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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
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Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
When I was quite young, I adopted the stereotypical pretentious reddit fedora mentality - other people are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd, I'm smarter than them, I'm an independent thinker, etc.  As I got a little older I softened on that.  I thought, well that's not really fair, people generally do try their best and everyone has a reason for acting the way they do, I shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that I'm all that different from them.


But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd.  Covid was empirical proof of that.  The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do".  Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.  Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten.  Like it never even happened.  They don't even think about it anymore.  How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?


Granted, people have always believed dumb things throughout history.  Mass psychosis has existed for as long as we've had mass society.  So, taking a broad enough view, Covid didn't really teach us anything new.  But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age.  At least communism required a commitment on your part; it demanded that you have skin in the game for the long haul.  Now the political flow of society can be turned on or off like a faucet, they can direct people over here one day and over there the next, running everyone ragged because they're deathly afraid of not getting enough likes on their TikToks from The Right People or whatever the hell it is that kids worry about these days.


With each passing year, reality does more and more to chip away at my faith in the inherent nobility of the human spirit.  I'm bitter about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science




We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning.




It's amusing that one of the categories where women are disadvantaged is also one of the least important categories (who cares about teaching ratings? especially at an R1 institute), and the category where women are most advantaged, hiring, happens to be the most important one - being hired in the first place is the necessary precondition for being able to compete in any of the other categories at all!  Salary can't be said to be wholly unimportant, but, most people aren't going into academia for the money anyway.


The discussion related specifically to hiring is in the "Evaluation Context 1: tenure-track hiring" section.  For example:




In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance.




This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"?  How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead?  It seems to me that the existing ideology is so entrenched that it could only be overcome with a Kuhnian paradigm shift - no matter how much the actual empirical facts change, ideology will only (possibly) catch up after a generational shift and a changing of the guard.


Not that I think it's appropriate to just say flat out "women are privileged" of course, as a simple pure reversal of the leftist claim of pervasive male privilege - reality is obviously much more complex than that.  But, as this paper suggests, the last several decades of feminist activism has obviously succeeded in securing certain concrete privileges for women.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I acknowledge that Covid was an actual disease that actually killed people.  But for most of the people who got swept up in Covid safetyism, what they were really responding to was the media campaign, not the underlying empirical facts about the disease itself.  That was the core of my complaint.


Covid is still killing people - why aren't we still in lockdown?  If reducing deaths from communicable airborne illnesses is a terminal value, why don't we have lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates every flu season?  The major difference between the Covid lockdown era, and the time periods before and after it, is the force of the public propaganda campaign.  That was the real operative factor.  I didn't think that so many people would be so responsive to that campaign, but they were.




I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting




Yes, deep blue.  It was inescapable here, impossible not to notice anytime you set foot outside.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage




I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good".  I assure you that they're not.


The average work of canonical literature is, in my opinion, not that good, and most of these works have "stood the test of time" only due to accidents of history, rather than their own intrinsic merits.  This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.  The average sci-fi story ranges from "meh" to "ok", just like how the average work of "literary" fiction ranges from "meh" to "ok".  It's debatable how many truly Great Books have ever even been written - think of how many physics books/articles throughout history have truly advanced the frontier of understanding in a deep and meaningful way, compared to the mountain of unread and irrelevant papers produced each year to feed the tenure committee machine.  All domains of human activity function in essentially the same way, including art, including "high" art.


Of course I'm by no means advocating for total aesthetic anarchism.  Some works are better than others; some works are really bad and some works are really great.  And being conversant in artistic theory and the history of art will help artists produce better works instead of worse ones.  I just want to be careful that we're not engaging in a knee-jerk elevation of the classical just because it's classical.  In fact 20th/21st genre fiction has made clear advancements that were largely undreamt of in previous eras of literature, particularly in terms of the range of plot structures and character types that it treats.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My memories of the earliest days are very fuzzy, but as far as I can remember even in the /r/slatestarcodex days, this forum always had a noticeable rightist bent, simply in virtue of the mere fact that it allows rightists to speak freely.  If you're one of the few places that doesn't subject witches to trial by water, then you're going to attract an unusually high percentage of witches, even if that's not your explicit goal.


