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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  

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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 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 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.




I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.


The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.




Then plainly, the humanities needs our help!  We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.


Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.  I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics.  It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?




Plainly not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.




I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations.  (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)


Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here.  In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds.  And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence".  This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow.  Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.


Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).


This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:




GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.






SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.






GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.






SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.






GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.






SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.






SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.






SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.






SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.






SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.






GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.




If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.


(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.




STEM gave us:


    

  • 

    Nuclear weapons
    

    • 

  • 

    Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
    

    • 

  • 

    Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
    

    • 

  • 

    AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
    

    • 



We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM.  The university should be the institution where that happens.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?




I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.




How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?




It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all.  It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls".  Nothing more.




At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.




Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do.  They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me".  It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.




I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.




I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious.  There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification.  Certainly.


But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist?  Certainly not!  It's pretty clear to me that they do exist!  Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest.  Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort?  I don't think so.  They should at least be given a fair hearing.  I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either.  You don't need a fancy theory to see that.


Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people.  Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".


It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken.  One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:




This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.




(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.




I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy.  You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx.  But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way.  There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them.  It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!


Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic".  Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy.  So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?




I'm not sure if I understand the question, or how it's related to the section you quoted.


On a basic level I'd be willing to hand control of society over to virtually any individual or group if it meant being able to live in a reality where machine learning was impossible.  You can be the king, the progressives can be the kings, it doesn't matter.


The only thing that might give me pause would be the concern that such a decision would betray a lack of courage on my part.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, do there exist two political ideologies that are both not liberal individualism, but also differ from each other by more than a "palette swap"?  Based on the way I'm reading you right now, you seem to be saying that the political universe essentially breaks down into "liberal individualism" and "everything else".  The ideologies in the "everything else" bucket may have differences from each other, but they will always be superficial differences compared to the primary difference of individualism vs identitarianism.  Is that your view?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


When I said the alternatives were woo, etc, I meant those "other types of intellectual activity".




What do you mean by "woo"?  I always understood "woo" to essentially mean "supernatural".  Is that how you're using the word?


There might be many criticisms you could make of what goes on in English departments or women's studies departments, but I don't think "belief in the supernatural" is one of them.




Perhaps you could come up with solid reasons it's a bad idea to build advanced AI, but then you'd be back in the realm of STEM.




You seem to be saying here that STEM (let's just say science) can give us knowledge of "solid reasons".  If that's the case, then what area of science is responsible for studying "solid reasons"?  What is our current best scientific theory of "solid reasons"?  If I open a physics textbook, I can find quarks, and wave functions, and black holes, but I can't find any "solid reasons".  Where are they?


This isn't just idle speculation.  It seems like in order for science to give us knowledge of X, then either we have to be able to directly observe X, or we have to have a scientific theory of X.  But neither of those criteria seems to be met here.  I can't look out my window and see any "solid reasons".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


STEM did not give us lockdowns or vaccine passes -- that was bullshitting.




Quarantines did exist in the pre-modern world.  But I think the Covid lockdowns were of a uniquely large scale, and of a uniquely pervasive character, such that they only could have existed with the aid of modern technology.  I don't think Covid would have played out the way it did without the internet (for WFH and Zoom calls), phone apps, and social media.




We already have that kind of smart feller, and they're already at universities. They don't seem to be all that useful.




Well, maybe.  But what conclusions are we supposed to draw from that?


If you think that the institutionalized critique of STEM supremacism and neoliberal market ideology ("homo economicus", as @f3zinker puts it) is genuinely vital, as I do, then I don't see why you should be dissuaded by contingent failures and defects of the university system.  Sometimes things don't work out.  That's the way it goes.  But that doesn't mean you give up.  That just means you try harder next time!


If you think it's impossible for the university to have any positive impact in this area at all, then that would be different.  But I don't see why we should accept that.  Do you think it's just impossible for the university to have any impact on culture or politics?  A number of rightists claim that contemporary progressivism can trace its roots back to the "postmodern neo-Marxism" of the Frankfurt school - i.e. it's an ideology that started in universities and percolated outward.  What do you think of those claims?


