aiislove
1yr ago
You're in the honeymoon phase. Enjoy it now because in a few months or years you'll start to realize the money doesn't buy you happiness, class or status and you'll feel pretty desperate that you spent money on uhhh, the gemological institute rather than on improving the happiness of the people around you. And if you don't reach that point it's not great either
aiislove
2yr ago
I realized years ago that I can't stand commercial porn because it's impossible to imagine myself feeling empowered with the actors you see in commercial porn. I know from experience that if I'm around a bunch of super hot people, it doesn't make me feel super hot, it makes me feel super ugly. I seek out homemade porn that lets me envision myself empowered if I was in the room: porn featuring homeless men, for example, because I feel superior to them.
All porn is cuckhold porn.
Well, all sex acts are downstream of power. Cuckolding is an explicit illustration of power. I have engaged in anonymous sex with other men since I was 18, once I realized how power and domination work between men this became clear. The more dominant male performs the top role and the more submissive male performs the bottom role. (This is not just in anal sex but in oral sex and aggression dynamics and so on.)
I like to view straight cuck porn often, because I find the eroticization between the two males very exciting. I usually ignore the women when I view it. Seeing two straight men go through the same process that two gay men go through when they have sex is gratifying. Cuck porn is basically gay porn with a woman inserted, but the domination and power dynamic between two men is still the same, even when there is no sex act performed directly between the two men.
aiislove
2yr ago
social contagion as a result of peer pressure.
I think you're right. I noticed during covid that the mechanism by which this happens is never a positive one: it's never people independently standing up for their beliefs that they independently believe are positive, but rather, it is borne out of an indignation that their peers aren't being held to the same repressive standards that they're being held to.
Progressivism is a social contagion due to a crabs-in-the-bucket mechanism. It spreads because people are irritated that they can't get away with being racist or sexist or utilize their own privilege to benefit themselves and are thus driven to disempower everyone around them in the same exact way.
aiislove
2yr ago
I thought up my username in a few seconds, it's just a pun on "ai" meaning love in Japanese, plus I like making AI generated art, not because I want to use AI to game social interactions. I'm not a transhumanist.
You can always turn the difficulty dial to whatever you want.
That's not the problem, the problem is that there will be people using the difficulty dial to begin with, and that I will have to make the decision not to turn the difficulty dial, and we'll all have to live with the effects of there being a difficulty dial...... It's just a mess and I'm ready to live in the woods without it all. Using a dial to make yourself popular is the definition of cringe in my opinion, it is so pathetic, I'd rather be unpopular than using a transhumanist means to buy friends.
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
1mo ago
White people imagining themselves as physically the same as black people is leading to ridiculous situations like this. Asians don’t have this problem they just avoid living around black people. Seems to fundamentally stem from the arrogance of the white mentality and a reticence to admit to weakness even in the face of mountains of evidence of weakness. Black people assaulting whites is hideous because of the power imbalance and white people lack the humility to admit this to themselves, or to people who are willing to exploit this arrogance to their advantage.
aiislove
2yr ago
I empathize with your sentiment but I think it's a little bit uncharitable, I mean people had a valid right to be afraid of the virus as well. My father was high risk and ended up dying from it, so to paint everyone who freaked out about the virus as a sheeple is slightly insulting, though I realize that for the majority of people they didn't have nearly as much reason to worry. I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting or somewhere outside the US as the response from where I was in a more rural area wasn't nearly as sheeple-y as your post seems to indicate, plenty of people were rolling their eyes the entire time in the small town I was living in
aiislove
1yr ago
You really don't think you own a big truck and a gun because it makes you feel less small and scared? I don't buy it, I can't imagine a situation where I'd own things that project power and security for any other reason than it being rooted in fear. My father hoarded guns and ammunition before he died because he was a small man in a violent city and didn't have the skills or interest to move out of the only place he'd lived his whole life. I'm unconvinced that most red tribe people are attracted to guns because they are fun rather than because they are afraid of the government and the collapse of society and a host of other things that they have a right to be afraid of. How is it condescending to point out the horrors that people are facing? I'm just as likely to say the blue tribe are also small scared people in a big scary country but they are more prosocial and are throwing their bets in conformity and the safety of the crowd rather than the safety of self defense as the red tribe does.
Also pinging @The_Nybbler
aiislove
2mo ago
nerds
jocks
Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.
The Blind Men and an Elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. [from wikipedia.]
As someone who travels between cultures frequently, I find myself thinking a lot about this parable. Everywhere I go, different people in different places have developed different views and interpretations of the world, but the underlying fundamentals of reality remain unaffected by mere human perception and interpretation. In other words, the elephant remains the same regardless of the spot we’re poking at, rubbing against or cutting into.
