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.
7mo ago
Genuine empathy cannot be compelled. And to the extent that it could be, it would have no value. We should encourage understanding; that is, a rational understanding of the physical and social causes that make people think as they think and do as they do. But such understanding is distinct from empathy and compassion as emotional affects.
What I find most obnoxious about the contemporary transsexual "movement" is that they have legislated, by social fiat, a prescribed position on a philosophical question that rightly should be a matter of free inquiry and debate: namely, the metaphysics and ontology of gender. This really grinds my gears like nothing else. Possibly more than anything having to do with bathrooms or puberty blockers. The right to open inquiry is one of the closest things I have to a sacred value. When you are forced to refer to an MTF transsexual as "she", you are being compelled, under social duress, to assert as an ontological truth that this person just is a woman (and all parties are aware that that's plainly what's going on here - otherwise it wouldn't be such a heated topic of disagreement in the first place). I can't accept being compelled to assent to such a contentious position.
For my part, the two positions on the ontology of gender that I take seriously are the conservative position - that there are such things as men and women, and the way we usually sorted people into those buckets up until ~40 years ago is basically correct - or the eliminativist position - that no person is either a man or a woman, and thus "X is a woman" is vacuously false for all X. On either position, to say that an MTF transsexual "is a woman" is to utter a falsehood, and thus I do not believe that such a statement should be socially compulsory. There have been serious attempts to develop an ontology that would support the transsexual position, and I treat them with the same respect that I give by default to all positions that I disagree with, but I don't personally consider any such view to be a live possibility.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.
EDIT: Just to head off some potential misunderstandings caused by my imprecise phrasing: I'm not saying to turn yourself into an evil caricature. Don't make yourself adopt positions that you don't sincerely hold in the first place. What I meant was that, the ideal scenario would be, you lay out your position as honestly and truthfully as possible, and if you are then informed that your position is sexist/transphobic, etc, your response would be: "ok, point accepted. I am. Now let's move on to the actual substance of the issue."
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.
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.
8mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics.
Leftists disqualifying potential romantic partners for not being sufficiently leftist is absolutely a thing.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down
It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.
Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11mo ago
But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded.
Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.
And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.
If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool.
It's reasonable to take Mark's assertion that "X is true" to be strong prima facie evidence of X, if you generally trust his judgement. But surely you recognize that Mark's beliefs are still defeasible, correct? Mark can still be wrong.
If he were to say, for example, that God is real - and that, more specifically, Islam is the one true religion - I doubt you'd be running out to convert to Islam tomorrow. Islam doesn't become true just because Mark says so. That claim still has to be evaluated against the totality of available evidence and argumentation, even though the source is trustworthy.
Or suppose that he told you that a person can be both 18 years old and 36 years old at the exact same time. That's something that you know to be false, just based on an analysis of the structure of the sentence. Mark's statement to the contrary wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) enough to change your mind.
So why not treat Mark's claim that he is actually a woman named Mary the same as those other two examples? At worst, obviously false nonsense, and at best, a highly contentious claim that should only be accepted after a careful examination of the supporting arguments?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo 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.
4mo ago
I'm seeing people who had long term and stable government contracts, sometimes decades, being let go.
Uh, welcome to life I guess?
This kind of thing happens all the time in the private sector. About a year ago my company went through a round of layoffs that hit a lot of people who had been with the company for 10 or even 20 or 30 years in some cases. Yes we appreciate your service and dedication, but profitability was down this year, we can't afford to be a charity anymore, and we've identified that you don't actually do much anyway, so, buh-bye now.
The shock and confusion coming from a lot of federal employees over the fact that they, too, are capable of being let go shows just how unique and privileged their position was.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
You need female voters
You're still not taking the abortion-is-murder worldview seriously enough.
Try to imagine that you are sincerely convinced that abortion is murder. Suppose further that, as you say, the pro-abortion position is so popular among women that the only way to have a non-negligible chance of winning a national election is to stop being publicly anti-abortion.
A natural followup question is, why is the pro-abortion position so popular among women? What explains this fact? The way I see it, you have two main strategies for explaining this fact:
-
One is to accept the popularity of abortion as evidence for the claim that abortion is not actually murder after all. If we accept as a starting point that most people (including most women) aren't particularly morally heinous, then the widespread popularity of X is evidence that X is not isomorphic to "murdering lots of innocent people for no good reason".
-
Alternatively, you can go the route of claiming that most women (or at least a large enough number of women to matter for a national election) actually are morally heinous, because they support the unjustified murder of innocent people. In which case, that's a problem, and you have bigger issues to deal with than who wins the next election. That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.
The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.
(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
I've always been more skeptical of the singularity than the average mottizen -- not outright dismissive, but skeptical. I've become more confident in my skepticism over the past year after seeing the diminishing rate of progress in frontier models and the relatively disappointing launch of GPT-4.5. I feel more assured now that currently known techniques won't lead to AGI.
