aiislove
2yr ago
What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender.
FWIW this is basically the exact rift between people who are "trans" and people who are "gender nonbinary" (or queer or otherwise gender nonconforming) in the LGBT world. I remember back on tumblr around 2010 a lot of gay/queer people were quietly shading transgenderism because being trans basically reinforces the gender binary whereas being queer/NB is something outside the binary. You don't hear about it much these days because trans is such a mainstream issue and people who aren't fully on the trans positive bandwagon are labeled TERFs or whatever, but the issue isn't really fully resolved.
aiislove
2yr ago
While I do know men who are married and accomplished, they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them.
I think that all men are neurotic and insecure. I have traveled and dated all over the world and every man you can imagine thinks they're a piece of crap at the end of the day. Every man in my family that I've known my entire life is like this. I think it's intrinsic to being a man. I have met men who are insanely hot with huge muscles and are, to me, the perfect example of masculinity and even they are extremely insecure. I am a thousand percent less neurotic and insecure than I was ten years ago but even today I'm just a snide comment away from spiraling again into self doubt. I think it's downstream of sexual selection, men are so driven to procreate and have sex that we lead ourselves into madness when we aren't actively fornicating. It sounds bad at first but taking this perspective has made me more empathetic to fellow men I meet. We're all self doubting. Dating as a gay man can be so dire because we often tear at each others' insecurities. It makes me have more respect for women who seem to be able to lend sanity to the male psyche in a way other men can't.
Also expanding this as a quick reply to @fivehourmarathon's post above, which I agree with strongly: He proposes that we need a new kind of masculinity we can perform or grow into. (I think that's a fair assessment of the point, correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it's a good proposal, however I think an easier fix would be to encourage people on an individual level to actually support and urge on masculine qualities in men. I can remember times people in my life have told me I have certain manly or masculine traits and it is a huge confidence boost for me to remember those times. I think we dislike making these comments as a culture because we don't prize masculinity as a trait.
aiislove
2yr ago
To steelman the distinction, I believe would be something like this:
Accusations that COVID was created in a lab by the Chinese is racist because it means to imply that Chinese people were either lazy, incompetent or malicious enough to create a lethal bioweapon that has caused many deaths, and so are to blame for these deaths.*
Accusations that COVID emerged because Chinese people eat weird shit is not racist because we are expected to understand that different cultures have different traditions and that framing their customs as being weird is the racist part so the non racist option is to give them plausible deniability because hey, it's weird to eat [pineapple on pizza or whatever else people from X culture eats] too.
Not saying I agree with the above, but I just feel the need to point it out in case anyone really didn't already understand the reasoning behind it. I do agree that your framing does make the distinction seem a bit ridiculous.
*Incidentally, now that tensions between the US and China are rising, federal opinions are starting to like the sound of this theory more and more.
aiislove
2yr ago
At the end of the day, from my experience, gender identity is downstream of self esteem and our ability to disentangle our desires for ourselves, from our desires for our partners, from what we believe we're capable of being for someone else.
Personally, I lacked self esteem growing up and had a lot of anxieties surrounding my ability to be masculine. (I'm a gay man.) So I was drawn to doing feminine things, which I also believed in my adolescent brain would attract a man (men are attracted to femininity right? Or so I thought.) But as I aged I realized that it's extremely gratifying to me to have my masculinity affirmed by other masculine men, and I don't really feel the gender anxiety I used to feel when I was younger. It is a matter of being more comfortable with myself than I was when I was younger. I too could have been trans, though I also felt physical horror at the thought of having my penis removed which helped me realize that perhaps it wasn't for me.
I wanted to see myself as an object of mens' desires, and I thought that being feminine would do so. If I was straight, perhaps I would want to see myself as the object of a woman's desires, and perhaps conflate the traits of femininity with what women desire, and so want to become feminine so as to possess those traits which women find desirable and become an autogynephile.
I love Veckatimest. Thanks for posting these, I enjoy reading them when you post them.
You might have already said this in another post and sorry if so, but about how many times have you listened to each album on your list? Are there ones that you've only listened to once or twice, or have you listened to each of them at least a handful of times?
aiislove
2yr ago
Conventionality is currently left wing.
Yes, and conversely, libertarianism is currently right wing. Hence the art world's complete identity crisis and breakdown over the past few years which I see as mainly a fracture between the elite old school liberal donor/patron class and the broke creatives who actually make art.
aiislove
2yr ago
I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race?
I absolutely abhor this line of thinking. I grew up in a red tribe setting and spent most of my adult life around blue tribe people and whenever they say this sort of thing it makes them look so, so bad in my opinion. People who watch Pawn Stars and NASCAR are poor and even if they're not poor have little to no cultural power in their own country, they have been dying by the thousands in drug overdoses, the rust belt has been on a downward spiral for a century, they have a poor quality of life and then have to be degraded by.... "theater kids" who rub their suffering in their faces. Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.