I find myself reorienting what I experience and perceive from the viewpoint of my background and upbringing, shaped to some degree by my current context. When I meet new people, I compare them to people I was raised around, my friends and family back home. When I try new foods I orient them in relation to foods I was raised with and are most used to. When I experience new weather patterns I compare them to the climate of my birth. Inextricably I am linked to the time and place of my upbringing.
I was raised in a chaotic home environment between divorced parents. My mother was very strict and had many rules, while my father was very lax and enforced very few rules. My mother raised me in the Protestant church while I attended Catholic school for two years, then I was switched to public school in third grade. The inconsistency between Protestant, Catholic and secular worldviews left me very disenchanted by competing narratives and viewpoints that each assert their own contradicting universal realities which I remain suspicious of today.
General artificial intelligence could be capable of synthesizing the perspectives and contexts of every place and time into one universal viewpoint. Mapping out the elephant of the world with more objectivity seems more plausible than ever before. The self assuredness of modernity and the arrogance of postmodernity (Fukuyama’s end of history, for example) are likely to be dwarfed by the self assurance of any newly synthesized panopticon of awareness that an AGI could run on.
But would an AGI be capable of synthesizing every view of the elephant into one accurate rendering of reality at all, or would it merely be able to switch from one perspective to another? The Japanese conception of reality works well enough in the Japanese context, and my basic understanding or exposure to it is amusing enough to me as an outsider, but start poking at it a bit and the construction begins to fall apart. We westerners are just as bound by the false or skewed construction of the Western viewpoint, which is difficult for us to perceive the limits and contradictions of.
I wonder if the AGI will be a Tower of Babel of sorts that could give the illusion of unity and progress but that ends up dividing us further than ever before.
Actually, the thought of a universal synthesized view of the world is what is most frightening to me because it is so utterly foreign to anything we’ve ever come up with ourselves. Either we will discover things we never wanted to know about ourselves and the universe, or we will fail to discover those things and create an even more dystopian world that further reinforces the skewed, convenient beliefs that I believe we already build our societies on.
——
Many people on the right believe that right wing thinking is fundamentally the position of believing in the power to change things: The power to make different decisions, free will, and so on. But in my years of reading right wing thought, the concept that feels the most fundamentally grounding in right wing theory is the idea that nature remains constant. That is, that the elephant remains the elephant regardless of our interpretation. This is the most reassuring concept to me in right wing thinking: that I don’t need to make the Sisyphean effort to rewire my reaction to things outside my control, that I can just accept them as immutable forces of nature and move on with my life. I also think this is a more loving, understanding view of the fundamentals of reality compared with the left’s struggle to undermine them.
aiislove
1mo ago
I've had this conversation before here, I do not agree with you, look at NFL stats, blacks have more fast twitch muscle, whites are less prone to acts of violence, violent crime and aggressive behavior. In the real world.
aiislove
1yr ago
The point of Barbie being "sexually harassed" five minutes after arriving in the real world is to illustrate that her luxury beliefs and wokeism is delusional. The Barbie dream world represents everyone who lives in a woke simulacra of the real world where the horrors of reality are shielded from their view. The point of the harassment isn't to portray the dangers of sexual assault, it is to illustrate the dangers of living in a fantasy world when other people are exposed to real horrors every day. Barbie brought the sexual harassment onto herself by dressing in a sexualized way and not anticipating the realities of interacting with people who aren't in on the luxury beliefs that Barbie got to hold previously.
aiislove
9mo ago
Basically, you have to begin by squaring the physical situation between yourself and the other person. There is fundamentally a difference between any two men that is 100% in the physical world. In a fight between two men, one will win, or there will be a draw. If I met a guy a foot taller than me with fifty pounds more muscle who was super bad at playing Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS and I was super good at it, it doesn't make me his top, it makes me better at a little game than him. If we had sex and I was using my super good abillities at playing Cooking Mama over him to make him suck my dick, it would be humiliating for both of us. If he was using his foot of height and 50 pounds of muscle on me to make me suck his dick, it would not humiliate either of us, I would have respect for his physical state. Later on, if he wants to play Cooking Mama together and I beat him, then it will make me feel good because we are both seeing each other for who we are. He is physically superior to me but I have these other traits that he can admire in me, whether it's being good at Cooking Mama or being smarter or richer or whatever.
Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength?
Well, I'm not saying that it "should" be that way as a prescriptive norm or something, I'm saying that basically you have to give credence to the brute strength between the two of you or it isn't going to work.
And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good?
Yes, this is one of my frustrations with gay dating, that men who are physically superior to me don't see themselves as such. They compare themselves too much with men they imagine to be bigger or stronger than them and fail to respect themselves for the qualities they possess.
