WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
6mo ago
I think it's difficult to understate just how important the effect of Stalin's takeover the Soviet Union had on American/European Marxist circles. There would forever after be two strains of thought that were perfectly intuitive and did not feel at all like a cop out.
1
Marxism works but starting it in Russia made no sense. The whole point is that Capitalism builds the capitol base and then once enough production exists only then do we shift how that production is distributed. But the only place Marxist revolutions happened were in Russia & China among peasants. This was an obvious corruption of original Marxism. It actually literally has never been tried.
For a modern day case of these, see Freddie DeBoer. The point isn't whether its true. It's whether or not a reasonable person who hasn't spend over 9000 hour studying microeconomics might find such an argument convincing.
2
It was going to work until Stalin betrayed the cause. A uniquely evil man. He corrupted Lenin's vision. He turned on all the original revolutionaries. He corrupted what would have otherwise been a functioning system. In this mindset the horrors of early War Communism don't exist. The USSR was going to work! Just look at those improvements in literacy rates! And Magnitogorsk! And all these rights that they had paper. But I'm not a fool. I know it didn't work. But just read Animal Farm. Or look at the Spanish Revolution. It's right there in how we were all working together until that bastard Stalin screwed it all up. I'm a communist because I approve of Lenin/Trotsky/Kropotkin's ideals, whose revolution was stolen away from them, but obviously i'm not a "Tankie". Those types of violations by the USSR is just proof of how Stalin messed it all up going forward.
And that's pretty much all you need. To the person who thinks in such a manner it doesn't feel like a cop out. It feels like sophistication. You can't even distinguish between communism, socialism, marxism, trotsky permanent revolution, Louis Blanque-ism Guaranteed Employment, Rosa Luxemburg thought, or Progressive Labor Union Revisionism for the Purposes of Getting Workers Used to Working in Committees Until the Actual Revolution. You just call all of it Marxist. But I know better. It's not that communism doesn't work. I know that in reality it was betrayed.
You don't even need to be personally invested in it all. You just need a disposition towards "everyone should have enough" and a smart friend who can answer your occasional question (or a youtube parasocial relation) and who can give you explanations that feel plausible. Enough to make you saudade for a world you've never known. Enough to make you put on the Soviet Anthem and smile on occasion before your next shift. Enough to make you call yourself a Marxist even though you don't think anything will change anytime soon. And then you listen to someone call Obama a Communist because he wants to create a.....marketplace for healthcare. And you roll your eyes and smile.
Because you know that real communism has never been tried.
From Bauhaus: A Graphic Novel, pg 50-54
"I saw them all, their faces as they crossed the threshold, their hands gilding over the textiles searching for the weave, their eyes reflected in the chrome plating as they let their certainties fall away....their certainties about what a house is, or an object...what a human being is, when there is no gender. In the 'Triadic Ballet' I want to show people move in space. The geometric forms represent the rationality that humanizes and merely stages physicality....and I wondered if, when they left the last room and went back out into the world, they would be able to look at it with the same revolution in their eyes.
The exhibition didn't convince the Landtag, which decided to shut me down: too expensive they said...but I was uncomfortable politically: the right-wing parties won the elections and we were bizarre and revolutionary creatures with socialist leanings. The masters' contracts were not renewed, and the Weimar experience ended on the first of April 1925. I was only six years old! Isn't it the same for everyone? You can still become anything but they tell you you're wrong....that you need to color within the lines, that geometry offers only a limited series of shapes, that words are to be written on the lines of a page. The control exerted by the outside world forces you to define your identity, while all you want is to experience yourself in the world. Your freedom is frightening for them.
This a very common sentiment in extremist left circles. Anarchists in particular. Shifting aesthetics first in order to subvert the current social order and show people that another world is possible. It's not intended to be demoralization, no one actually sits down and goes bwahaha now I will make the world ugly to demoralize my enemies. It's exaltation. Revolution. Religious ferver. It's the sincere conviction that they are breaking people out of Plato's cave and liberating them.
Destroy 2000 Years of Culture is a prayer, not a conspiracy.
I want to be clear though. This doesn't mean the average person making this kind of art is thinking in these terms. That's an entirely separate issue. It's more like how the average conservative might say 'washington is holding back Americans with too much red tape' and then when you keep digging at where that phrase came from you eventually find a Mises Libertarian arguing with a Ancap. Or how a normal left leaning person might say "Healthcare is a human right. We have to help everyone" and then when you keep digging at their phrase you find a Kropotkin-poster arguing with a Noam Chomsky fan about whether the point is to liberate humanity from all Social Exploitation or if it's about liberation from all Material Inequality which Generates Social Exploitation. The tails tug at the core.
