to pick on you specifically of course. It's a difficult truth to realize, and it's an easy truth to forget. We all need constant reminders.
My only nitpick would be that I don't see it as a "vulnerability". I just see it as a constitutive part of being human.
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1mo ago
The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.
We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas
"Effectiveness of policy" is the last thing that political disagreements are about. If you listed all the causes of political conflict in order of importance and relevance, "effectiveness of policy" would rank around... 67th place? Maybe?
Political conflicts arise because of clashes between incommensurate value systems, misalignment of tribal interests, the competing demands of heterogeneous subjectivities, emotional biases both conscious and unconscious... if political conflicts could be settled through rational argumentation then people would have done so already.
Of course people will still try to convince themselves that politics is really about "policy", for various reasons. It could be because they're classical liberals who recognize that liberalism needs to postulate a universal, expansive, and malleable blank slate core as part of human nature in order for liberalism to function at large scales over long periods of time. Or it could be because they find the idea of human subjectivity to be intrinsically uncomfortable, and a world of rational information-processing agents is more amenable to their tastes. Whatever the reason.
The sooner you adjust your frame of reference, the sooner things will start making sense.
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1mo ago
You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her
Speak for yourself, I want a woman who can knock me unconscious.
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1mo ago
like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth
Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.
I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"
or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him
That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...
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1mo ago
Right, there's the classic "I don't know who the woman was, but I can tell you that she wasn't my mother!"
But my dreams (insofar as I can remember them anyway) are rarely even complex enough to have much of a "telling". I was walking down a street in my neighborhood. Bam that's it that's the dream. Rather uninteresting! (I suppose even that little bit is still a "telling" though.)
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1mo ago
You can probably endlessly subject all of this to Freudian psychoanalysis, but I don't care for it.
Funny enough, dream analysis has always been the least interesting aspect of psychoanalysis to me. Probably because I rarely have them, and when I do, their "meaning" is always quite manifest and apparent -- there's a clear causal relationship between what I'm dreaming about and something I was thinking about recently, or something I experienced at some point.
Although, I am curious on a meta-level if this says anything about me...
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1mo ago
Ah, I was asking more about the symbolic meaning of the narrative -- the coming technological dystopia, the alienation from our humanity, a sense of impending irrevocable loss, etc. How often do you consciously ruminate on those sorts of things?
(Just as a quick note for anyone reading this: my views on sexuality will be inevitably misunderstood at first glance, although if prompted to clarify these misunderstandings, I could perhaps only speak in metaphorical language. It's easier to clarify what I don't believe in. I don't advocate for Bataille's permanent revolution, I don't advocate for the ecstasy of transgression-as-such, etc.)
I am cautious regarding this concept.
Something that, due to my own dimwittedness, I didn't appreciate until recently, is the difference between concrete rootedness as such on the one hand, and rootedness-to-come on the other.
I yearn for rootedness. There's nothing I want more. But it's a rootedness-to-come. It's an abstract rootedness that can only be intimated at with whispers and signs. It's a familiar image, but it's been passed through a filter that makes it look like a dream. Perhaps it will forever be on the horizon.
It's easy for me to forget sometimes that there are people who live in reality, and not in dreams. Rootedness for them is already here; it's inconceivable for things to be otherwise. Rootedness for them is Aunt Sally and Uncle Joe, it's the corner convenience store that's been in the family going five generations back, it's the guys down at the Elks Lodge or the local church, it's all the family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas and in general it's all these things that define the coordinates of their world. These are their "roots", this is their "memory".
Given the vast differences in constitution and temperament you find among different individuals, it's unsurprising that we develop different conceptions of "memory".
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