If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)
This sounds like a sort of dated concept, I do remember hearing this idea back in the early 00's or so but I really haven't heard gay men say this sort of thing in a long time. Anecdotally I am much more popular the older I get. I can imagine if a man wants to be a bottom that he is concerned he is getting too old and would have this perspective, but he really should just man up and be a top for the sake of everyone around him and his own dignity.
Also, with regard to the birth order effect,
That makes sense, it is my understanding as well that it is considered by science to have more of a biological cause but there is also a great bias against socialization related explanations of homosexuality so I wanted to present my theory from my own experiences.
Responding to @Forgotpassword as well here.
Speaking as a white gay man so your milage may vary. But as a gay top I am attracted to Asian and Latino men who are a bit smaller than me. It's difficult to top men who I perceive as bigger or stronger or more violent/aggressive than me so it's more difficult to top black or Middle Eastern men even though I often find them attractive in an abstract way. Even when I do "top" a man taller and hotter than me it leaves me feeling weird because I don't feel superior to him in any way so it feels like it shouldn't have happened. I suspect that straight men who are not black might find black women harder to "top" (excuse the weird gay metaphor applied to heterosexual intercourse) compared to white or Asian women. You have to be able to believe that you have a right to screw the person you're screwing and it's easier to believe it when you have a physical advantage over that person physically.
Does the black female face structure more commonly have more masculine components to it?
I don't know if it's necessarily "masculinity" that black women have more of but it's possibly some combination of aggression and strength and dominance that is off putting psychologically in a sexual context. Black men look stronger and more dominant so trying to top them as a white man is difficult and weird, compared with other more docile looking guys. I imagine it's the same with women, broadly speaking.
aiislove
1yr ago
I don't know what self-sourcing means but I just googled it and it says "the ability to take care of ourselves" which I would define as power- the power to have self defense over anyone trying not to let you take care of yourself. So your response essentially boils down to "no guns aren't about power, it's about self sufficiency" which is ultimately downstream of power so I'm not sure what you are objecting to
aiislove
2yr ago
Your haughty affectation is a defense mechanism to protect yourself from having to see the ugliness in your heart and the uncharitableness you approach the world with. I don't know if you are rich or poor but regardless you display no sense of noblesse oblige and have no class. You can delude yourself into thinking you've made peace with your hard-heartedness but at some point you will face a very human obstacle and the flimsy affectations you are relying on will crumble and you'll be left with a cold heart that offers no warmth for yourself or the situations you face.
It’s useful for me to hear from people who are genuinely appalled by my views.
Are you engaging with my views on an emotional level or are you protecting yourself by holding them at an analytical distance to try to perfect your artificially constructed worldview?
maladaptive at the level of “seeing like a state” and trying to actually build a great civilization.
Can you tell me your secret to being so above the rest of the wretched of the earth that you can operate on some theoretical transhumanist plane of great civilization in spite of your own humanity?
aiislove
9mo ago
Based on what you've said, it sounds like you imagine that even in the ideal situation, a long-term gay relationship with partners in stable sex act roles isn't possible, or couldn't continue to be mutually beneficial?
I am sort of agnostic on this point, if I had to tell you exactly what I believe, it is that it is possible to have a long term mutually respectful relationship between two men that is mutually beneficial, but it is very very rare and requires huge amounts of respect and humility from both partners who also understand the true dynamic of the relationship. And that this is not exclusive to homosexuality but really to all long term relationships.
Why is it that you (and apparently your past sexual partners) think someone has to "deserve" particular sex roles?
Because when you are doing sex acts with a partner, as two men, unless you are kissing or 69ing, there is fundamentally an alpha and a beta position. Because you have to, usually subconsciously and even unknowingly between the two of you, work out how the act is going to go, and to violate the order can hurt both of you if you don't understand that it's happening as a violation of the order between you two.
How much of that is just contingent on you and them happening to physically not enjoy being the passive partner?
As I've pointed at before I don't really "not enjoy being the passive partner" (aside from anal sex which I do not enjoy bottoming,) indeed I don't mind being a passive partner orally for either a man who is my top who I respect, or a bottom who I also respect and wants me to blow him.
That seems like a very bold claim; I'd be interested to see you expand more specifically on why you think that is true.