WestphalianPeace
12d ago
This is a great list of narratively strong games but I think this misses something unique in how video games deliver narrative. The interactive nature of video games means that the reader/player can experience narrative through gameplay itself. Video games are distinct in this player experiential means of narrative communication.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for example has the player personally experiencing being beaten down by it's punishing combat system, then getting passingly good at that system, getting over their fears within that system, and then experiencing mastery over it. The endboss line "Hesitation is defeat" is not just a good character line, it is an expression of what is being experienced by both the in-game character and also the player. You the player have to get past your desire for safety and instead fight on the knifes edge, and overcome. Your experience mirrors the character's own experience of repeated trial, overcoming of the desire for safety, and success. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
Victoria 2 has no narrative at all. It's a grand strategy game full of mathematical expressions of interest groups, migrations, military power, & prestige. But through repeated games you the player experience the narrative of what it means to be a nation amidst Great Power politics. Of the iron faced incentives structures set by the world around you. Play as france and you may find yourself willing to go to war over this pointless piece of land in Africa no one had ever heard before called Fashoda just as an excuse to start a war to devastate a nation simply to avoid them overcoming you economically and subsequently militarily. So you have to go to war now, before it's too late. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
Frostpunk is a city builder that takes place in a steampunk Victorian Era cold driven apocalypse. There are a few dialogues to set the tone or inform you about what's causing the next crisis. But overwhelmingly the narrative is told through decision making. The first time you play (before repetition causes desensitization) you sit grim faced at each challenge. You may demand people work extreme hours with no rest. Children into coal mines. The butchery of innocent sick and wounded just to make room for the next batch and because it's not worth it to recover them when food is so low. The sincere temptation of dictatorship or religious fanaticism just to keep control of the populace long enough to make it to the next day. 'we can always loosen things up later' you tell yourself. Your jaw has been clenched for three hours without realizing it as you make Sophies Choice tradeoff decisions that you deem necessary because your people are all that's left and The City Must Survive. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
I think video games have a really powerful means of getting a person to emotionally understand a narrative or setting in a way that books and movies simply canot. It's different to read an idea or see it versus being personally constricted by a system and condemned to navigate a world within it's rules. So while I think your list is a fantastic set of games, a golden age even, I think your comment on decline since the ps4 overlooks how games more broadly can communicate narrative outside of the traditional considerations of dialogue or imagery.
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
I think one of the big issues is the old core playerbase were nerds who approached fiction from the point of view of External Immersion.
"What is this world? what is it's culture? How would their people approach things? What has the universe made clear is normal and what is abnormal"
This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"
Or they'll play fantasy mods (Anbennar) of Europa Universalis and not think twice about how every primary human faction is European inspired and fantasy races take up the entire rest of the world, creating and effective all European humanity. All with in universe expalantion of Orc slavery explained as reparations to humans for former Orc invasions. Because "well that's just what this universe is"
And this older nerd playerbase thrives on this. The actual diversity of settings is what's appealing about fiction and then their internal logic is to be followed through on.
But that approach to fiction is actually really rare! Most people are Inserters, not Immersers. They play games in order to insert themselves into a universe. What interests them is the challenge of achieving their mindset in each new circumstance. (sidenote: it's a matter of degree. not an either or.) To these people the setting itself is significantly devalued. There's nothing 'there' about making the Forgotten Realms setting stay in character with previously established lore. No instinct of dissonance. In fact each shift in the setting to better align with their perception of the world around them (and remember, most people have an astoundingly poor sense of what the demographics of any given country are. along with a complete inability to distinguish between what's normal in their local area vs the country as a whole) only makes more sense to these people. It feels more immersive for their insertions because it's more intuitive. And it's more intuitive because it's now more familiar. And that's normal.
Even though, personally speaking, I don't find very interesting.
WestphalianPeace
10d ago
https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg
80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.
High. The chances were high.
I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.
WestphalianPeace
10d ago
They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it. They are the ~1% approve at the end of any poll about do you prefer building A or building B.
