Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme.
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
· Edited 3mo ago
You know, we were just talking a few posts downthread about how the "experts" are willing to blatantly lie in order to advance their ideological agenda.
We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse, the rise of fascist dictators, the end of civilization, and in general all manner of untold horrors.
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons. Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
More on Trump's tariffs.
I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:
Trump's ICE thugs raided a roofing company in Washington State to arrest three dozen people.
I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.
MAGA.
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
It is easy to forget or sideline the executive orders of the previous week: bans on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and discourse as well as “gender ideology” in all federally funded programing, as new obscenities flood the news cycle. Threats of deportation to international students who engage in legitimate protest; expansionist designs on Panama and Greenland and proposals to take over the total and forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza from their land are announced in quick succession. [...]
The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. [emphasis mine]
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
20d ago
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?
[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.
People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.
[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.
No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.
But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:
English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.
In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.
It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.
[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”
Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.
The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).
I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.
I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.
Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.
Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.
At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.
The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.
A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?
I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.
We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.
[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.
Focusing in on some specific examples:
Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12d ago
I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.
We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..." At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear. And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."
For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light. So tolerance for these characters is low. And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
12d ago
Mostly trolls whose names I've forgotten. That guy who keeps making alt accounts here to post WN articles and then delete them is kinda like that.
Apparently darwin was kinda like that, although I never interacted with darwin personally.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
And as a tactical choice it is itself a ideological commitment. It’s not merely ‘rapid change’- it requires an acceptance of top down impositions, rationalism, the idea of de novo societal shifts implemented by a vanguard party. I reject all of that ideologically.
You are right to point out that the distinction between tactics and principles is not as clean as I made it out to be. But I'm skeptical that recourse to revolution is always indicative of the deep ideological commitments that you portray it as having. Whatever it may entail ideologically, I don't think it's a good criteria for cleaving the global ideological space at the joints.
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution? Does it have to be denounced? Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
Or consider the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which instituted an Islamic theocracy. They certainly claim to be following a conservative tradition of some kind; it might not be your preferred tradition, but it's a tradition. Are they too committed to an Enlightenment rationalist view of human nature? Does Islamic theocracy share a deep philosophical affinity with Marxist communism that has hitherto gone unnoticed? And the American Revolution too?
The most reasonable conclusion, on my view, is not that revolutions are a result of people having a deep ideological commitment to the idea of a top down rationally organized society. Revolutions are a result of people wanting power, and having the means and opportunity to seize it. This is universal to left and right, old and new.
I agree with much of the DR that gays are perverts who shouldn’t be allowed near kids, that women shouldn’t vote, etc. But my reasoning and therefore implementation of these ideas is very different.
Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
@2rafa? Your response?
DOGE sets its sights on Medicare and Medicaid:
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is quickly expanding its reach through the federal government. It recently accessed systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Musk and his team are now looking at key payment and contracting systems for Medicare and Medicaid - that was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. On X, Musk posted, he believes that, quote, "big money fraud is happening."
Mostly just talk and speculation at this point, but there are clear indications that medicare/medicaid have not escaped the notice of the DOGE.
In spite of the perceived celerity with which DOGE is eviscerating government programs, I'm still mostly in the "nothing ever happens" camp. "Cutting government spending" at this point is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the sinking Titanic that is Western civilization. The slow Brazilification of America is irreversible either way. Nonetheless, I am enjoying the apoplectic response that Musk's antics have occasioned.
EDIT: Oh, and social security was named as a potential target alongside medicare/medicaid as well.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
Recently from Slavoj Zizek: THE POPE IS DEAD, ANTI-CHRIST IS ALIVE AND KICKING
I'm curious what the actual (theistic) Christians here think of Zizek's "Christian atheism" and his conception of Christian love.
More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause). At the level of agape, feelings (sexual or not) no longer matter; what remains is just the Holy Spirit, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause. Terry Eagleton, a Catholic Marxist, was right: agape should be translated as political love. As a comrade, I can involve myself sexually with another comrade, I can become his or her friend, but this doesn’t really matter: if the situation of a struggle demands it, I should be ready to betray him or her, because only the Cause matters. And if my comrade is a true comrade, he or she will fully understand me and even despise me if I allow any weakness for him or her to overcome my fidelity to the shared cause and am not ready to betray him or her. My position here is that of Louis Althusser, who in 1980 gave an interview to Italian TV in Rome, where he said:
“I became a Communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church, but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church today. I remained a Catholic, that is to say, an internationalist universalist. I thought that inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity.”
