It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby.
He's complained before about the inability of Hollywood writers to avoid changing what they're adapting just to "make it their own" and no doubt GoT soured him a bit. So I'm not shocked that he has opinions about HOTD. It is odd, but mainly because he's a producer.
Wondering if someone from HBO is calling desperately.
They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.
I should look up how many major feminist figures are lesbians cause I have seen this claim before: that feminism is skewed by lesbian attitudes. But it isn't even just LGBT activists. Someone like Rachel Zegler is, AFAIK, straight. And yet she disdains the classic Snow White story's romantic elements because what's important is that Snow White becomes a real leader.
Well, for most people, the actual point of most stories is not to become a king or queen since they won't, the romance is the most real thing in the story. Zegler, on the other hand, can hope to reach those heights.
They're making movies for themselves, not the audience.
The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it.
Half-white, affluent actress using the plight of dead underclass blacks to whine about racists not liking her show was too much even for normies.
Even if we ignore the poetry of the cosmos, poetry and metaphor are the primary (if not exclusive?) way of talking about God in ancient Judaism and Christianity
Sure. I guess I'm just asking to what degree sometimes "poetry and metaphor" are just what a God does. If you start from the idea of an omnipotent god then it has to be metaphor, just chosen to convince. If you start from a polytheistic world that collapsed into monotheism gods really did do the things they were said to do . Baal really did ride clouds.
I guess to me it's more of a two-stage process. This:
they understand death, so God keeps one from the grave; or maybe they understand a certain social archetype, and so God “awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine”.
Happens first to the polytheistic gods. Each of these things gets a god. Baal is potent because rain is important and he's rain. So worship Baal (he really will make it rain). This gets absorbed by Yahweh, then it collapses from both metaphor and fact into purely metaphor. Because once Yahweh is omniscient and omnipotent he can make it rain, but doesn't really ride clouds or stride across the floor of heaven with his feet.
The psalm that hypes up God as shepherd isn’t the psalm that hypes up God as vanquisher of foes
We should expect this if God is gradually eating porfolios. El is the old benevolent "Father of Years", Baal is the vigorous god, the "rider of clouds" who trampled the Yam the sea. They weren't assimilated simultaneously or uniformly.
Being a potent and compelling thing worthy of worship is what it means to be a god. You dump all those stories into one pot cause you don't want to deal with anyone else's god, you get a mess with the only common element being potency.
Tanista
1yr ago
they will spend paragraphs about how God “stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea”. Why the incessant poetry?
Maybe it wasn't just poetry? There's reason to believe that people at the time really did believe that the sky was a dome. And battle with the sea was a common trope for deities.
But that kind of makes your point I suppose; the language used to describe God was aimed at convincing people in that milieu so naturally the cultural touchstones of the time would be used, even if they're also subverted at times (Leviathan is the mere pet of the God of the Book of Job, not an equal foe of the sort ANE gods fought for cosmic dominance).
God is the combination and crescendo of potent / persuasive felt language
I like to think of monotheism as an argument that just got out of hand.
The Biblical authors wanted to center Israel around the worship of one God and one Temple so they did what others in the region did and made him a national God and dissed other gods constantly.
When that didn't work they just kept doubling down and making God more powerful and having him absorb more and more of the portfolios of other gods to eliminate the competition. Gods are explained in terms of phenomena people care about (like fertility and rain, there's a reason Baal was popular) but it's more that Yahweh just kept cannibalizing existing gods and metaphors than they made those up for him. Which is why he's discussed in so many contradictory ways.
The Israelites eventually found that the most stable equilibrium was denying even the existence of all other gods by positing a maximal, singular God that unified all those portfolios instead of just calling them wussies.
But the elements that were persuasive in their original milieu are still there, despite any theological awkwardness they may produce.
and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men.
- Why did "small" sneak its way in here? Is this an established thing with people who suffer from GD?
- This argument always runs into the "what about the twinks?" question. What about a feminine gay man? They should risk rape unless they get marked as a GD haver?
- Why are whatever solutions we use to prevent rape for all men not good enough? And, if not, why shouldn't they be improved for all men instead of letting some men secede?
- I don't actually know that we can know that these men "wouldn't hurt a fly". We separate men from women precisely because we can't know or we'd use this screening method to have mixed-but-peaceful prisons. Mental illness doesn't make men harmless, especially to women who are weaker and less aggressive. There's an argument that they could be less violent than the median male inmate and yet still be violent enough to change female prisons negatively for female inmates.
I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.
I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.
I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.
Tanista
1yr ago
That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes
The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.
It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.
The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.
Tanista
1yr ago
Speaking of hotfixes:
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did.
I used to take this for granted too but then you look at something like student loans where women hold more debt and take longer to pay it off and student loan forgiveness is argued for specifically as a salve for women and I wonder.
Although women make up more than half of the college educated labor force, per the Pew Research Center, women still face barriers to paying off their loans due to the gender wage gap, a lack of generational wealth and gender norms placed on women.