People like Ozy really exist. They really do have actual disdain for things a statistically normal person finds beautiful. From Ozy's own self-description:
"One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures"
"However, art of this sort leaves me cold"
"The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. "
This is Joan Miro's The Birth of the World
To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.
In Malcolm & Simone Collins "A Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" they model sexuality with two polarities, one for intensity and one for Yes/No. So most people have an inborn strong intensity towards Bloated Corpses and that is often paired with a disgust reaction. Makes sense evolutionarily. But evolution is a blind idiot god without context. So sometimes the intensity meter stays the same but for the Yes/No marker the 1 becomes a 0, and they become sexually attracted to Bloated Corpses with all the intensity that most people are repulsed.
WestphalianPeace
10d ago
I'm really sorry if this post is too long. I hope it will be at least interesting. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'representing one's preferences in 2D'. But if you find me crude, unimaginative, and close minded perhaps this post will be morbidly fascinating for you. Regardless, I'm thankful for your pushback.
I think what people find beautiful has a basis that is like 80% human nature, 20% human culture. An extreme example of the influence of culture. Japanese teeth blackening!
But I would find it strange if every human culture recreated it. Black teeth don't touch on the human nature nerve ending. It's a cultural influence on aesthetics that seems to die out when not constantly reinforced.
Meanwhile on the human nature aspect I think each person's aesthetic sense is the same filter that applies to nature as it applies to art. Thing's arn't beautiful and then we discover them. It's the reverse. We have beauty preference that reward or discourage us when we find them. These preferences reveal to others what our individual dispositions towards the environment are.
In the beginning there is an advantage for living near running water. That advantage builds into a reward signal for things that indicate running water, like shinyness. "Find running water" is too complex but 'happiness chemical reward for seeing shiny thing' is simpler to build into our nature. So now we have a preference for shiny things and we encounter Jewels. It's a worthless hunk of rock but that doesn't matter. It activates the same 'reward shinyness' part of the brain that is contextless.
It's the old AI joke. "Instead of programming AI to make people happy, why not program people to like Hydrogen. Afterall, there's a lot of hydrogen."
There is a reason we don't get happy about hydrogen. And it's the same reason why people worldwide like shiny things.
So what's beautiful in nature vs what's beautiful in art? Well if our aesthetics are our human nature with individual variation, mediated by culture, then the answer is nothing. Its the same sense organ applying to both objects.
which is why autistic people love Brutalism.
see the following image
On the left is a heat map showing where someone with a typical brain will focus their attention. On the right is how someone with ASD views the same house. Here's what Sussman and Chen state in the article:
Notice how a person on the autism spectrum, at right, avoids details like windows (which might suggest eyes) while a typical brain instinctively goes straight for them, without conscious awareness.
Pause here for a second and imagine Jane Jacob's eyes on the street concept. It's comforting for me to walk down a street full of windows and houses with front porches and pleasant symmetry. I generally welcome the interaction with my neighbors and, while not creepy about it, can't help but glance over now and then to see if I can catch their eye. I think that is typical.
Now imagine that your brain doesn't work that way. Imagine that your brain is completely overwhelmed by the eyes on the street. It's too much to take in, even just the buildings. Or it's an uncomfortable reminder that someone (unfriendly) may be tracking you. Now, is it possible you'd find some comfort — or perhaps just a noticeable reduction in tension — passing a building that instead looked like this?
So there is an instance of nature very strongly affecting preferences. Normal people like buildings that align with our caveman brain's constant search for faces. Austistic people hate making human eye contact. So now the whole world gets to endure Brutalism.
But then there is culture! It can't be thrown away entirely. Turns out we can break people's brains with enough repeated influence. My sincere apologies for the extended quote but it bears repeating in full. Bold parts were added in by me.
In Architectural Myopia: Designing for Industry, Not People we find that
, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that “architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.” The researchers traced this disagreement to well-known cognitive differences in the two populations: “Evidence that certain cognitive properties are related to building preference [was] found.”
Training to See a Parallel Reality.
Training is required to induce “architectural myopia” in a student, as the research suggests. The reason is that the peculiar industrial aesthetic now considered normal within architecture runs contrary to our physiological needs (Salingaros, 2006). We humans have evolved inside a complex, fractal, structurally hierarchical environment, so that our neurophysiology responds positively to and receives sensory pleasure from natural environments. Traditional architecture and urbanism in all of their multiple variations manifested over millennia and across geographical distances precisely follow this natural geometry, which is why our brains recognize them and respond to them.
