A few features I like from the reddit RES suite that I'd love to see here:
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Hide child comments button (clicking this hides all of the responses to a comment)
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Clicking the body of a comment and then typing "a" to upvote or "z" to downvote
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Tracking your personal upvotes/downvotes of each individual user (for example, next to a username it will have +1 if I've upvoted them once or -12 if I've downvoted 12 of their posts/comments)
Edit: I just figured out how the lines on the left of posts work to collapse threads so disregard my first suggestion above.
aiislove
1yr ago
I actually prefer having the net votes at the bottom of a post because I can start reading the comment from a neutral point of view. On reddit when the votes are at the top I feel like it influences me to read the comment from the point of view of it being good or not based on the number of up or down votes and I'd rather choose for myself whether the post is good or not.
aiislove
1yr ago
Actually I like the idea of demoting the username to the bottom of the comment too. I would prefer that over moving the votes to the top.
aiislove
1yr ago
What advice do people here have for living among people they can't stand or see as ideological enemies? I'm very contrarian. I have foolishly bought into the narratives from both the right and the left about why their opposing parties are bad but neither of the narratives from either party about why their own party is good. I have a very low opinion of nearly all fellow Americans. I have been traveling outside of the US for the better part of the year and it has been fantastic being able to meet people who barely know who Donald Trump is, but I'm absolutely dreading going back to the US and being pulled back into the muck and the entirely degrading discourse of the political environment. To make matters worse, I am self employed and can work from anywhere so any return to the US would be by my own will and it will absolutely make me feel like an idiot to be back in the culture I'm so happy to be away from. Though I will be happy to see my family again and experience the big beautiful open empty spaces and long straight roads that lead nowhere. (Those are the things I miss the most.)
So, yeah, any advice? Do I just need to get over myself and practice acceptance and just meet people where they're at? I had a really (to me) innocuous vaguely centrist comment get downvoted into oblivion tonight on reddit and it's triggering the same irritation that I felt every day while I was in the US so I just wanted to get some help from people who might be able to relate to being a contrarian in a world where everyone seems so invested in things you'd rather ignore. I wish I could go back to before 2016 when I didn't care at all about politics and was able to ignore the news. Should I quit reading the news and places like themotte cold turkey? I just find this place really intellectually stimulating in a way that I don't experience elsewhere so it would be such a loss to me if I didn't keep lurking here, but at the same time it's not helping me think more kindly of my fellow man
aiislove
1yr ago
I've been DNing since early this year and part of it was to try and figure out if migrating seasonally would work for me. I hate hot weather so I went somewhere in northern continental Europe in July to see if it would be nice, without realizing the length of days is ridiculous. Sun would rise at 6am and set at 10pm. I can't stand the sun either. So I'm trying to figure out where the best place to spend May to September- I always assumed far north to avoid heat, but not with that sun. Southern hemisphere, I guess, but I'm not a huge fan of most of the countries there, and none of them get cold, snowy winters like I'm used to in North America as far as I'm aware. I'm looking forward to the next few months of cold weather in East Asia now.
aiislove
1yr ago
Did you read my post? I have been out of the US for the better part of the year now, I am having a great time not being near any Americans, but I don't want to live outside of the US long term. I essentially see everyone in the US as someone I can't stand or as an ideological enemy to some degree, but find the infrastructure of the US as the most hospitable place for me to live, long term, for practical reasons. Your reply isn't particularly helpful since I'm inclined to make peace with my neighbors at some point rather than run away from them like I have for most of my life.
aiislove
1yr ago
My plan is to make peace with my neighbors, but I want advice for how to do so. I don't know where to begin. If I didn't need advice I wouldn't be here asking for it.
aiislove
1yr ago
Remember, 40-50% of eligible American voters steadily do not even bother to register and vote. Do you hate them too? Are they also your enemies?
No, I am not registered to vote either. Like I said in my first post, I would prefer to return to the way I lived before 2016 when I happily ignored politics and didn't have strong opinions about political issues. But now I feel I've read so much about politics that I can no longer see people as having an opinion that they've come to on their own, but rather that every opinion I encounter is downstream of broader political culture war issues. It makes me feel so cynical and hopeless.
Can you be more concrete what "infrastructure" you mean?
