Spookykou
4mo ago
*Which is not entirely her fault, I think. It's just that to the viewer's ape brain, her combativeness works less well because she is a woman than it would if she were a man.
I remember when some people ran with this idea, trained actors to perform a gender swapped Hillary Trump debate, and it did not turn out the way they had assumed it would.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.
I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I coulda sworn a big thing with the bell curve was that it was basically respectable when it came out, and it took a few years before the 'pointing out statistics is racist' idea fully took hold on the left. I remember some big name black journalist who, in a retrospective, talked about how he found it personally disgusting that other people at the Atlantic(maybe?) wanted to have dispassionate scientific discussion about those ideas, and he had to nod and smile along, etc. I would model the change as, in the 90's, racism is bad, but statistics are not racist, into, those types of statistics are actually racist, into, maybe but those statistics seem correct and frankly I don't care anymore if you call me racist.
Spookykou
30d ago
A brief defense of Mass Effect, and why I wish more games like Mass Effect would get made.
I grew up a nerd(reading Piers Anthony, playing Samurai Swords, D&D, MTG, etc) who was socially adept enough to pass as a non-nerd. I dressed well, hung out with the cool kids, went to parties, did drugs and had sex. It was all good fun. Sometimes I would also hang out with my nerd friends and go do nerd things. I remember one time going to a Con, dressed well, hair on point, and seeing people walking around in dragon T-shirts and cargo shorts, poorly made cosplay, and the occasional Naruto-headband. As I watched the pockmarked, sweaty nerds, a deep pit opened up inside me. I was jealous. My fashionable sneakers and my tight fitting jeans were all lies, DAMNED LIES. I wanted to be like them, and I was just too scared to admit it, too scared to wear a dragon T-shirt. Well, not anymore.
I enjoy power fantasy. Yes, it is kind of cringy and lame and low-brow, but ima live my truth.
I want to be a kick ass hero who saves the galaxy and fucks hot alien chicks.
Spookykou
11d ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Spookykou
29d ago
Yes, I had a longer response at first that included how much I enjoy TNG (the bridge crew) and how the Mass Effect crew of fun competent people who work together for a common goal is a refreshing and pleasant experience compared to everything else being 'serious' story telling, which just means everyone has to talk constantly about their trauma and hate each other, while being sarcastic and ironic.
I am somewhat suspect of complaints about 'quality' with writing, just across the board, but also specifically when talking about 'romance' from the male perspective. I think it is mostly an isolated demand type phenomenon. Pull up straight male dating sims and visual novels(tons of games where you are a normal guy trying to get a girlfriend), and most people will say the whole genre falls within the porn to ham-fisted range, but if you look at popular LGBT visual novels and dating sims the writing is basically indistinguishable(and nobody complains). I think that feminists have been very effective at spreading memes about the Problematic Male Fantasy in a very asymmetrical way such that straight male wish-fulfillment is the only kind of fantasy that is quickly and easily recognized as bad. I even think there is a real extent to which some men have been conditioned into finding their own innate preferences icky, or at the very least I know of one case where this is true (myself).
I am not sure exactly what kind of story you are looking for, a male version of Colleen Hoover, Your Lie in April, When Harry Met Sally (the video game)? I am also not sure what 'sensitive storytelling' means. My previously mentioned skepticism around a lot of 'literary critique' is because I think the human impulse to describe personal subjective preference as an objective and legible standard is way too strong(obviously I am not guilty of it though).
Spookykou
2mo ago
This seems to be hyper focused on writing, which is odd because a lot of the most popular games ever made have basically no writing at all. Surely video game quality is not singularly determined by writing quality, I would contend that writing quality is actually pretty low on the priority list of things that matter when determining game quality.
Japan is a weird example to bring up when a manga like Demon Slayer can out sell the entire American comic industry. Demon Slayer is no The Sun Also Rises, but Japan is clearly doing something right. They are a lot less woke than the west, and are probably the second most powerful cultural exporter behind the US, Korea might be close, but they don't necessarily do better on the woke dimension.