Training adds additional layers of preference on top of our instinctive, evolved responses. Architecture school invests several years conditioning the student to respond preferentially to abstract industrial forms and surfaces. At the same time, this industrial aesthetic is touted as superior to all previous, traditional expressions of built geometry. Elaborate theories of history and technology are given as apologias for this now-correct aesthetic, solely appropriate to this wholly unique climax period in history (Banham, 1960; Giedion, 1941; Gropius, 1965). All of this effort creates individuals that see things differently from the rest of us.
This long-term program of psychological conditioning, has, since its development in the original Bauhaus, turned out to be extraordinarily effective. An architect experiences the world in a very different manner to any person who has not undergone the same training. By internalizing preferences derived from abstract images that override our neurological structure, over time, responses become automatic and crowd out other, more innate responses. The result of this aesthetic hegemony is the phenomenon of “architectural myopia”, an interpretation of reality that conforms to ingrained beliefs.
In those situations where emotion isn’t triggered instinctively by human physiology, our evolutionary makeup is not decisive and can be bypassed. Thus, in front of drawings or designs on a computer screen there is sufficient emotional isolation, and an architect judges the industrial, minimalist, “contemporary” designs positively as isolated objects possessing a pleasing clarity and monadic legibility.... At the same time, anything that resembles the complexity of traditional architecture is automatically judged negatively (its meaning is supposedly associated with reactionary or philistine culture) and it is rejected without any reflection.
In summary, yes. What's beautiful in art is what's beautiful in nature. It's the same instinct, influenced by culture. When you reveal a beauty preference you unavoidable reveal an aspect of how you perceive the world. All that's left is to discover is what percent of that is your predisposition or cultural molding.
WestphalianPeace
9mo ago
I'd recommend Ross Douthat's book "To Change the Church" to get a good sense of that. Either in text or audiobook. It's really quit the engaging read, even for a non-Catholic or even non-believer.
Rather than an outright schism a soft coup looks more like manipulating public opinion through journalists ignorance, manipulating bureaucracies hiring (your ideological allies) & firing (or doing the catholic equivalent of "promoting" someone to Siberia), using ambiguous statements that motte (castle) in the text but bailey (field) in public understanding until the lay public is so unaware your old bailey (field) wins the battle for assumed public opinion. Use edge cases to create extreme exceptions to a long standing principle, then expand that principle to other comparable but less serious edge cases. Then after enough time has passed don't talk about the long standing principle at all and instead explain that it would just be hypocritical to allow exceptions for these extreme edge cases but not to those more common cases.
As an example of how long standing doctrine can become completely irrelevant to the common believer until that new generation forms the next generation of deciding authorities, see American Catholic Opinion on Birth Control. A mere 8% of American Catholics believe birth control is morally wrong. If you point this out to those other 92% of Catholics they won't explain in detail why they humbly disagree with the Church. They'll claim there is no disagreement! The most common reaction will instead be an aghast disgust over your bigotry in claiming something so ridiculous as that the Catholic Church opposes contraception. And the coup is complete.
Nearly half of Catholics don't even know Catholicisms distinction regarding the Eucharist. Athanasios may stand like a rock against the world. But the average member is not Athanasios.
To pull off a coup as Pope you have to make it look like you never pulled off a coup. Everything has to be continuity. But with the right voters added here, the right ambiguous statements added there, you can pull off a coup. You can alter unchanging Dogma because you convinced regular people that you never actually altered anything. It was always there the whole time.
WestphalianPeace
19d ago
Despite the creator's pseudonym being Thames (implying British) I suspect the creator is actually Canadian. Either Old Stock Anglo-Canadian or the 90's generation of Cantonese/Korean first gen Canadian. There's also a smaller but real possibility of earlier Indian immigrant family who moved to Toronto specifically to get out of India and now feels like the Old World is chasing after them.
There is a quip later in the video about Indians & Tim Hortons. That's a Canadian specific stereotype. Nobody from East Anglia or Texas would have strong associations about Tim Hortons. In the US the association would be between Indians and 7/11, Dunkin Donuts, or even Motel chains. The UK I'm sure has it's equivalent. But the association of first resort would not be Tim Hortons.
I therefor conclude that the creator was born and raised in Brampton, Ontario and born in 2000. Brampton was extremely European pre-90s, 70% European in 96', and 60% European in 2001. It's now 18% European (mostly retirees) and 52% South Asian. These are circumstances were people falling into hate-spirals become a real possibility.