Not to say that there won't be impact to individual jobs and industries, of course. There are plainly people who find LLMs to be very useful even in their current state, and LLMs aren't going anywhere. But I don't think that o3 or even o4 or o5 will lead to a cataclysm.
some relatively minor additional work
The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo 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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.
Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant.
The administration was ordered to “facilitate” his return. That’s different.
It’s unclear why SCOTUS should be able to order the president to take a citizen of El Salvador, who is currently residing in El Salvador, and bring him to the US. What if El Salvador just doesn’t want to give him up? Given these facts, it’s reasonable to read “facilitate” as “facilitate only to the extent possible”.
Even SCOTUS has limits on their powers. I don’t think we should expect them to be able to order the president to bomb another country, for example. Their power diminishes rapidly outside of US borders.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
It is worth talking about! There’s a lot you could say about the role that the stock market plays in the right wing imagination, its relation to anti-elitist attitudes, etc. You could turn that into a great post. But you have to actually write that post. You can’t just post a bare twitter link and say “take a look at these jackasses”.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her.
A lot of women (of a more progressive bent) have a complex about how much the approval and company of men actually matters to them. A shocking number of young women are trying to force themselves to become lesbian or bisexual because "a man shouldn't be the most important thing in your life", even though they have no sexual attraction to women at all.
The ironic thing is that women's dependence on men is nothing compared to men's dependence on women! I don't think that women are really capable of understanding the reality distortion field that emanates from every non-ugly woman, and the effects that said field has on straight men.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s.
I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
the ‘male centered woman.’
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
You wrote this as a pretext for asking Dean to finally explain what his ideology is, didn’t you?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
The tacit agreement was that they wouldn’t have to be capable of fighting their own battles (and in the case of say Germany, a lot of people didn’t want them to be capable of fighting their own battles — the memory of WW2 was still quite fresh when the Berlin Wall fell). For the sake of stability in Europe, the agreement was that countries would become semi-vassals of the US empire in exchange for the US’s protection.
Not to say that the terms of this agreement have to be binding for all eternity. If a new arrangement is needed then so be it. But this idea that European countries did something “wrong” by not maintaining a larger military presence is, I think, lacking in historical context.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
27d ago
They actually don't know what a woman is.
No, they do.
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
You seem to be gesturing at this concept here:
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications.
although I'm not entirely sure what your exact position is here. Do you think there are "thought leaders" at the top of the progressive movement who actually do have an accurate model of reality, followed by a legion of "footsoldiers" who uncritically imbibe the propaganda? I don't think I find this to be very convincing, because even among the "footsoldiers", we can tell from their discourse that they're able to consistently and accurately distinguish between transwomen and ciswomen, and thus they have an at least implicit model of what a woman is, although they may use doublethink to not consciously acknowledge it.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people?
Well, how would you?
(I don't actually know how I would do it without sounding a bit mean, while also being honest and avoiding overly romanticized depictions. I suppose the most brutally honest and concise way of putting it is that "woman was fashioned by nature for one thing, man for several".)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
There's always an unsavory character using it at the same time as me, but absolutely nothing has ever happened.
And then there are some of us who have been violently assaulted in front of our own homes by precisely these same unsavory characters.
Not that I'm saying that having or not having experienced this or that personal anecdote gives one special epistemic privilege when it comes to policymaking. I'm just saying that violent crime is in fact a real thing that people can have legitimate concerns about.
I get that cars are convenient and make people feel powerful and in control, but they impose such a big negative externality on the rest of us non-car users (pollution, taxes, use of public space, not to mention the very large amount of deaths caused by accidents, far higher than that caused by urban villainy on public transit)
Perhaps you need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
DEI seems to be viewed more favorably than not.
I mean, yes? Duh?
DEI is racial spoils politics for non-whites. And, to some degree, depending on context, spoils for white women as well. People like it when you give them free stuff. The majority of people alive are not white men. So, most people by default will be predisposed to viewing DEI pretty favorably. And a lot of white men have been convinced that it’s a good thing too, even though it actively and explicitly harms them. So that tilts the scales even more.
It takes a rather strong principled ideological commitment to arrive at the position that DEI is a bad thing, so it’s unsurprising that it’s a minority view.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I’d wait for mass layoffs at OpenAI before we take any claims of “AGI achieved internally” seriously.
There's a strong anti-academia sentiment even among highly educated tech professionals. We have youtube to serve the needs of undergraduate education. And as for research, they assume that 99% of it is bullshit, and the 1% of it that isn't bullshit can be carried out under the auspices of private corporations.
I've always been a staunch defender of academia, so I'm sympathetic to your position. But after enduring decades of the total ideological capture of the academy by the left, I can't say that I'm disappointed or surprised that the right is pushing back and taking action.
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