I don't expect Christians today to be lining up to join the local Communist Party. It is my view that, more often than not, actually-existing communist movements have been little more than a thin veneer of respectability over the ambitions of power-hungry sociopaths. But isn't there still a kernel of truth here? Isn't there something, as was articulated in last week's discussion, "quasi-communist" about Christianity? Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love? Should Christians not view communists as fellow travelers who are correct about certain fundamental principles, but misguided on method?
[...] That’s why love should be paradoxically commanded. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The key resides in the last words: “as I have loved you”—here the vanishing mediator is located. Padre Nogaro is right to emphasize that true love is not mediated, that it links us directly to a neighbor. I would only add that this is why Christ is a vanishing mediator: only through Christ as a vanishing mediator can we love our neighbor directly, without mediation. At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling (which, of course, cannot be commanded); it is a practice of how I deal with others. True love is cold, not sentimental. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here. Why? Because we are fallen.
There is a certain basic paradox that presents itself when one begins to interrogate the concept of love: do you love me for who I am, substantially, in essentia, or do you love me for my qualities and properties? You say that you love me because I'm smart, because I'm funny, because I'm beautiful; but suppose that I were not smart, nor funny, nor beautiful. Would you still love me then?
Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue. If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Thus Zizek suggests that true love should be "cold" rather than "sentimental". Powerful sentiments suggest that one is fixated too strongly on the secondary qualities of the object, rather than the obligation of love proper. Love is seen to have an almost Kantian character: the bloom of pleasure is a stain on the perfect austerity of duty. Christ is then interpreted as the formal condition of possibility that both binds us to this duty and makes its realization conceivable; Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong". (In particular, it opens the door to transactional thinking; if He Himself told you that all of humanity was saved, but you alone were damned; would you still love him? Would you still love him even if he wasn't living up to "his end of the bargain"? An authentic conception of Christian love has to confront this possibility.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.
Ironic, given that just a few days ago we had people accusing TracingWoodgrains of being too leftist.
As someone whose positions are also sufficiently idiosyncratic that I don't fit in perfectly with either "side", I'm not unsympathetic to him. But this is simply the fate of all "centrists" - that's the reality of it. It would be like someone during WW2 saying "I don't support the British, or the Germans - I'm just neutral!" He wouldn't be looked upon with kindness in either country.
Ultimately if you want to avoid getting crushed by the tidal forces of politics, you have to decide which issues are most important to you, join the side that is most aligned with you on those key issues, and table your disagreements for a later date.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
· Edited 4mo ago
Signs point to Donald Trump soon invoking the Insurrection Act (paywalled, but you can get around it with Reader View):
The clock is ticking down on a crucial but little-noticed part of President Donald Trump’s first round of executive orders — the one tasking the secretaries of the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to submit a joint report, within 90 days, recommending “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act.”
Many of us are now holding our collective breath, knowing that the report and what it contains could put us on the slippery slope toward unchecked presidential power under a man with an affinity for ironfisted dictators.
Adding to the suspense was the recent “Friday Night Massacre” at the Pentagon — the firing of the nation’s top uniformed officer and removing other perceived guardrails (i.e., the top uniformed lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force) standing between the president and his long-stated intention to declare martial law upon returning to power.
And here's the linked EO they're referencing:
(a) Within 30 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the President, through the Homeland Security Advisor, a report outlining all actions taken to fulfill the requirements and objectives of this proclamation; and
(b) Within 90 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 essentially allows the President to declare martial law by deploying the military to "suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion".
I still don't think that Trump is going to make a serious attempt at establishing permanent one-party rule. What would be the play, exactly? Declare permanent martial law and then cancel elections in four years? I don't think there's much appetite for that, either with him or with the members of his inner circle. But then again, I also never predicted that he would cut off military aid to Ukraine either, so my predictions have already been wrong once!