When Algeria was willing to commit ethnic cleansing ("by suitcase or coffin") it's population of French Europeans in Algeria was ~10%. Demographic shifts can make people go into dark places.
I am, of course, making up the exact age and location out of the flimsiest of pretenses. But I'm thoroughly convinced this is just another propaganda effort in the ongoing Canadian ethnic tension that now exists.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
On further look
at your image "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by Mearsheimer probably shouldn't be on there. Mearsheimer is a thoroughly mainstream author. Anyone studying International Relations will have to contend with the Realist school of thought and Mearhsheimer is pretty unavoidable.
Likewise putting "On War" by Carl von Clausewitz on there is a bit like saying Sun Tzu's "Art of War" is a banned book. It's not just "Not Banned" it's prominent and pushed. The casual reader will like Sun Tzu's small chapters writing style far more than Clausewitz's "let us consider War from Idealism first principles and also here's 200 pages on Napoleonic era reconnaissance" (skip the Napoleonic stuff, but don't ignore the Idealism. It actually important to his argument) But On War is still literally the first book that will be presented to anyone studying the Europe & it's descendants Way of War.
At most there is a vague sense of "Clausewitz is outdated because he deal with states and not non-state actors". But On War is the elephant in the room at any given time. No one gets a masters by saying "ehhh clausewitz is basically still correct". That doens't indicate any intellectual development. So while there is a bevy of people criticizing Clausewitz that certainly doesn't rise to the level of Banned Book.
WestphalianPeace
5mo ago
The Afghanistan Papers revealed that if the truth is sufficiently awful people will refuse to believe it or discuss it because they are convinced it's more plausible that racially biased people are making unfounded accusations.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1457753480840372231 (US forces unable to stop child rape and because 'it's their culture')
"Homosexuality was taboo among adults but it was not uncommon for afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as "man-love Thursday" because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn't want to alienate allies in the fight against the taliban"
I also recall an old Foreign Affairs article that made an addendum to why it happens on Thursday. Broadly speaking, many Afghans believed that prayer on the Islamic holy day, friday, cleansed them of their sins. So if you rape someone on Thursday, pray on friday, you are then clean and worthy of paradise on saturday. Of course the sin was the homosexuality, not the rape.
What makes it doubly insane is that Bachi Bazi was a source of illegitimacy among the wider populace. which means destroying it would have an actually removed a source of Taliban legitimacy.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1366444372972081153 (bachi bazi as source for taliban support)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZD1UIU0AE8WxU?format=jpg&name=large (Afghan governor was a drug dealer and tyrant but his province was actually stable)
When the US was stuck between a hardliner who could keep the peace and total anarchy it was incapable of biting the bullet as a matter of policy. If stuck between a plan that had proven successful but icky or a plan that would be unsuccessful but sounds good it went with the sounds good.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZE6_TUUAI9rdH?format=jpg&name=large (US aid would filter through contractors over and over again until about 1/20th actually made it to the country)
Literal actual corruption would have been more efficacious then what the US did. The US would spend outrageous amounts of money on domestic actors and not make any use of the purchasing power difference of Afghanistan being dirt poor. Who do we have to thank for this lighting money on fire policy? Thank staunch conservative senator Jessie Helms.
"...because when the soviet union fell apart we had to cut a deal with Jessie Helms to continue our aid programs. The deal with Jessie Helms was that we would spend the money in the United States. We would buy American products, American grain, American consultants, American Security experts, and they would implement our aid programs."
Finally just for a final kicker. Rural Afghanistan could be so isolated that it would literally inbred. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDr8Z6lVIAMK_O6?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 ("I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs" he said in an Army oral-history interview.)
That's a lot of scattered stuff. So lets return to my central point. When the truth is so awful people will take accurate descriptions of the situation as proof of racist evil rather than of tragic suffering.
It would have been tragic but true to describe Afghanistan as a land of inbred child rapists who believe that Islam means that if you commit a sin on Thursday then on Friday its cleansed away. That stability at the hand of tyrants would have been more valuable for producing peace than Western european style metrics about the percentage of women in parliament. And that literal direct bribery and corruption applied at the point of local discretion by the military would have been order of magnitude more effective than actual policy. And that the cause of restricting the military's discretion and demanding Made in America contractor corrupt fiscal suicide was due to a Conservative Senator.