In seventh grade, I went on a trip with other seventh graders. There was this girl, let's call her Brooke. We were all like 13, Brooke was a skinny, hot, popular girl. But she went around all the time complaining about how fat and ugly she was. It drove the rest of us kids all crazy because we all thought she was hot and skinny, and if she was fat and ugly then that made us all obese and hideous. Dating today in the US is like meeting a million men who act like they're Brooke who thinks she's fat and ugly when really they're hot and nice and need to see themselves as hot and nice in order to share their hotness and niceness with the people around them who want to enjoy it as well, and this can't happen when they're stuck feeling badly about themselves. (And before someone accuses me of acting entitled to someone else's hotness or niceness or whatever, I try to practice what I preach and share my good traits with those around me too.) It's so elementary, read The Rainbow Fish if you don't believe me.
aiislove
9mo ago
Imagine a guy with a big dick and then imagine the same guy with a tiny dick. Which does your monkey brain pick as the winner instinctively? (You could say, well the bigger thing gives you more to attack, maybe it's a disadvantage, bla bla) but in this instance I'm purely talking about who in a split second decision is more physically intimidating to the viewer. I personally would give the edge to the bigger dick guy
aiislove
2yr ago
Do you think that tik tok's particularly strong boosting of local content, especially compared with other social media platforms, is possibly tied to a desire by the platform to deepen partisan and regional divides across the US?
There is also something dark in the way the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire in the most degrading way. For example I'm socially anxious and insecure about my masculinity so my feed was overrun with hypermasculine extremely affable men to a ridiculous degree. I have never had that experience with any other social media platform. I haven't used the app in over a year but there was something about it that always struck me as more toxic than any other. It is almost like the mirror of Erised, the magic device that shows us our deepest desires but never gives them to us. I found it completely maddening.
aiislove
2yr ago
This is kind of a pithy observation rather than anything else and I don't have the will to write a full effortpost on it but wondered if anyone had any thoughts on a pattern I've noticed often.
In political debates, it often seems that criticism from one side levied at the other side is often a better critique of the side making the critique than the target of the attack.
For example, the left seem to be convinced that America is a hair's breadth away from being sucked into a religious authoritarianism by the right. But it seems that the right today is extremely libertarian and not particularly religious, indeed, the opposite of a religious authoritarian state. But I believe the fervor of leftism and the shutting down of free speech by the left is essentially a sort of religious authoritarianism, much more than anything I see existing on the right.
Similarly, the right tend to characterize the left as being morally failed and corrupt and generally against the traditional family structure. But in my opinion, the left are extremely consistent in their morals and it is the right who have strayed farther from their own traditional morals and proven themselves corrupt in various ways while also having their own traditional family structures degrade far more than the left has experienced. (I don't know how I can prove this except to say that anecdotally my red tribe family and communities I've been around are having far more family problems compared with the blue tribe people I have experience with.)
I see this as a sort of psychological projection, where both sides are too myopically focused on their own experiences to see that the problems they think the other side have are actually the problems they themselves are experiencing and then project it onto the opposing party.
aiislove
6mo ago
Well the problem is that it isn't just cheap plastic crap that's going to get more expensive... All the food you eat in the US relies on Chinese produced knives and forks and cutting boards, the farmers in america harvesting the food rely on Chinese produced shirts and jeans. And so on. When the Chinese inevitably impose counter tariffs the food they used to import from the US will stop being bought disrupting the agriculture industry, the knock on effects will be on everyone not just people you're characterizing as brainless consoomers
aiislove
9mo ago
I guess, if you're a gay man who sees himself as a beta and imagines a man as "straight acting" then you're imagining a guy who is confident and secure in his masculinity and isn't effeminate. Effeminacy is a whole other thing that would take forever to unpack and it inevitably veers into trans/gender ideology which I just don't want to think about right now, not to mention that effeminacy is not limited to homosexual men really.
So, to try to parse your question, you're asking if the fact that most gay men do not see themselves as alpha that it makes them want straight acting men? Well, yes, because any gay man who is seeking an alpha has degraded himself as a beta on some level, he's not going to be "straight acting" enough to be someone else's alpha, and thus that's the problem, when he's inevitably surrounded by men more beta than he is who he can't provide love to because he doesn't have the love for himself he needs to give away. (It's getting late and I've sort of lost the plot, hopefully this makes sense.)
aiislove
9mo ago
interracial relationships are overwhelmingly white man/nonwhite woman
I originally had a short paragraph about how the sexual graph for men is an inversion of the sexual graph for women- basically Asian and Latina women would easily outcompete white and black women which would explain this.
(and the one exception is there are more black men in relationships with white women than white men in relationships with black women, but this is probably just obesity on the part of black women making them undesirable)
I doubt it's just obesity making black women undesirable but rather their more masculine traits generally (Michelle Obama is a man, anecdotally, according to white men) and fewer desirable female traits
outside of the NFL and NBA American sports are dominated by white men
Because white men have the money and time to commit to sports
When I look at news in the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times about the war in Ukraine, all of the reports seem to betray an anti-Russian bias. Is this an organic situation that reflects the actual views of the reporters, or the editors employed by the newspapers? Or is it a result of US government interference pushing their anti-Russian agenda in the domestic news? How much freedom do reporters have to publish their own pro-Russian views, if they were to have any? Does the US government intimidate or otherwise control newspapers into not reporting news that paints Russia in a positive light?
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