DE feels way more leftist than woke, but it does have some woke elements.
Yes, the vast majority of video games have been made by white/asian men including (all?) of the greats.
I think this is mostly just that you are using a scale for evaluating writing such that 95% of writing is all crammed together in the 'shit' category and then acting like it can't be further differentiated. Shit contains multitudes.
Spookykou
4mo ago
I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.
The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.
The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.
This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I assume they intended this to mean a reciprocal situation to the US, so, in the hypothetical the Christians are demanding that nobody talk about Passover in anything that could be considered general/public communications specifically and just refer to the time around Passover as "Holiday Time" because Saint Mark's Day falls around the same time.
Also the paid leave system in Israel is fundamentally different and more religiously based than the US model. From reading your link, it is just that all people get 9 paid holidays for holy days, and which days you are expected to take is broken down by religion (four religions listed, not sure what they do with atheists). In the US, Christmas day, just the one day, is the mandatory federal holiday. The vast majority of holiday time is private policy specific to an organization. I think this reflects a fundamental difference between how these counties view religious holidays that is almost totally orthogonal to the social engineering point the OP is trying to grapple with.
Spookykou
5mo ago
Live by the sword die by the sword. The left has aggressively pushed that everything and anything is a dog-whistle for racism, islamophobia, homophobia, etc. The too cute by half, about face to it being idiotic to suggest that antizionism is antisemitism rings hollow.
Spookykou
19d ago
I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.
The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.
More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.
Spookykou
7mo ago
This assumes that all attempts are equally serious and reflect similar levels of mental anguish. It is also possible that some attempts are less serious and driven by different emotional states. For example, maybe some people are desperate for attention/support/accommodations from the people around them, and understand that an attempted suicide will give them those things. Obviously there are other reasons women might prefer softer options, while still being 'equally depressed', but its not a given that that is what is happening when looking at attempt numbers.
Spookykou
2mo ago
Are you saying that the word 'stolen' has a hard technical meaning such that someone who believes, for example, that there was a distributed effort by various actors including those in service of the US government to pervert the course of a fair and free US election, can not in good faith describe that as a 'stolen' election? Is this a standard or established somewhere else? Did Russa 'steal' 2016?
Are you claiming that anyone who wishes to argue that the election was flawed or unfair must also state emphatically that it was not 'stolen' before it is possible to have a productive conversation, even if the person in question never said it was stolen, or did, but never referencing the more extreme and implausible versions of that claim?
Are you sure this is not an isolated demand for rigor, is it really your normal operating procedure to demand disavowals from interlocutors in this way, either over a specific definition or cluster of ideas, even if that person has not previously held or promoted them?
How would you feel about reciprocal rules, would you be okay with both parties not using the word 'stolen', such that they could not say it was stolen, and you could not say it was not stolen?
Spookykou
4mo ago
Isn't Japan famous for people consistently turning in wallets with all the money inside, and similar stories? The, people in small towns not locking their doors things also seems related. I imagine that high-trust societies exist, and modern western urban centers just happen to be lower-trust, currently. Especially in 'public' spaces. I would bet there are at least some high-trust enclaves within most major cities where the norms shift closer to Japan.
Spookykou
5mo ago
Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.
O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.
Spookykou
2mo ago
I have driven as far west as Las Vegas and as far east as NYC, I don't even know how many multi-day road trips, etc. I have a family member who sets the cruise control to the speed limit and doesn't touch the gas. We can go hours getting passed non-stop while never once catching up to a car ahead of us. Either everyone who isn't speeding is also doing the cruise control at exactly the speed limit thing, or almost nobody is driving at or under the speed limit. I often complain about how dangerous it is because even the 18 wheelers all want to pass us and that shit is risky on a two lane country road.