But could you have said that? Does anyone believe that you could walk around in polite society and talk frankly about such issues and how we are going to approach solving them. Could you ever imagine Obama making destroying culturally acceptable religiously justified child rape as his first priority in an hearts & minds strategy?
Twitter personality InverseFlorida invented the term Sanewashing to describe how people watered down "Abolish the Police" into something sane sounding. That people would get angry at you for saying "Abolish the Police means exactly what it says and the people who first started saying it are very clear about this" because those people had actually come to believe that X actually meant Y. People who sanewash really believe their revised version of a statement to be the real meaning of the original statement.
The Afghanistan papers showed that people will Sanewash away not just Insanity, but also Evil. If forced to confront uncomfortable truths they will not just disbelieve a statement but they will go through a process of putting it through a sanewash sieve. Once they have their watered down pseudotruth they will then use that 'truth' as proof that the actual truth is just a racist overexaggeration.
Now consider how many people are unwilling to believe the accusations that Hamas uses hospitals as munitions bunkers & military HQ's. And you will be unable to unsee the instinct to Sanewash Evil.
WestphalianPeace
10d ago
Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.
In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.
For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.
I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.
WestphalianPeace
10d ago
Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.
I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.
So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.
Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.
Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.
Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
I would back On War if only to get it across to those seeking power that the point is to achieve a goal. it's to instantiate the world you desire. Too many find power, exercise that power, and then are befuddled when they didn't get what they want.
"But I won. I won the fight/beat the army/socially humiliated the opponent. Why don't they give up?"
well, if you didn't get what you want then you didn't actually win now did you? Art of War is great for impressing upon someone that they should maximize their chances of winning On War is great for impressing upon someone that they should know what winning looks like ahead of time and then pursue victory. Not the other way around.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
most of what I see on the list is ignorable drek. And most manifesto's make for awful reading. At best useful to seeing the difference between their literal words vs how the media represents them.
That said On War is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants to understand war beyond a peasants sense of "Who are the Goodies & Who are the Baddies/Why don't we just nuke everyone as a first resort?" The Michael Howard translation is fine.
Democracy The God that Failed has awful prose and relies a lot on buying in to Austrian Economics but is useful as self-refinement for exactly why one ought to support our current end of history style of government. Either walk away from with a real sense of the unavoidable flaws in democracy, convinced that there must be a better way. Or alternatively confront it's arguments and be made tall by fully understanding the steel man motte for democratic governance.
Or if you want something more readable just go with Caplan's little discussed "Myth of the Rational Voter". People always bring up his education book and his open borders book but his 'Democracy barely works in practice and the academic theory for how it works is hilariously unrealistic' just sits there quietly.
WestphalianPeace
12d ago
There is also the issue of budgets. It costs more and more to make a video game. How big did a studio need to be to make a JRPG for the ps2 vs how big does it need to be for the ps4. As it gets more costly to make a console game the harder it is to justify taking a risk on an interesting narrative. I loved Specs Ops: The Line and I maintain that it's the best way to read Heart of Darkness. But I simply can't imagine it getting made in this environment.
PC gaming is getting better and better though, if only through accumulation over time. And if you consider visual novels like Utawarerumono to count as video games then things have never been better. More top 5% of visual novels are out then ever before. I remember when it was regarded as an unprecedented victory when we got VNDB's 3rd most highly rated VN (Muv Luv Alternative), let alone the more obscure stuff, or legendary H games like the Rance series, Evenicle, or Dohna Dohna.
On a more narrative stories with plots, etc point we did get Disco Elysium, which was pure lightening in a bottle never to be regained. If you have not played it before it simply must be experienced. Suzerain may count, although it's characters are more expressions of political factions that exist and the real character is the nature of Turkiye post WW-2. But books have used individuals to express such situations for a very long time now.
Overall I think both your initial argument and your critique of my own are strong.
Perhaps it's that when graphics were bad and gameplay restricted that one of the only options left was to rely on strong writing. But now that graphics are good pretty much everywhere and gameplay design is a fairly well mastered craft there is just not as much pressure to perform on narrative. But that's just an intuition.
WestphalianPeace
12d ago
I think we need to make a clear demarcation between race vs ethnicity even if the one often incorporates the other. The old Yamato Nadeshiko trope is a clear example of something that's like 90% behavior, 10% physical attributes.