It seems like we've had a slight uptick in leftist (or at least anti-Trump) posters lately so I'd be particularly interested in hearing their thoughts.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
Trump pauses aid to Ukraine after fiery meeting with Zelenskyy:
The Trump administration is pausing all aid to Ukraine, including weapons in transit or in Poland.
The pause comes days after a contentious meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Donald Trump in the White House.
I guess that settles the question of his authority over this matter!
One analysis I've heard is that everything -- both the reduction in US aid and the increase in European defense spending -- is part of an elaborate pre-constructed kayfabe to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific. These types of "actually everything is under control, it's just nation-states acting in their own rational self-interest" stories always strike me as just a bit too convenient. Certainly many would like to believe that the adults actually have everything under control at all times -- but that doesn't make it reality. I have no trouble believing that this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap. I mean, he might be. But he also might not be.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.
The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
Also:
I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race.
This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.
I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.
I can of course only speak for myself, and not the Trump administration, or even the "MAGA movement" as a whole.
IR policy wonks would say that this suggestion is nonsense; that any conflict between the US and China is just the rational, mechanistic outcome of two world powers who are both vying to secure their own interests. But for my part I will acknowledge that, yes, there is a racial element to the designation of China in particular as a geopolitical adversary, as opposed to some other nation. Ceteris paribus, I would prefer for world power to remain concentrated in the hands of European and European-derived peoples, as opposed to non-European peoples. (This is largely already a doomed project due to the ongoing mestizofiction of America, but, you know, you can't win 'em all...) And I particularly don't want power to rest with the Chinese, who have produced a civilization that (in its current phase of historical development at any rate) I view as uniquely soulless and utilitarian. (I do not view all non-Europeans, or even all East Asians, as exactly equivalent in this regard; if Japan were in China's position instead, I would be welcoming them as liberators!)
The Chinese, too, have a sense of centrality and irreplaceability. They too believe that they have a world historical mission to be the center of world civilization. Very well then, we shall see who prevails.
But all this only goes so far as influencing the fundamental choice to take up the conflict in the first place; it has no bearing on the strategic considerations for how the conflict should actually be navigated. China is obviously very powerful and capable, and it would be the height of foolishness to underestimate them as a nation of "trinket producers".
Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal.
A change in American economic policy sent global markets into a tailspin, so objectively speaking, America is in fact a big deal.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I'd like to draw attention to a specific passage from Marcuse's The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man (the full essay begins on page 44):
Now there is, in the advanced technological societies of the West, indeed a large desublimation (compared with the preceding stages) in sexual mores and behavior, in the better living, in the accessibility of culture (mass culture is desublimated higher culture). Sexual morality has been greatly liberalized; moreover, sexuality is operative as commercial stimulus, business asset, status symbol. But does this mode of desublimation signify the ascendancy of the life-preserving and life-enhancing Eros over its fatal adversary? Freud's concept of sexuality may provide a cue for the answer.
Central in this concept is the conflict between sexuality (as the force of the pleasure principle) and society (the institution of the reality principle) as necessarily repressive of the uncompromised claims of the primary life instincts. By its innermost force, Eros becomes "demonstration against the herd instinct," "rejection of the group's influence." In the technological desublimation today, the all but opposite tendency seems to prevail. The conflict between pleasure and the reality principle is managed by a controlled liberalization which increases satisfaction with the offerings of society. But in this form of release, libidinal energy changes its social function: to the degree to which sexuality is sanctioned and even encouraged by society (not "officially," of course, but by the mores and behavior considered as "regular"), it loses the quality which, according to Freud, is its essentially erotic quality, that of freedom from social control. In this sphere was the surreptitious freedom, the dangerous autonomy of the individual under the pleasure principle; its authoritarian restriction by the society bore witness to the depth of the conflict between individual and society, that is, to the extent of the repression of freedom. Now, with the integration of this sphere into the realm of business and entertainment, the repression itself is repressed: society has enlarged, not individual freedom, but its control over the individual. And this growth of social control is achieved, not by terror but by the more or less beneficial productivity and efficiency of the apparatus.
TL;DR - "It was more fun when we were in the closet."