Actually, I think I've just hit at the crux of the issue of your original post. Theatre kids are, or have been for the past few decades, leftist because it's where elitism and cultural capital lie. Take away that construction and suddenly the creatives are free to switch sides, which I believe is already starting to happen as I've outlined in this post from a few months ago.
aiislove
2yr ago
Look at podcasts. Red Scare is the one most people are familiar with but The Perfume Nationalist is a really great piece of art and I strongly recommend it to anyone for an interesting right wing/libertarian take on art and culture.
aiislove
2yr ago
It would be wise attitude - one brief look at Chinese history demolishes all racist canards about "oriental slavish nature". How many peasant revolts in Europe came ever close to succeeding?
As an outsider currently in East Asia, it seems like EA cultures operate efficiently when the underclass are happy with the people ruling them. The structure of society is extremely hierarchical, I think the "slavish nature" you refer to basically reveals itself in the underclass's willingness to appease the powers above. East Asians also seem less inclined to desire power compared with other populations but rather seek status instead of power. It's extremely degrading for anyone to serve a master they despise which is why Chinese history is full of revolutions: these are the times when the underclass felt so degraded by the rulers that they overthrew them.
Conversely in the west, our entire culture is built around the message that we're all equal and that we all have an equal say in democracy and so on. East Asian culture doesn't seem to care about everyone having the illusion of equality, in fact they're fine with their place in society as long as the rulers are competent and protective and provide comforts and necessities, whereas the (post-?) Christian egalitarian west hates to imagine that we have any rulers other than ourselves.
aiislove
2yr ago
Great post, you've made lots of interesting points, thanks for sharing your perspective.
The weak exist at the mercy of the strong, so they are subservient to the strong.
Context, I'm a white American currently in East Asia (not China) and this exact point I think is the hugest difference between the mindset of rich countries and poor countries (or more specifically, today, rich old countries like USA and Japan and currently poor/recently poor countries like China, Thailand and South Korea.) There is more of a palpable understanding of the risks and dangers of reality in the cultures of poor countries that the US and our aging allies seem to be increasingly oblivious to. Your statement above reads as extremely low class and would probably be shocking to most people in the US but it's so blatantly true that I can't help but feel like any culture that understands it is bound to outcompete any that ignores it for political or social reasons.
it causes me regular frustration that the vast majority of westerners fail to grasp that they're working off of fundamentally different values, let alone understand that they will naturally optimize for those values. Chalk it up to the American belief in universalism[...]
Yes, that's exactly it. The west is too myopically focused on the belief that everyone is equal that they fail to even imagine that a civilization halfway around the world and thousands years older could possibly have a different set of values, for fear that they come across looking racist, when a bit of cultural pragmatism could really help steer things in a more sane direction.
aiislove
2yr ago
Why does there not seem to be much progress with AI in the field of music? I am loving all the AI art and chatGPT stuff coming out but I'm really looking forward to AI implementations in music that are interesting. As a layperson it seems like it shouldn't be too difficult, as music is really rather formulaic at its most basic form.
Most of the AI music stuff I've seen so far has been music generated completely from scratch by AI but that isn't very interesting to me. How far away are we from convincing style transfer for example? I'd love to be able to convert a song into another style of music.
A few years ago I found this soundcloud account but the music is pretty garbled and prone to overfitting. Just seems like miles away from AI in other domains so I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into why AI music seems to be lagging behind AI in visual art and chat.
aiislove
2yr ago
What happens to human tribes or primate populations in the wild when the average age of the populations become too high? What kinds of social dysfunctions emerge in these societies? Do the young start to neglect or abuse the old? Do they get outcompeted by rival tribes? Is it simply something that never happens in the wild?
Any thoughts on the "Chinese spy balloons"? I just did a search for "balloon" on here and couldn't find any discussion of it. Was wondering if anyone had any theories or points to share on the situation
aiislove
2yr ago
the only remaining alternative to punishing social transgression is mob rule, [...] even a purely-black community that does not police or imprison its members will eventually turn to lynching or exile.
Yes, exactly, that's why I find the concept of police abolition/defunding the police so frightening. It doesn't mean that suddenly there are no cops, it means that suddenly everyone is a cop.
aiislove
2yr ago
France modernized post WW2.
Wait.... Really? By what measurements? I always imagined they were as modern as the US or England prior to WWII and I'm surprised to hear that they weren't.
aiislove
2yr ago
Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution.
Was it this image I just found on the wikipedia entry for the French Revolution? If so, that would be (according to the caption on the entry) "the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back."
Actually, I suspect there probably is another version that depicts the Second Estate carrying the other two on its back ("a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy" as you describe) that is supposed to show the apparent situation after the revolution which you were shown, parodying the image I've linked to above
But either way, even after the French Revolution, France still had many rich people, right? Certainly the monarchy was abolished, and maybe the nobles were stripped of their titles or shunned from society or something, but somebody was still owning all those chateaux and vineyards and 18th century jewels, right?
aiislove
2yr ago
Actually, milk in grocery stores is kept at room temperature in Europe.... https://www.thehealthyjournal.com/faq/why-isnt-milk-refrigerated-in-europe
Granted it's kept refrigerated after opened in Europe. You should still refrigerate unopened milk in the US.
aiislove
2yr ago
That was my understanding as well. If that's the case I don't understand why everyone in Asia isn't getting sick all the time because I see massive amounts of food sitting in the room temperature sweet spot for bacterial growth all day long
aiislove
2yr ago
Is anyone here knowledgable about food safety? I really hate getting food poisoning. I've been in Asia for a few months and I'm surprised to see prepared foods including seafood and meat being left at room temperature at grocery stores and food markets all day long. I've seen this in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. In the US prepared foods are required to be refrigerated or heated at all times for food safety reasons.
