aiislove
7mo ago
I don't own a big truck, but I'm pretty sure big trucks make you feel smaller by comparison.
You buy the big truck to augment your feelings of smallness. When you control the truck you feel much larger than any person who is not controlling a truck. You feel smaller than the man controlling the tank or the semi truck but you feel bigger than anyone in anything smaller than you.
What is the source of the FUN of guns? Is it POWER?
aiislove
7mo ago
I used to want to be part of the blue tribe but after seeing how they treated the red tribe since around 2008 I just don't anymore. The condescension and classism is so hideous. How can you see people who you feel culturally superior to and have contempt toward them rather than compassion and empathy for their condition? Yes, walmart is a hideous place, but god so is Baltimore. The red tribe likes big trucks and guns because they're tiny scared people in a big scary country. If you're taking the bait and seeing them as some Jan 6 insurrectionist threat rather than people with decades of subpar education under a semi hostile cultural millieu that confuses them and your response is "ew, no thanks" then I think that view is morally repugnant and I don't want to take part.
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
7mo 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
1yr 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
4mo ago
I have noticed that nearly every AI I try is bad at making centaurs. The centaurs that the AI produces are almost always just horses, or sometimes a man riding a horse. I suspect it's because the AI is overcorrecting for unlikely results (there are no actual photographs of half man half horses in training data since they don't exist) so the AI doesn't want to produce a half horse half man hybrid creature.
They also tend to make mermaids have two tails (a la the starbucks logo) rather than one tail like everyone imagines.
aiislove
5mo ago
When you imagine having sexual intercourse with a woman who do you want to have sex with? Someone who is aggressive and dominant or someone who is submissive and docile? I prefer the latter for men, the former keeps me from being comfortable enough to imagine performing with them. When bottoms are too active it is a turnoff, do you not feel the same way toward women? Of course I need to believe my partner is attracted to me, so I'm not seeking disinterest entirely, but a partner who is doing less makes it easier to perform versus a partner who is trying too hard to perform their role. You need confidence in yourself and your partner to make love and it's easier to have confidence with a smaller weaker partner than with a stronger one. If straight men don't feel this way then muscular strong women would be more popular as sexual prospects but they're really not. Similarly I don't want to have sex with men who are too strong for me because it makes me feel weak.
aiislove
5mo ago
You're welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm not sure if you are interpreting the sentence you quoted as meaning that I am applying the same ideas to the psychology that women have when they have sex with men, which is not what I was implying. I meant that I imagine that for men who are attracted to women, that those men also have to be able to see themselves as more dominant and masculine over the women they are having sex with, and that it is easier for, say, a blond white man to imagine himself dominating an Asian woman compared with dominating a black woman.
On another tangent, I believe men who are interested in being dominated by women are sublimating their domination instinct and directing their sexual anxieties toward the female to cover their insecurity and fear of not being able to perform. Exploring this dynamic in sex might be titillating and sexually gratifying for the man but I can't imagine it boosts or stabilizes his ego in the long term, it is a rather masturbatory practice and doesn't result in self security. Similarly a gay man who only bottoms or performs submissive roles in sex is probably unlikely to experience full gratification from sex.
aiislove
5mo ago
Who do you (you plural, anyone can answer) think the Girardian scapegoat will be? Is it impossible to predict?
aiislove
7mo ago
That's correct but from my view, there will always be some background noise of politics going on but it's usually possible to tune it out. But there is a point leading up to the presidential election when it becomes completely impossible to avoid politics for months at a time- just driving down the street you'll see signs, non political people on social media will be posting non stop about voting, the news will be a landmine etc
aiislove
7mo ago
Make sure you're not doing these things just to please other people. Think hard about what YOU are getting out of what you're doing and if it's not making you happy then think of something else that will make you happy and do that instead. You should also try to see the positives in the things you're doing, for example I used to feel like the work I did was bad and it made no difference but then I started to realize that my work is actually making a positive impact on people and it can help them lead happier lives and it made me respect myself and my work and the people around me a lot more. If you are alienated from society try to reach out and just be kind to people and talk to people more and stop isolating yourself as much.
aiislove
7mo ago
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?
aiislove
8mo ago
Can you speak more plainly? What are the other popular theories you're talking about?
aiislove
8mo ago
We need to invest much more into understanding the genetics of human intelligence and developing technology for polygenic gene therapy.
I was totally with you until this paragraph. No we don't. "Fixing" the IQs and abilities of the races flies in the face of nature and history and humanity. Let Asians be smarter. Let black people be better at running. Let everyone be the way nature/God intended them. I don't imagine creepy futurist scientific interventions will be any better than today's misguided progressive interventions, for example distribution of genetic intervention is unlikely to be evenly distributed in the near future.
aiislove
8mo ago
Well, I've never been one to take an easy path. What is it about seeking wisdom with others that makes it easier than seeking wisdom alone?
aiislove
8mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
10mo 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
11mo ago
Oh, I remember hearing about that. I just read about it here. It's really too vague for me to comment on because one person said one thing and another person claimed another, and retail is a weird power dynamic to begin with in all sorts of ways (not to mention the store could just have that bag on hand not to really sell to anyone, combined with the sales person perhaps not knowing who Oprah was), and besides that the client-customer relationship is different in Europe compared with America- indeed, it may have been out of respect for the customer that the salesperson didn't want to show her such an overpriced item when most people shouldn't really be spending thousands on purses anyway
But yeah, I'd say that was Karen-like behavior from Oprah borne out of a lack of grace and perspective from her position as an American billionaire interacting with a salesperson, for her to weaponize her status in that way is weird and also self serving for her in that she tried to garner sympathy from it
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
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