So personally I think ethnicity groups are constructive/useful. I think a physical attribute description like race is only useful when it correlates with ethnicity with such overlap that it's meaningful information at a glance. People want the ethnicity information so badly that in monoracial societies people often play shibboleth games to figure out what someone's sub-identity is. Naming conventions/accent is a common one. My sister worked in a town that specifically renamed itself so that anyone who pronounced it as it's naturally read would be immediately outed as an outsider. To pronounce it 'correctly' you had to pronounce it incorrectly. Done after the American Civil War to identify Yankees. And I've heard that in Ireland a way to checking if someone is protestant or catholic is ask them what school they went to growing up. No idea if that information is outdated or just rumor though. But it illustrates the point.
On a racial level if a 3rd generation japanese-american visited Japan I think it's perfectly reasonable for the local Japanese to initiate conversation with him in Japanese after a quick glance and then be surprised when he only speaks English. But it would also be reasonable if the native Japanese looked at the 3rd gen, had a second to process all the other information, the manner of dress, hair style, posture, gait, social manners, nearby company, and concluded 'I bet that's an American'
There is also one other issue of identity groups being useful. And that is the tragedy of victimization on the basis of ones attributed race/ethnicity by others. As illustrated in the movie Operation Finale. A young woman is unknowingly courting the son of Adolf Eichmann. When Israeli agents explain to her that she's at risk to she protests that she and her family aren't Jews, her grandfather was Jewish but her father converted and they are good Catholics. To which the agents respond rightfully 'you think that matters to him?'.
I think it's useful, inevitable even, for people to form identity groups based off of mutual aid against threats they each can't avoid by disclaimer.
I hope my writing is precise. This is such an awful topic to discuss because of the constant ambiguous 2 step people perform going back and forth between race, ethnicity, and individual's position in race-ethnic-cloud-space.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
I'd be interested to see also a list of effectively banned videos related to these books. Extremist groups often create video's arguing their worldview and these video's often veered into the mixing together seemingly unrelated ideologies. It's a combination of fascinating and hilarious. Imagine, for example, seeing a video on Northern Irish Loyalist extremism and then suddenly the video starts explaining the necessity of a Land Value Tax. Incredible.
Or if in the midst of a Kahanist speech there was some side ramble against the Israeli government because of the importance of environmental regulations on water usage for sustained economic use.
If anyone else remembers, there was a time in early ISIS when they spooked the world by virtue of having a good media game instead of Al Qaeda style grainy shaky cam in the mountains. They produced a video explaining how after ISIS will fix the economy by brining back the Gold (Dinar) Standard in resistance the Federal Reserve. It is inadvertently hilarious/voyeuristically fascinating as they go back and forth between ancient history lessons, quotes from the Quran about weights & measures, and Free State Project tier screeds against the Federal Reserve. All in English.
You can still find it on Internet Archive (views: 150) but it's otherwise effectively scrubbed from the internet.
I can't help but find such absurdities to be interesting to collect.
WestphalianPeace
4mo ago
It's not everyday I get to use so appropriately so I couldn't help but comment.
It's led to the most hilarious accusations though.
Turns out that if you say "maybe follow a norm where you don't interfere in the internal affairs of another country and they agree to do to same to you" you'll find yourself accused of being both ultra far left and ultra right wing
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
"Seeing like a State" continues to stay relevant.
Interesting stories, fandom goodwill, and developer reputation continue to be the illegible benefits of the varied forest biome. All sacrificed for a cadastral map of Norway Spruce accessible to investors who can only work by algorithm.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
Imagine being one of the most combed over subjects of all time, to the point where people use your field as an example of ground so well trodden there is nothing left to say, and then someone unrelated walks in an discredits a major source all because he got super into early 00's internet religion fights.
WestphalianPeace
6mo ago
Have you ever considered reading the War Nerd translation of the Illiad? I confess to not having read the original poetic translation. But I found myself literally spontaneously guffawing and feeling as though relaxed next to a campfire storyteller in his novel format retelling. Sensations that I'm not sure are as easily flow-into-able in the more high brow accurate translations.
That said I'd like to read it in the original someday. Do you stand by the Fagles translation for the average man?
WestphalianPeace
11d ago
I use race to point towards someone's uncontrollabe physical features. People generally default to height, hair colour, and skin colour but this also includes internal features like pelvic tilt affecting butt shape.
