aiislove
2yr ago
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
aiislove
2yr ago
do Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power just because their ancestors from 400 years ago fled England?
This isn't what 2rafa is proposing in her post at all, she is proposing that the Mayflower descendants deserve more wealth and power because they have more sense of duty and respect for the people around them and the institutions that their ancestors built than the descendants of people who flew over 30 years ago do.
aiislove
2yr ago
I was trying to point at the spiritual toll of ignoring race in my comment. I think it's more empathetic and kind to simply look at people and the groups they belong to and make broad observations about them and accept that they have differences that make them unique in the same way that white people have differences that make us unique. Trying to ignore that does a disservice to your own judgment as well as the shape of reality and the path of nature.
You dodged @Ben___Garrison's psychoanalysis downthread but really I think it's a valid point to examine the underlying motivated reasoning for your position rather than to pedantically try to dissect whether some group's traits are due to like, racial group genetics or their specific parents. Personally I do find it irritating to dissect race in a competitive way, as most men are prone to doing- seeing men who are more fit in ways that I am not is grating but accepting it is part of being a mature and respectful person. Race blindness appeals to me in theory because it absolves me of having to see the lack within myself and those around me, but it's at the expense of coming to terms with my own inadequacies and the traits of others. We focus so much in this thread on the hypothetical violent black males which can make us feel superior in terms of peacefulness but so few of us want to focus on the traits of black males that we can feel jealous of- sexual virility, domination, and so on.
aiislove
2yr ago
You ignore race at the expense of living in and experiencing reality. I would love to have the luxury of ignoring race all the time, but I don't have that luxury. It doesn't really stop at race either, any time you distract yourself from any kind of material reality you are doing yourself and those around you a disservice. You can tell yourself that men and women are exactly the same and redefine the definitions all you want a la Judith Butler but it's as incoherent at the end of the day as telling yourself that Vietnamese men and men from Ghana are the same thing. I've been all around the world and it's simply not true. Black men are more prone to violence and aggression and are more sexually threatening and intimidating than East Asian men, for example. It's so simple that people don't want to look at it. Just go to the fair and look at the chickens. There will be small meek chickens and big aggressive ones. Look at dogs. There simply are differences. Advocating for race blindness on the backdrop of BLM riots is absurd, this just feels out of step with reality at this point.
Racial blindness is a great ideal to work toward, especially in times of peace and little social unrest, but right now it's just so ridiculously out of step with the times that it seems kind of incoherent. It doesn't seem in effect very far removed from the liberal anti-racist position which is also glaringly out of touch.
aiislove
2yr ago
Nah man, I know what I like too, but I'd rather go without them than make the people around me jealous that I have something they covet. It actually makes me feel horrible to flaunt status around other people. It's just sick and would be ridiculous for me to brag about what I have when it makes other people upset. I'd rather use my resources to empower people around me than make them jealous. I have ruined friendships from envy before and I would much rather have the friendship back than be able to feel superior to them because of what I have or what I've been able to experience.
aiislove
2yr ago
That's a crazy statistic to read. The fact that Alaska would be first by that particular measurement is also strange.
aiislove
2yr 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
your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits.
I don't think this is what HBD racists are saying. And if they are saying this, it is because they are trying to distract themselves from the underlying issue, which is that smaller weaker people are afraid on a physical material level of bigger stronger people who are more prone to aggression and violence. Whites and Asians don't "deserve" higher status on contingent merits because they're smarter, whites and Asians "deserve" higher status in society because when you get in the woods the strongest man wins. It's better to try to live in a world where we can have nicer things than simply a brute force competition, all the time, because then you don't have society, you just have the horror of nature which is the very thing society is trying to protect us from to begin with.
Thanks for the analysis, I think you're correct.
The piece of media that really illustrated everything you're describing, for me, was the Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I could write an entire essay on it as well but it really strikes at the same situation you're pointing at. Kaguya-hime's father becomes obsessed with material and societal wealth, pulls his daughter and wife away from nature and raises a girl who is so empty that by the time she ascends to heaven she has nothing to live for. This is basically the same as Susan's pursuit of material/societal wealth that drags her away from the world of Narnia (which, while a fantasy world, actually represents the world of truth/nature/God in the same way that Kaguya-hime's birth village represented truth/nature/God.)