If all of these jobs better fit a woman's temperament why can't they just pay their loans?
Male roles may have been liquidated by modernity but not necessarily just because the inevitable march of technology making lifting things and whacking people less useful. The modern liberal state may have given us a little push.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman.
Strawman or the bailey?
If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?
Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses).
If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.
Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.
"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens
As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.
My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.
There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.
As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.
So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).
Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.
There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.
Tanista
1yr ago
But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.
Yes. That would be the fallacious version.
As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.
Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.
Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided with both the low visibility of trans people and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.
And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.
We only have a couple of examples but...
Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."
If blank slateism is true, yes.
That's kind of the problem. The ideological fortress is of use to larger groups than just the trans activist segment that captured it so now people don't have a way to disentangle themselves from ridiculousness like Tickle without losing their motte entirely. And they haven't found it because
That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy
If they were only attacking the fallacious version of that argument then trans activists would have a thinner wedge to work with. You can accept that it's ludicrous to assume static or totalizing gender roles without accepting that gender has nothing to do with sex (which is where we are) or the sort of doctrinaire blank slateist/anti-sex-based role position that came to dominate.
It also only has to hold for a couple of months
(Before someone says that Kamala is no Obama)
Tanista
1yr ago
Admirable goals. But if you can't actually pay for your rumspringa yourself some pragmatism has to seep in.
Maybe two years of fornicating and drinking and less debt to worry about is a good compromise.
Tanista
1yr ago
Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).
I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.
But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.
I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids
Tanista
1yr ago
Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.
And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.
Putting aside deeply illiberal solutions that both sides refuse to even consider, it seems like the most viable solution suggested by your post is to simply cut down on college as a necessary rite of passage.
How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?
Tanista
1yr ago
He said this before getting Man of Steel:
Everyone says that about [Christopher Nolan’s] Batman Begins. ”Batman’s dark.” I’m like, okay, ”No, Batman’s cool.” He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go.
So did the producers push him in that direction or did they find the man for the job?
My intuition was that Batman vs Superman was a studio mandate to rush the shared universe, Snyder tried to do some comic grimdark/Frank Miller inspired stuff and couldn't pull it off.
Just as, iirc, a lot of Watchmen fans argue he didn't get Watchmen either. There were a lot of complaints about Snyder insisting on the violence and gore itself being cool for their own sake so this isn't even new. But obviously far more people feel invested in Batman and Superman than Watchmen so they didn't make as much of an impact.
Ironically it even managed to ruin gravitas by proxy in making the DC films, Snyder and all that copy him double down on seriousness to insane degrees.
Nothing about Snyder's work before DCEU implies that he had to take a turn to go where he did. I think that's just who he is. I sometimes even appreciate his clear disdain for certain allegedly immovable parts of DC canon
And who he is is someone who should never have been given control of an entire cinematic universe. Zach Snyder being allowed to act as some sort of auteur or writer-director when his best works like 300 were mainly strong on visuals and he needs at least two tries to make a decent superhero movie is one of the more amazing coups in Hollywood
He really must just be a great guy to be around.
I said she wasn't stupid. Which is what's implied by wondering how an econ student could make these basic mistakes.
She's not making mistakes, she's pandering. We know this because of how she treats something she has even more experience with. She was openly contemptuous of a (very stupid imo) left-wing view up until it suited her politically. Whatever else she is, she wasn't stupid enough to believe that view when she actually had to enforce the law and practicality mattered. She simply doesn't care now that her job is different.
aren't you somewhat responsible for greatly strengthening the existing circuitry that links that visual cue to a state of arousal and sexual reward?
It may be true but most men won't perceive it that way because our perception is that abstaining will just make you more distracted. This is actually the most common advice: fast long enough that you redirect the inevitable energy towards something useful. The idea of retaining your sexual energy has taken on a life of its own amongst the porn-saturated via NoFap but seems to predate it so the idea was out there.
It's unlike chocolate, so I think the condemnation might actually be stronger from the other direction: you're going to feel arousal anyway. The problem is you're associating sexual arousal with an ultimately fraudulent reward and powerlessness, which heightens the anxiety that comes with feeling sexual desire.
She was also a prosecutor and actually did that job for years and actively mocked left-wing views on crime before turning around when BLM was big and downplaying her experience.
It's not a mystery and she's not stupid, just a weathervane.
Because all other gods are dead. Yahweh's deeds were his resume in a competitive market. But the market has shifted.
The choice now is one God of varying flavors or the No-God. Everyone arguing for the former takes divine potency as fact so the debate is on other lines (whether God is moral, which God is coherent). The No-God simply puts forward a rival theory to divine potency. You have to start with philosophical argument and assertions to even make room for God.
I suppose the more naive and unpoisoned by modernity a religious community is , the more we should expect unabashed glorying in God's potency. Some people do still think hurricanes are just a form of divine moralizing so...
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