I use ethnicity to mean culture, language, & upbringing. But culture almost always includes an accounting of racial features. A Japanese Beauty is largely a social construct, but it includes notions of long straight black hair. Mormon face is apparently a thing. It would be strange to read accounts of "the ideal Dutch beauty" of the 12th century and find requirements for Afros, even if the other 90% just describes social virtues. Kaufman points out that while many cultures place a value of skin lightness relative to their own norm, they also find the extreme paleness of Europeans to be ugly.
So ethnicity accounts for race, but race is only at most a statistical indicator for someone's ethnicity.
I'd say your personal ethnicity has drifted away from the broader Moroccan core. Different cultures have different notions of what's within their cultural cloud vs what goes beyond the boundary. There are many accounts of people born and raised in Japan still being ostracized as 'not really japanese' because they don't fullfill 100% of all expectations of what it means to be Japanese. Many settler-colonial societies like the US & Canada meanwhile have a much more open conception of what it means to be American. Of course these self-conceptions can massively shift overtime, but there's always a self-conception. I don't know how expansive the Moroccan conception is but i'm sure it's something you've navigated & negotiated about with both your family and with strangers.
I was born in Canada but came to the US in my adolescence. When I go home everyone immediately comments on how American I've become. But most Americans didn't grow up being told to 'Go Back Where You Came From'. And every Remembrance Day I'm reminded of my difference from the typical American. Meanwhile my Jamaican-Canadian-American coworker complains about she feels racially alienated living in America. She misses Jamaica where everyone looks like her. But she's culturally a much cleaner fit into the American mainstream than I am.
WestphalianPeace
26d ago
If you are a mostly-lurker and you have that itch that crosses the line that stops you from posting it's often something others either appreciate the thought behind or passion behind.
So congrats! You are now quite literally in the top percent of posters! Tens of thousands of lurkers. Thousands of posters. Dozens of AAQCs.
The vast majority of this forum is atheist/agnostic. Some are Christian. But the numbers have to be seen to be believed
Source: Tracingwoodgrains's First Annual Survey, N = 885
Agnostic: 23%
Other Atheist 13.6%
Atheist Humanist 27.8%
Atheist Antitheist 12.7%
Making the total non-believer population round nicely to 77%. A little bit more if you include those who put down things like "catholic but lazy, not really believing" or "Taoist".
A census of what percent of the US is atheistic is difficult to pinpoint. An atheistic secular Jew may decide when asked on a polling question that his religion as ethno-religion is more important then a discreet theological claim and thus when the pollster asks "what religion are you" he answers Jewish. Even though when later asked 'do you believe in a God" he responds with a clear no. So too may the no longer believing Catholic who raises their kid in the church and keeps their thoughts to themselves because their Catholicism is too intertwined with their ethnicity to be unwoven. There is no contradiction here, just note that how big or small you want atheists to appear does depend on what precisely you are asking.
But for the simple "what religion are you" question. "Atheist" got 2% in 2007 and 4% in 2023. Source: Pew Research 2023 National Public Opinion Survey
What makes this forum so outrageously non-representative compared to the US population as a whole is not only that 4% vs 77% number, but also that the First Annual Motte survey also asked "what religion were you raised in". 30% were raised broadly non-religious. Meaning the average Motteizen isn't just non-religious, they are someone who was immersed and walked away. They say there's no zealot like a convert and I think this applies just as well to deconversion.
So if this forum has 3x as many explicitly anti-theists as the atheist population of the US as a whole and population here is more atheistic by literally 15x as much then your question transforms into something a little bit different. It's not just 'why does this forum broadly...' but rather 'why is a forum of this specific belief breakdown treating religion with such respect'
And for that I return us to perhaps the source. In favor of Niceness, Community, And Civilization, by Scott Alexander
Or as Our Own Tracingwoodgrains brought up iwhen trying to explain this place in On Mottes and Mythologies
What we've all participated in constructing here is a precious little creature. I take seriously the horrific implications of why treat them with respect at all.
I find this forum to be a civilizational candle in the dark in these ircivilizational times. And that means taking the religious among us here seriously. If we are excessively demure to them then that is only a reason to expand that sensibility to others, not to deny them that environment in the first place. There is enough vitriol on every other website and in every other which side are you on boy shibboleth seeking interrogation-conversation. If you J'accuse this place of taking people who hold unsubstantiated beliefs ridiculed in greater rat-dom and engaging with them with seriousness of tone and tenderness of heart then I take your accusation in stride.
Yes. It is.
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