That being said, I think we have hit an all time low when it comes to the number of active leftist users, and I think that's due to a couple factors:


    

  • 

    I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists.  This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces.  Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views.  If they don't want to deal with rightists in their own spaces, why would they want to come here and deal with us here?  There's a reason that the left has become the party of deplatforming.  I think it's pretty straightforward.
    

    • 

  • 

    Regardless of how open you are to dialogue, it can be mentally draining to be the only one arguing for a certain viewpoint while everyone else is against you.  Once leftists start to self-select out of the discussion, more and more of them will start to decide it's not worth staying as they become a smaller and smaller minority, creating a vicious cycle.  We also don't have an easy free source of new users because people can't just stop by with their reddit account when they see this place linked on subs like /r/sneerclub or whatever.
    

    • 

  • 

    Users with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to feel embattled by the general forum atmosphere, more likely to get heated during debates, and thus more likely to get banned.  I don't want to litigate the cases of specific users here, but I can think of at least a couple examples of this.
    

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals




It heavily depends on the government and the type of speech in question.  Holocaust denial is currently illegal in multiple Western countries and has been successfully prosecuted.




The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.




So, I think this is a common cognitive bias to fall victim to.  When you encounter someone who has views that are dramatically different from your own, you don't have an internal mental model of what it would feel like to actually hold those views with sincere conviction.  So you assume that they don't.  It's easy to reach for an alternative explanation of, oh they don't actually believe that, they're just saying that they believe it because of X Y Z.


I catch myself falling into this trap sometimes when I think about leftist views.  Like when people complain about movies and TV shows being too white and not diverse enough.  Sometimes I think, look it can't actually bother people that much when this or that piece of media doesn't meet their own preferred racial quotas, they have to just be saying this because they like the feeling of power it gives them, or maybe so they can get a cushy sinecure as a diversity consultant.  But when I take a step back and think about it rationally, I realize that that's not a psychologically realistic model of how people operate.  Most people don't just make shit up for years on end, even when they can derive some personal benefit from it.  The simplest and most plausible explanation is that people really are upset about a lack of racial diversity in media, and they really do experience it as a serious injustice, foreign as that notion may be to me.


Similarly, I can assure you with full confidence that when rightists complain about leftist speech censorship, they really are angry about it, legitimately.  It's not a ruse, it's not a Machiavellian attempt to advance some other covert agenda.  You might think their reasons are bad, but the emotions are real regardless.  If nothing else, you should be able to appreciate the obvious self-interest angle.  If I want to say X, and other people are stopping me from saying X, then I'm naturally going to be upset about that.




Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people




Saying that MTF transsexuals are not women is not in any way "violence", "hatred", or a call for "eradication".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here".  It's natural to want someone to blame.  (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)


When you look at:


    

  • The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
    • 

  • Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
    • 

  • Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
    • 

  • The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
    • 

  • The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
    • 

  • Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations
    • 



you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn.  It's not an isolated incident.  And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.


Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either.  I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.


The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side.  If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason.  But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."


Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious?  Where are their allies?  Who is actually willing to support them?


Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong.  But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push




Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.






Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.






[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.




It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders.  The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?"  Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window.  It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.


There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back.  Particularly because women are given a free pass.  It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.


This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers.  Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict?  That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Peterson disparages a former client as "vindictive", dismisses their complaints as a "pack of lies"




I don't see the problem here?  There's a good chance that the client was vindictive, and their complaints were based on lies.  As long as he doesn't reveal any of his clients' personal information, there's no issue with him expressing his views on these matters.




and refers to a fellow practicing physician as "criminal" for performing an otherwise legal surgery.




Obviously he's using "criminal" in this case to pass moral judgment on the physician's conduct, rather than making an accusation about actual illegalities.  Censuring Peterson for this statement comes off as an attempt to establish this physician's conduct, and the medical establishment's treatment of gender issues more broadly, as being beyond ethical scrutiny - which is something that I certainly cannot accept.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.




Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?




Because it is a prize.  This is an objective, undeniable fact.  It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it.  Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".


Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for.  But then that's a separate discussion entirely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?




Can't you ask that about most protests?


I never really "got" protesting.  I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves.  If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"?  It doesn't make a lot of sense.


Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity.  You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more.  But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious.  Their own actions make me want them to lose more.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Broke: "It's my fault that I failed so I should just give up."


Woke: "It's other people's fault that I failed, so I should try again."


Bespoke: "I am responsible for everything that happens to me and everything that happens to everyone else.  I have failed before and I always will fail, but I'll keep trying anyway because as the Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith I embrace the absurd.  God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:




The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, denying tens of millions of Americans the chance to get up to $20,000 of their debt erased.






The ruling, which matched expert predictions given the justices’ conservative majority, is a massive blow to borrowers who were promised loan forgiveness by the Biden administration last summer.






The 6-3 majority ruled that at least one of the six states that challenged the loan relief program had the proper legal footing, known as standing, to do so.






The high court said the president didn’t have the authority to cancel such a large amount of consumer debt without authorization from Congress and agreed the program would cause harm to the plaintiffs.




The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system).  One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other.  The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different.  And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high.  If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.


The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation?  Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?  The group identity angle is obvious.  AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians.  Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder.  Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics.  So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you.  But perhaps that's uncharitable.  Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				FILM REVIEW: India the Worst country on Earth
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.


At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Problem of The Problem Of Susan
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's clear that when Lewis wrote this particular scene, he had these words in mind, which he had written on another occasion:




“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”




Susan is the critic who treats "adult" as a term of approval.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Only then can you really destroy them by pointing out how ridiculous they are.




But what counts as "ridiculous" in the first place is itself politically determined.  I personally think the left acts out in a lot of ways that I would classify as ridiculous, but it plainly hasn't discredited them on a national scale so far.  The extent of your pre-established narrative dominance determines whether your particular mode of acting out will be seen as legitimate (BLM riots) or illegitimate (January 6th).  So before you goad your opponent into acting out, you have to be in charge of defining what counts as "acting out".  I think that's a more fundamental goal.


I'm uncertain if it's even possible for the left to push the pro-Palestine stuff "too far" at this point.  I don't know how many centrist swing voters are left in America.  Probably still enough to influence the results of national elections, but not enough to uproot the entrenched zeitgeist or really impact the way things are heading overall.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.




It wasn't so much his object-level political views, which as you point out were largely garden-variety conservative talking points that would have been at home on 00s Fox News.  What really made him unique was his personality and his discussion style.


He was supremely confident in his own views, and seemingly oblivious to any and all criticism, despite being (in my own personal opinion) supremely wrong about some of those views.  He frequently railed against "postmodernism", despite the fact that a simple transcript of his comments would constitute a pretty good experimental postmodern novel in its own right.  He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other.  He had a habit of simply fleeing from any sub-thread where he was asked to provide direct evidence of his claims; this clashed very noticeably with the "grizzled military veteran, ride the tiger, don't take no shit from no one" personality that he wanted to project.  It was this contrast that made him such a frustrating and fascinating character.


I'd rather have a discussion partner who's interesting and wrong, than a boring one who I agree with.  In spite of my numerous disagreements with him, I would often check on his profile just to look at his recent comments and see what he was up to.  So his ban will constitute a loss for me in that regard.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ll just take this opportunity to say: not every space has to be welcoming to everyone! And that’s ok! Really!


I think it would be great if more women were encouraged to post here. But not at the expense of changing our existing culture and standards.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A Christian might see Jesus as a spirit guide, a Hindu might see Shiva




But, isn't that exactly the hallmark of a subjective phenomenon based on hallucination/misremembering/wishful thinking/etc, rather than an objective phenomenon based in reality?  The most parsimonious explanation when confronted with mutually contradictory reports of the same phenomenon is that someone (or everyone) is simply mistaken.