Spookykou
5mo ago
FWIW I found hanging out with kids to be surprisingly fun/less gross than it seemed at a distance.
It is hard to explain, but at least personally I am very clean and germophobic, while also being a stand off-ish introvert who finds most people to be boring. Still had a hell of a time playing with my little cousin and his snot covered Legos.
Spookykou
20hr ago
Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.
Just, love reading it.
Spookykou
1mo ago
I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.
A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.
Spookykou
2mo ago
This is already a thing, at least where I live. Any time I see the doctor I always leave with a handful of documents covering any medications or exercises or what have you that they are recommending. Of course I leave those papers in the car and never look at them again.
Spookykou
4mo ago
I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.
Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.
Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.
Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.
Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.
People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.
Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.
The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.
I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.
Spookykou
29d ago
I can't stand Sanderson's work, for, well a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that he has really bought into the idea that culture is arbitrary and I am really bought into the idea that culture is contingent and so whenever he brings up some arbitrary cultural practice it brutally murders any interest I might have had in the setting. I can very easily imagine people who do not care about this at all, and hate Sanderson for totally different reasons.
Talking about writing being good or bad is really weird because people want and enjoy different things, and people are sucked out of a story for different reasons. You seem to be very fixated on the extent to which the story was well planned to function as a trilogy, where as that rates pretty low on the totem pole for me. I assume this is why you do not actually talk about the companions or world-building, when those are the two things @urquan brought up specifically as being their favorite parts (I agree with them). If I had to pick between a story that had perfect planning to create an overarching narrative structure for a trilogy, or a book with good characters, it is not even close. They are not even playing the same game. I would burn the narrative structure book just to read the good characters book for the handful of minutes that the fire burned.
Moving on,
And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
Mass Effect is a military sci-fi story about a judge dread spy, hunting down a rogue judge dread spy. I feel like within that milieu it is not necessarily an indication of bad writing if the most pivotal scenes are situations where the main character has to make life and death choices. I actually don't really see what ideals of good writing this is supposed to be violating even outside of the military sci-fi genre.
You are obviously correct that there was no plan(or at least not a good one), and that between poor planning, clumsy execution, and format related limitations, the overarching narrative structure as a whole is not good. However I think you go too far when you say this is all locked in by ME1. Kaiden or Ashley die, and it sticks with that. They absolutely could have de-emphasized Wrex's importance to the wider galaxy while simply keeping him as a companion, or not, this would not have been difficult. They could have totally cut the side mission with the Rachni if you killed the queen in ME1. The whole mission is a complete stand alone that takes like 30 minutes. The reasons the Mass Effect trilogy is so disappointing (at least for me) is that it could have easily been better.
Paragon and Renegade get way too much hate. My Tav is 99% head cannon, because even though I have seven responses to every question there is no consistent characterization to any of them. Sometimes I can joke, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can be a hero paladin, sometimes I am a craven coward shuddering in fear (thanks cutscene). It turns out something like 75%+ of people just want to play some variation of Paragon, in literally every single-player RPG, lean into that and you can make better stories.
I agree on ME3, I like it and I think it gets too much hate because of the ending.
but actually Andromeda
I feel like Andromeda has pretty glaring writing problems, the story constantly strains credulity because the world-building totally fails to support the narrative they wanted to tell. A quick breakdown.
There is no reason for you to be operating as a small team. There is no reason for you to ever even step foot on a planet outside of the Ancient Vaults, because your ability to manipulate vault technology is the only thing that is actually special about you. If you do step foot on a planet, there is no reason for you to do so without a shuttle to ferry you from place to place. There is no reason for 2/5ths of a 500,000 person colony mission where 80% of the population is still in cryo-sleep to terraform multiple planets, when they could and should be focusing their efforts on one for at least the next hundred years. The whole setup is horrible for a first person shooter single-player RPG. The vault tech stuff should all be long term research projects. Clearing out the Kett and securing objectives should all be large squad military actions. Honestly, the world-building and setup for Andromeda is wildly more compatible with a base builder game, you could make a reasonable Andromeda mod for Rim world and it might actually be good.