If you just DON'T think that a humanistic critique of STEM is important, or if you think it's outright pernicious, then of course you would be in favor of just turning universities into trade schools.  But then, that would just be grounded in your preexisting political commitments, not in any empirical facts about the university itself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I’m curious to be “true white” and not “expanded” white which specific barbarian tribe you needed to descend from




Why the scare quotes?  Is it really that strange to suggest that some people are white and others are not?


"White" means "people of European descent".  The majority of South Americans are of mixed European and Native American descent.


For what it's worth, I'd be fine with just getting rid of the word white and using a term like European-American instead (or whatever hyphenated neologism is appropriate to your locale).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Last week I not so popularly defended copyright, and I still believe it's the best compromise available to us. But it doesn't exist because of a fundamental right




How do you feel about software license agreements?  Plenty of software/code is publicly visible on the internet and can be downloaded for free, but it's accompanied by complex licensing terms that state what you can and can't do with it, and you agree to those terms just by downloading the software.  Do you think that license agreements are just nonsense?  Once something is out on the internet then no one can tell you what you can and can't do with it?


If you think that once a sequence of bits is out there, it's out there, and anyone can do anything with it, then it would follow that you wouldn't see anything wrong with AI training as well.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is it not different from the early factory laborers buildings the machines that would replace them?




They consented and were paid.  It's not analogous at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 3, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.




Did you want a daughter instead?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger.




Right, there's value in deterrence.  But presumably you don't think that every individual on earth should have personal direct access to the nuke button - instead we try to limit that power to a small number of trusted actors.  It seems to me that everyone having unrestricted personal access to ASI is the same as giving everyone a direct line to the button.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.




But there are plenty of people in the general population with the same sorts of thoughts.  Not everyone, obviously.  But more than you might suppose - if everyone had their own personal ASI, then people who would normally be stopped by incompetence or laziness can offload all the work to the ASI.


You might think "well I'm a god anyway, so I'll still be able to get everything I want".  But you have to remember that your adversaries are also gods who are putting a roughly equal amount of intelligence and material resources into their goals as you are into yours.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 24, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling




Well there definitely is.  Sort of.  David Finch has a bunch of lecture-style videos on Gnomon Workshop, Glenn Vilppu has a bunch of demo videos, Michael Hampton has a figure drawing book that a lot of people like.  I'm sure there are more Japanese-language resources specifically for anime that I'm unaware of.  My problem was that I was too stupid for everything and nothing held my hand to the degree I needed.


A lot of these things go like, "well if you want to draw a person, then you draw a ball for the head, an egg for the ribcage, cylinders for the arms and legs, and 1 2 3... there you go, you drew a person".  But whenever I tried to do it myself it just looked awful.  I understood the basic idea, and I agreed that it made sense, but something was going wrong and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.


The problem is that there's only so much detail you can convey verbally.  You can tell someone to use basic shapes like eggs and boxes and cylinders to construct more complex ones, but the catch is that if you don't draw exactly the right kind of shapes in exactly the right position and proportions, then everything will look like crap.  That's where all the magic happens.  The devil is in the details.


The head is a really instructive case study because it's a small and self-contained object that has a ton of complexity.  I kept banging my head into the wall over and over again trying to get the Loomis head method to work and I didn't know what was going wrong.  Yes I'm drawing a ball for the cranium, and then I'm attaching the jaw and marking where the side plane is and I'm drawing the features on the front plane, so why does it look awful every time?  The books themselves didn't give any hints.  There's so much detail that goes into even something as simple as the ball-and-jaw idea - where exactly does the line for the eyes/brow go?  how long do you make the jaw, how wide?  what is the exact ratio of the front plane to the side plane, when viewing the head from a given angle?  how exactly do you arrange all the features, how far apart are they? - that you really can't write it all down, you just have to look at a lot of examples and figure it out for yourself.


The big first step for me was drawing studies of references (anime references in my case) and then overlaying my drawing onto the reference (digitally) to see how accurate I was.  For the first time I could actually describe explicitly what mistakes I was making, instead of just having a vague feeling that everything looked wrong - now I could say that this particular drawing was wrong because the eyes were too far apart, or the jaw was too long.  Now I had actionable items I could improve on in both my studies from references and my original pieces.