I did some googling but didn't find any satisfying answers as to whether I personally (as an American) can safely eat food that's been left at room temperature for hours in grocery stores in Asia or not. One forum I read said that food producers (i.e. farmers) have much more strict regulations in East Asia than the rest of the world so it's not a concern. (They also said that in the US and other countries, food safety falls more on the end seller rather than the producer as in East Asia.) Another forum said that Asians are just more used to the contagions that would be present than foreigners so they don't get sick. Another forum mentioned something called "fried rice syndrome" which is a common food poisoning from leftover rice that hasn't been stored properly. If either of the latter two cases are true I think I should avoid eating food that's been sitting out but I'd like to get some advice here.
aiislove
2yr ago
Sorry to derail the thread but you keep talking about how Gen Z uses tiktok and reels and I'm still trying to figure it out. You said in another comment that (paraphrasing, not an actual quote) "when Gen Z wants to find a Mexican restaurant, they go to instagram and type in Mexican Restaurant [city name] and find what they're looking for." The other day I tried this out for looking for a barber shop in the city I'm in (a world class city which has hundreds of barber shops at least) and instagram didn't give me a single barber shop result in the city I'm in. I tried a handful of phrases and different types of searches (tags, accounts, whatever instagram let me search with.) I don't know if your claim was an exaggeration or a bad example or if I just misunderstood/misremembered what you said or what but I felt like a total boomer and immediately gave up and switched back to google maps like I've always done.
I think my post touched some nerves with you and @gattsuru (in this comment). You both have made long responses to my post and I think your replies mostly align with the mainstream position of homosexuals in polite Western society. But my post aligns with my own experiences. I opened it with a disclaimer that I was speaking for myself and if anyone objects then they're free to, which you two have done. I don't have the energy to respond line by line to either of your posts but if you want to talk more my DMs are open.
FWIW I used to buy into a lot of the points that you both make in your posts but the way I describe things in my post reflects the way I see things. I'm not going to walk back any of my opinions but I don't personally see most of the things in either of your posts as being informed by experience but rather as being informed by a more naive worldview that serves to paper over the less comfortable parts of the homosexual experience that many people have to live with.
To assert that my post is objectively wrong when I opened it with a disclaimer stating that it's based on my personal experiences and anecdotes is a bit irritating to me when I don't even assert that my opinions are objectively correct.
Is there anything in my posts that you're willing to admit rings true for you?
And not sure if this is poor form but I want to specifically respond to the last paragraph in your post:
Please just be careful about who you trust and what you believe on the Internet. The parent post sounds insightful but it's really just deep insecurity colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region. I hope that the pseudo-insight isn't what led to this being listed as a Quality Contribution.
I don't think it's really great for you to link to another comment where I'm being honest with my feelings and giving advice to people as evidence that I'm "deeply insecure." My posts and worldview are absolutely not "colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region," I have traveled many places and dated many men and am basing my worldview off of things I've seen that seem to be universally unifying. Rather I think that your framing of the three concepts (position, activeness and dom/sub) as well as the rest of your and @gattsuru's comments are characteristic of being colored by experiences specific to one moment in time in one geographic region (namely the present day USA/Western Europe or somewhere with massive US/Anglosphere influence) much more than mine are.
Homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE should not be presented as universal.
Fundamentally, I think that homosexual relationships in Turkey and the UAE, for example, help illuminate homosexual relationships everywhere. And that to not generalize based on homosexual practices in one culture, onto homosexuality in every culture, is small minded and essentially segregating whereas using my experiences from one culture to apply to the concepts of another is precisely how we can learn more about ourselves and each other.
what percentage of your partners would you say were Marriage Material?
If you're asking if they were MM for me personally, I'd say about 50% of the guys I dated were. (that's about 7 out of 14.) I think the other half weren't unmarriable for someone else but they weren't compatible with me.
How many Marriage Material partners did you have a shot with?
Mmmm, ten years ago, I didn't have a shot with any of them, but these days I think I have a good shot with almost all of them. (I attribute this to being more experienced, more confident, and more honest with myself about what I'm looking for)
This is actually a really astute take that I've never considered or even seen implied before. But it rings very true.
It also kind of reminds me of my weird opinion on drag queens. I can't stand drag queens because I instinctively feel an aggressive competitiveness when I see them. They are basically men performing femininity in a competitive (masculine) way. They make me mad because I feel like I could be a better drag queen than them, which is a really masculine response to have, but simultaneously it implies that I am good at performing femininity, which is an irritating realization I have to contend with.
If an MTF trans woman wants to join the 1% of beautiful women, in my mind, that is an essentially male/competitive worldview bulldozing the reality of the 99% of femininity and what it is to be female, in a way.
More options
Context Copy link