Spookykou
1mo ago
One thing that bothers me in the abortion debate is that I personally see a lot of granularity within the worth of a human life. If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year old men or one eight-year old boy, I will save the boy every time. More over, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation. I do not see any incongruity with my moral intuitions as outlined above, and the moral intuition that it would be wrong to kill one of those eighty year old men. Similarly, I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight year old boy, either(I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year old man). As such I generally find most of the extreme claims about the implications of treating a fertilized egg as a life overblown. I am fine with having a category of thing where I think it is wrong to kill it but which I do not think our entire society must upend itself in an effort to protect. Especially not when that protection would be against what would commonly be understood as the 'natural order' of things.
We currently think of full humans as being ... full humans, and yet 100% of them die. How much of our humanitarian efforts are dedicated to immortality research? I think your hypothetical reflects more than anything a poor understanding of how humans actually behave and the kinds of moral intuitions people are mostly running on. I would propose that a huge number of people would see nothing incongruous in holding a funeral for a miscarriage while simultaneously not donating 50% of their income to R&D on how to reduce the number of fertilized eggs that fail to attach.
Ultimately I find health of the mother concerns to be valid, but I can understand why some would worry about the category being stretched too far. Beyond that, I think abortion is very popular and the best case real world policy I could hope for would be something like, safe, legal, and rare.
And of course, I am a hypocrite who purchased a morning after pill for my girlfriend one time after a broken condom, such is life.
I guess there are two ways to read the relevant comments. One would be that religious people actually had better predictive modeling skills and their rejection of gay marriage and similar trends was based on them having an accurate model of how that would lead to specific bad outcomes.
The other reading has a bit more wiggle room. Maybe, conservatives and religious types had passed down and maintained social technologies that were valuable and well-honed, ironically, by a process more like evolution than intelligent design. It was from these inherited norms and values that they knew 'something' was wrong without actually understanding the complicated multifaceted societal shifts and changes that would come about in response to any given policy.
If the second position is all that is being claimed, then the internal experience might have gone something like; back then I believed in secular hedonistic sexual norms and values and thought religious people were crazy. Two adult homosexual people having relations, dating, and getting married, all seemed like totally acceptable/good things, and I supported the general cultural zeitgeist that was in favor of gay marriage.
As time has marched on, I am increasingly confronted by things that seem to be coming out of that same cultural movement that I once supported, that I know find distasteful. I can see a through-line, from the arguments and ideas that I once repeated to the slogans and activism of today. I regret the confidence with which my younger-self dismissed the concerns raised by traditional/conservative/religious figures. It increasingly looks like their social technology was correct in some way about the nebulous dangers of increasingly liberal sexual norms and values and now we are living through the consequences of them losing that battle.
This certainly speaks broadly to my personal rightward shift.
I believed that we really understood sociology and that the social sciences were robust, accurate models of reality. That all calls for traditional/religious/conservative values were born of ignorance at best and malice at worst. Then I started reading SSC and my faith in the social sciences was shatter (irrevocably?). My whole worldview came crashing down, sexism first, then racism, every aspect of the liberal progressive package was called into question. Where once it was obvious beyond question that Christianity was an arbitrary useless hatful ideology, now I wonder, how it spread so far(it wasn't always powerful and rich)? How did enslaved priests convert the Vikings? Maybe memetic fitness is a real thing and Christianity was actually a valuable and insightful social technology that made the societies that adopted it better? I don't actually strongly believe this is true, but it certainly seems possible to me now.
So I might be projecting, but when I hear someone say that 'maybe the religious doomsayers were on to something', it speaks to me. Even if I doubt I could find a specific religious doomsayer whose positions I would endorse.
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