The next thing was taking references (still anime head references) and tracing the construction directly on top of the reference.  Like, I knew that there was allegedly a ball-and-jaw construction lurking in this drawing somewhere, but I hadn't really internalized how exactly that should look (even for the more realistic heads that Loomis used I didn't have a good sense of how it should work, and I certainly didn't know how to apply the same technique to anime proportions).  So I just took a bunch of pro drawings and went, ok if I was going to draw this I guess the circle would line up like this, and then we have the jaw here, and if I was going to draw a guideline representing where the eyes go it would go here... basically taking the drawing apart like a mechanic takes apart a car.  And it really helped me start seeing patterns and shapes that I had never seen before, and it forced me to really focus on all these little details that I had been getting wrong this whole time.


Anyway I wanted to try and describe my thought process explicitly because I've never seen any book or video lay it out like this, and I hope it's helpful if you have any students who want to learn more about anime or Western comics.  A lot of art instructional material just goes with a sort of "grind" mindset like "yeah just do 10k one minute figure sketches and you'll learn how to draw" but that sort of thing didn't work for me at all.  I had to really slow down and think about what I was doing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Solve your damn problems.




The Gay Science, I.24:




Different forms of dissatisfaction. - The weak and, as it were, feminine
discontented types are those who are innovative at making life more
beautiful and profound; the strong discontents - the men among them,
to stick with the metaphor - are innovative at making it better and safer.
The former show their weakness and femininity by gladly letting
themselves be deceived from time to time and occasionally resting
content with a bit of intoxication and gushing enthusiasm, though they
can never be satisfied entirely and suffer from the incurability of their
dissatisfaction; they are also the promoters of all who know how to
procure opiates and narcotic consolations, and consequently they resent
those who esteem physicians above priests - thus they assure the
continuance of real distress! Had there not been a surplus of these
discontents in Europe since the middle ages, the celebrated European
capacity for constant transformation might never have developed, for the
demands of the strong discontents are too crude and basically too
undemanding not eventually to be brought to a final rest. China, for
example, is a country where large-scale discontentment and the capacity
for change became extinct centuries ago; and in Europe too the socialists
and state idolaters, with their measures for making life better and safer,
might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese 'happiness',
provided they are first able to extirpate that sicklier, more tender, more
feminine discontentment and romanticism that is for the moment still
superabundant here. Europe is a patient who owes the utmost gratitude
to his incurability and to the perpetual changes in his affliction: these
incessantly new conditions, these no less incessantly new dangers, pains,
and modes of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that approximates genius and that is in any case the mother
of all genius.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.




Let me put it this way: I have no interest in classifying works as either "mass market products" or "genuine Art".  This is of no use to me (and indeed it can be actively harmful).




Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude.




His letters are obviously beautiful.




The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities.




I hear this idea a lot that the globalists want to push porn because it destroys people, but as far as I can tell this is contradicted by most of the available evidence.  Most major corporations and websites are not very friendly to porn at all:


    

  • Patreon's ToS outright bans porn involving real people (and they will shut down fiction/drawings too if they think it's too "extreme")
    • 

  • Apple app store obviously bans porn
    • 

  • Major payment processors like Paypal do not want to be associated with porn
    • 

  • Steam's guidelines have a bit of leeway but generally they don't publish porn, it's common for localizers of Japanese adult games to put a gimped version of the game on Steam and then have a separate patch you download to restore the cut content
    • 



I mean yeah porn isn't literally illegal and is always just one click away for anyone with internet access, but, the same can be said for a lot of politically incorrect stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race




I prefer to reserve judgement and proceed cautiously in such matters, when possible.


With regards to the case of pornhub specifically, I'd gesture towards something like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.




don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards




I sincerely, earnestly disagree.


(Of course not all porn is great just because it's porn.  Every genre has superior and inferior works.  But if a video about eating shit is bad, it's not bad because it's a video of eating shit.  It would be bad for other reasons.)