It's analogous to how you have a lot of wildly contradictory reports of UFO encounters, with people reporting different physical appearances of the aliens themselves, different appearances of the craft (which suspiciously seem to evolve along with American aesthetic preferences, from the Cold War-era flying saucers to the modern Apple-inspired cubes and spheres), so some believers try to explain the contradictions away by saying "well, maybe they aren't really aliens, maybe these are spiritual entities that are manifested by the collective unconscious, so they take whatever form a particular observer is expecting", and it's like, yeah maybe that's the case... or there could just be no UFOs to begin with.  That theory also resolves all the contradictions, in a much more parsimonious manner.


That being said.  Someone close to me did have an NDE, and he still swears by it decades later.  He described it as "perfection", beyond the most perfect bliss you could ever imagine, of a totally different ontological kind from anything that you could ever experience in this reality.  Frequently when he retells the story, he reminds me "I've done a lot of drugs.  I know what drugs feel like.  This was no drug."


I do believe that, even if these states of consciousness are nothing more than the result of brain chemistry, they're clearly very exceptional states that merit further investigation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.


The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites.  Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes.  He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.


The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte.  It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:




"Several months ago my office received a protected disclosure from Eglin Air Force Base indicating that there was a UAP incident that required my attention.  We asked to see any of the evidence that had been taken by flight crew in this endeavor, and to observe any radar signature, as well as to meet with the flight crew.  Initially we were not afforded access [...] eventually we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image.  The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries, and I'm somewhat informed on the matter, having served on the Armed Services committee for seven years."




Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:




Interviewer: "From the videos you have seen, from the stories you have heard from people up in the sky, if that footage, if those videos come to light, publicly for the American people to see, what do you think people's reaction would be to it?"






Burchett: "I hope they're angry.  That this government, both parties, have hid this from them."




When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.


It's always possible that everyone is just lying.  There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not.  But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be.  I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities.  Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway.  If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.


At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing.  He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves?  And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves.  Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.


Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet.  If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen.  Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.


The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not.  Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks.  Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly.  But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves.  If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other.  But even this argument is not particularly convincing.  If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".


Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems.  I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:




“Inquir’st thou not what spirits






Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass






Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin






Were blameless; and if aught they merited,






It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,






The portal to thy faith. If they before






The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;






And among such am I. For these defects,






And for no other evil, we are lost; 






Only so far afflicted, that we live






Desiring without hope.”




Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation.  Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue.  Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled.  But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ.  They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved.  There can be no exceptions.  An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.


This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries.  Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised.  They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone.  It is not our place to pass judgement.  But Dante had no such qualms.  He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances.  Dante simply knew.  This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.


This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic.  There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational.  But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth.  Kant was well aware of this.  Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life.  The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.


I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion.  We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society.  Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children.  The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution.  Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible.  The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence.  The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.


Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us?  Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil?  Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.


Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework.  We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values.  In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled.  There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well.  Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good?  Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads?  It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.


At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists.  Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving.  But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not.  I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces.  There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.


There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid.  From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures.  In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change.  It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace.  This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.


It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":




[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.




(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post.  @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details.  Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)


It's hard to be very optimistic.  The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:




[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


All porn is cuckhold porn.




Is every fictional story a cuckold story?  Whenever I enjoy a work of fiction, am I getting cucked?  If I read Harry Potter for enjoyment, am I getting cucked?


If I can enjoy Harry Potter without being cucked, then why can't I enjoy porn without being cucked?  We can subsume both experiences under a single general process of experiencing fiction.  The fact that one is more likely to make me ejaculate than the other does not seem to me to be an essential difference.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.




We already know what such a community would look like, it's called 4chan.  It's one of the most influential internet communities ever and has been an endless source of entertainment and fascination for me for the past 15 years.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


way overtending this garden




I don't think this is an entirely baseless claim, but I do think the mods generally do a great job of modding for tone and not content, which is what we want from them.  This is the only public forum I'm aware of where Nazis and progressives both make regular contributions to the discussion.  We want to curate and preserve a space for that kind of ideological diversity, and if the cost of that is that the tone of the average post becomes somewhat more stilted, then that's an acceptable loss.  A complete withdrawal of moderation would lead to people with minority viewpoints self-selecting out of the discussion even more than they already have.




Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another.




Many of the regulars were posting here before ChatGPT (or even before GPT-3).