Kaguya-hime is completely heartbreaking, by the way, and the older I get the more upsetting it is. It kind of shook me out of the path of material status chasing, it was so profound.
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
As someone who used to listen to Coast to Coast AM all night every summer in my, er, late youth, I'm curious to know if there are any interesting developments in cryptozoology or paranormal activity over the past few years. I kinda lost the plot on the UFO stuff, the conversation always feels so masturbatory ("The government says [something exciting]!" but the [something exciting] always seems to be something, um, not exciting, to me...)
aiislove
2yr ago
Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?
I disagree with all the other comments on here. I was just in East Asia for half a year, no one cooks at home- people don't even have ovens in their homes, and food is so good and plentiful and cheap there that no one eats at home. Americans cook way way more than that, everyone I know from my mom to my brothers and sister to my friends in NYC to my friends in the midwest are into cooking their own food. Eating out is very expensive in the US. My dad, recently deceased, ate out every meal of his life after leaving home, but he was particularly rich and an outlier in many other ways. Everyone else in my family cooks for themselves and their families.
aiislove
2yr ago
Off the top of my head: Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Spiderman, Batman, Superwoman, Breaking Bad, Superman, Mad Men, Minecraft, Resident Evil, The Godfather, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Metal Gear Solid, Star Trek, The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games, Fast and Furious, Transformers, Twilight, the X-Men, Silent Hill....
aiislove
2yr ago
Hmm, thank you for your interesting response to my post. I may be misinterpreting your conclusions and theories but I feel like we really aren't as much in disagreement as you are implying, maybe I was too vague or worded things too hastily in my original post.
Responding to your first point: I think you're actually illustrating the frustration that I found with tiktok and that I was trying to illustrate with the Mirror of Erised comparison. The Mirror in the book shows just a facsimile of our deepest desire- it is a sort of masturbatory object that just displays an image on a surface of ourselves owning or doing what we desire. We could imagine an actual Mirror of Erised app that, say, records our faces and bodies and then AI generates videos of us doing whatever we want- battling foes in Ancient Rome, sleeping with any celebrity, whatever- but this would actually be even a step removed from the reality of seeing just a video of someone doing or being what we want of their own volition, because we as independent actors imagine ourselves in relation to whatever we're viewing. Basically, if I see a hypermasculine friendly guy in a video, I am also seeing the shadow of the qualities that I lack projected onto the subject. If I was shown a video of an AI version of myself acting this way, it would probably be less maddening because it's so fantastical that I wouldn't be seeing my own lack in this video but rather either enjoy seeing a fantasy version of myself for a moment, or just dismiss it outright as silly.
I think I'm rambling and losing the plot here so let me go back- Yes, you're correct that there is always a distance between what tiktok shows us and what we desire. I think this is also part of the irony that Rowling was trying to elucidate by inventing the Mirror of Erised.
Point two: Yes, my desires are shaped by what I think they will give me. I think I could be happier and more popular if I was friendlier and more masculine so I seek to become more masculine and friendly, because those are traits that I believe I lack.
The tendency of the algorithm to produce "gravitational attractors" based on your own self-reports arrests the movement of desire and falsifies it.
I don't see that as evident... The second level desires I have (to become more masculine and be friendlier) are still strong enough for me to be hung up on it, I'm not gullible enough to waste time on some literal clickbait that's like "This one weird trick to masculinity will get you a thousand new friends in 50 seconds or less" but I am gullible enough to waste hours scrolling through feeds of masculine affable men to try and glean some tips from them or otherwise, in my monkey brain, try to glean some kind of affect from. It is showing me the second layer of what I want because I think that's the level that tik tok can provide me with, because I don't think it can provide me with the underlying actuality of being happier and having more friends as such. Thus, the layer of abstraction from being able to get anything out of the platform as I tried to allude to when I framed tik tok as "maddening" in my original post.