The suggestion here is that as sexuality (outside the context of reproduction in a heterosexual marriage) becomes more socially acceptable, it begins to lose the creative and rebellious aspects that made it so distinctive in the first place. As a Marxist, Marcuse's overriding concern here would have been with the political dimension of sexuality, specifically with how societal views on sex relate to the hypothetical future proletarian revolution. Dreaming dangerously in the bedroom leads to dreaming dangerously in the political realm as well - that's the hope, anyway. But if the bedroom simply isn't dangerous anymore, because our liberal tolerant society has declared that everything is acceptable now, then this opportunity for political agitation is lost.
It was suggested in last week's thread by certain posters of a more traditionalist bent that a libertine attitude towards sexuality destroys the "magic special soul-bonding" that is proper to an authentic sexual connection. It is quite ironic to see the arch-Marxists of the Frankfurt school arguing for much the same position; although admittedly, in different terms, and for different ends. Maybe Hlynka was right after all??
Of course, our current political situation throws a bit of a wrench in Marcuse's account of things, because there's plenty of old-style repression to go around; likely more than at any other time prior to the sexual revolution, despite superficial indications to the contrary. The global e-commerce market is not friendly to sexualized media, and is mostly getting more stringent over time (pornhub can't even take credit cards!). #MeToo can be seen as a spontaneous regeneration of older, more strictly codified standards surrounding courtship and interactions between men and women; although it has been purged of overtly religious content, it seems to me to derive from the same impulse as the more familiar religious style of moralism, because humanity clearly abhors a vacuum in this domain.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
I'm not exactly a fan of top-level posting denouncing the beliefs of someone who isn't permitted to clarify their position
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
But Hlynka's narrative had some pretty clear and specific keywords that you've not even raised.
Taking one of Hlynka's positions and using it as a synecdoche for "Hlynkaism" in toto is, indeed, an example of the very behavior I was criticizing, and for that I apologize. (In my defense, it was supposed to just be a cute moniker rather than an assertion of a serious philosophical claim.)
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
Call it whatever you want- left or right, whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions)
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
That sort of rejection / non-recognition of the alternative enlightenment paradigms was / is one of the core tenets of Hlynkaism.
I believe that I'm quite capable of considering all relevant alternatives, but please let me know if I'm missing something.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
There's only one key sentence in the article that you need to read:
As a result of the change, it is expected that Wimbledon's Hawk-Eye challenge system - brought into use in 2007 - where players could review calls made by the line judges will be removed.
How far are we from "JudgeGPT will rule on your criminal case, and the ability to appeal its verdicts will be removed"?
The actual capabilities and accuracy of the AI system are, in many instances, irrelevant. The point is that AI provides an elastic ideological cover for people to do shitty things. He who controls the RoboJudge controls everything. Just RLHF a model so it knows that minority crime must always be judged against a backdrop of historical oppression and racism, and any doubts about the integrity of elections are part of a dangerous conspiracy that is a threat to our democracy, and boom. You have a perfectly legitimated rubber stamp for your agenda in perpetuity. How could you doubt the computer? It's so smart, and it's been trained on so much data. What would be the point of appealing the verdict anyway? Your appeal would just go to the same government server farm, the same one that has already ruled on your case.
Open source won't save you. What I've been trying to explain to advocates of open source is that you can't open source physical power. GPT-9 might give you your own personal army of Terrence Taos at your beck and call, but as long as the government has the biggest guns, they're still the ones in charge.
"AI safety" needs to focus less on what AI could do to us and more on what people can use AI to do to each other.
Elon Musk’s DOGE Uses Police to Seize Independent Nonprofit
Obviously, if you wanted to paint Trump as a dangerous authoritarian fascist, this is exactly the sort of thing you'd point to as Exhibit A. So I'm trying to determine if this is actually as bad as it sounds, what the steelman is here, and the extent to which this may or may not have been under the purview of the executive branch's legitimate authority.
The linked article and their website describe USIP as a "private" nonprofit that was "founded by Congress". Obviously, the government using the police to forcibly seize private property due to political differences is not a good look. Presumably there are legal minutiae here that would determine the extent to which this organization is or is not still subject to the government's authority (is any organization "founded by Congress" subject to federal government control in perpetuity?).
As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off. USIP describes itself as an "independent organization dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad".
More options
Context Copy link