Point three: I actually am and have taken many steps to correct the things that I'm trying to improve in myself, including masculinity and friendliness. It's not something that can be fixed overnight and I'm likely to struggle with it for years and years, just like I've struggled with overeating and low self esteem. Of course my nature is to be unmasculine, unfriendly, eat tons of food and hate myself, but I have to resist all of these urges every day. I am proud of the progress I've made in all these areas. I don't know if watching the content I was fed on tiktok was a positive path to self improvement or a toxic mirror that felt like a needle at the side of my insecurities. In a way it was both, perhaps.
aiislove
2yr ago
I've deleted and re-downloaded the app a handful of times and every time I do I get tons of local content and videos that seem to highlight things people are insecure about- for example, one video I saw was something like "my [rich] mom's insane skincare collection," (playing on people's class anxieties and appearance anxieties,) videos of really hot local people with lots of followers (playing on people's social anxieties), I can imagine other people get tons of social justice related type content that plays on people's anxieties around race and such. It just seems to boost content that shows what people find themselves lacking. It's kind of Girardian in how it shows memetic desire of others in one platform. So it seems like it's already designed to figure out what you want and then give you a simulacra of that thing.
Of course I'm not blameless as I chose to follow and interact with the accounts that show me what I want, but I suspect most people would be even worse at resisting the bait than I was.
aiislove
2yr ago
I get this really metallic taste in my mouth when I'm in an extremely stressful/panic situation (like the kind of thing that only happens once every 5 years, like I'm totally shit out of luck with an authority figure or something)
I also feel physical pain in my chest from loneliness sometimes like my heart is literally aching from the emotion
aiislove
2yr ago
Yes, prioritize Michael's, a publicly traded company beholden to activist shareholders over the thousands of disaffected right wing weirdo independent sellers on Amazon.
Actually, I second buying from the Chinese directly, even as a disaffected right wing weirdo independent Amazon seller.
aiislove
2yr ago
a man of mature years than by a child of twelve
Was the thinking (by MacArthur, and/or by the general Western Allies) that Japanese civilization as a whole was a much younger or less developed/more recently modernized culture than Germany, or that the people of Japan were inferior to the German people by such a degree that they were characterized as 12 year olds compared with Europeans?
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.
Fever, Body Language and X by Kylie Minogue are all great and super fun danceable albums
Kelis put out a house record in 2010 that's still so good called Flesh Tone (Not sure if the Kelis or Kylie albums have kid friendly lyrics if you're sensitive about that)
Definitely look into some old Nile Rodgers produced disco, I Want Your Love is one of my favorite songs of all time
Also Giorgio Moroder- Coast to Coast AM legendary theme song The Chase and his work with Donna Summer I Feel Love are amazing but I'm sure he has some full albums that are great
Not exactly what you're looking for but I think kids would love the Bust a Groove 1 and 2 soundtracks, the Katamari soundtracks (1 2 3 etc.) and anything from Dance Dance Revolution :)
Edit: I also used to listen to this CD on repeat when I wanted to dance
aiislove
2yr ago
Have been to Mykonos and stayed in Athens about a month. The cab drivers in Athens are 100% insane as is all the traffic in the area so just be ready for that I guess. Look for restaurants with mean looking old Greek men sitting outside them all day long- the waitresses might not speak english and it might be awkward but the food will be so, so good. I recommend anything with feta and any and all roast meats- roast chicken with potatoes in Greece can be insanely good, roast pork, fava bean dip, of course try spanikopita from bakeries... now I miss Greece!
The Acropolis in Athens is cool but going to have tourists, the Acropolis Museum nearby is pretty good too. The city can be quite grimy but doesn't really feel unsafe so it can be charming but I personally stayed in a suburb which was a bit more comfortable. The beaches near Athens are odd, they're mostly a few yards wide a the largest so I wouldn't really recommend them unless you're just really in the mood for the beach while you're in Athens though I imagine you'll just do the beaches in Corfu instead
But have fun, Greek people can be super super nice if you're friendly and laid back. Also just general advice as someone who travels a ton: Do a bit of research on places that interest you personally and have them starred on a map (I just use google maps.) Then when you're in an area you can pull up your map and see a handful of places that looked interesting to you beforehand and you can just go. It's good to have a variety of things, like some restaurants, snack places, museums, shops, whatever you're into so you can always have an idea for something to stop by when you need something or want to kill some time and don't know the area well already. If there's something that interests you, look into it, don't do tourist stuff just because everyone else does it.
You're right, I was conflating the comment you replied to with this comment she made below.
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