Yes. I like the visuals of America between the coasts. I like the huge roads, big vehicles, straight highways that go on for miles and miles, the anonymity, the lack of a cloying, overinterested community that defines the rest of the world. 24 hour grocery stores and gas stations all across the country. I have been to about 20 different countries, and while traveling abroad is my favorite activity, at the end of the day every country makes me feel claustrophobic compared to the US. There is no where in the world with the same degree of freedom of open spaces, space between you and others, space for ideological freedom and freedom to live your life the way you want. France has beautiful food and incredible architecture but you can't eat dinner at any time but between 7pm and 9pm and I was chided for having my car face the wrong direction while pumping gas a few months ago. Why I have to have my license plate visible to a camera while getting gas, I don't know, but that's just the one millionth difference between the US and most countries that irritate me. I could come up with a handful of other specific American things I couldn't find anywhere else, but those are the biggest irritations to me off the top of my head.
aiislove
1yr ago
We're on the same page, but where do you realistically think is a better place to live?
aiislove
1yr ago
first serious AI incidents and global censorship/compute regulation regime
What does this part mean? What kind of serious AI incidents could occur? What would "global censorship" even look like- if something was censored globally, no one would know about it. Or if people knew about it, it wouldn't be a global censorship.
aiislove
1yr ago
I empathize with the article. I think what we're seeing is an increasing atomization among middle class and affluent whites in the USA while tribal identity politics emerges at the same time. Middle and upper class whites are retreating from the social sphere, and from each other, while the interests of niche groups of people are beginning to take precedence on the national stage. I think the article isn't incorrect, but that it is only telling one half of the story: that the atomized nature of mainstream US culture is accelerating while also losing prominence to the groups that don't have the luxury to isolate.
The 2021 documentary "Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Adam Curtis lays out a theory on individualism being a fluke of the 20th century which I'm inclined to agree with. I suspect white America will continue to atomize and recede socially and this "social recession" will end when whites begin to be outnumbered by other minority groups with stronger community ties.
aiislove
1yr ago
The two episodes with Rene Girard on the podcast called Entitled Opinions are really good. He goes over memetic desire as well as his concept of scapegoating. I found everything he had to say very interesting and I listened to the two episodes two years ago but still think of them often.
The first episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-why-we-want-what-we-want
The second episode: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ren-girard-ritual-sacrifice-and-scapegoat
aiislove
1yr ago
I am a gay man with a degree in fashion design who has spent most of my life obsessed with clothing. In the end the only two things that matter for a man are neatness and confidence. If you look sloppy, it doesn't matter how much confidence you have, people will write you off. If you appear to have no confidence, it doesn't matter how neat you look, people can tell you don't like yourself, and others won't like you either. You don't need a guide, in fact the more concerned with fashion you are the worse you are at it, which is the terrible truth I've arrived at. Pick out flattering styles that function and make you look put together that will earn you respect from the people you want to impress, but don't overdo it. It's a tricky balance, but err on the side of thinking too little rather than thinking too much. I apologize if these maxims are too vague, but if you're looking for specifics you've already lost the plot. (Don't get hung up on 2 button vs. 3 button jackets or the width of your tie or anything else. Invest in a functioning wardrobe and then wear it with the confidence that you know you've made good decisions.)
aiislove
1yr ago
Populism will prevail, and the world will burn while the Americans prosper off the chaos.
Why do you think Americans will prosper off the chaos? American hegemony can't last forever and China seems much more ready and willing to fight for the gains than anyone in the west these days from my view. I agree with the rest of your post but I don't see things working out as well for the US.
Speaking as a gay man this is extremely accurate. Once you start noticing that most gay guys are competing for whoever they all think is the hottest guy around you can't stop noticing it. I've noticed if I'm with another guy who likes me, but isn't hotter than me, I get way more attention from other guys than when I'm out by myself. Alternately, when I'm out with a guy hotter than me, he gets all the attention and I get none. This is basically Rene Girard's concept of memetic desire in play.
It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately. I suspect it's due to their (or our, speaking as one of them) predisposition to stand against mainstream culture, as it's impossible to miss the mainstream/capitalist adoption of left wing ideology lately. There's just no excitement or energy in trying to champion leftwing causes when every leftwing cause has been coopted by mass media and tech giants (which are also criminally censorious to creatives currently) and wall street corporations. The artists and creatives who continue to work within the spaces of leftism are increasingly boring and uninteresting and creating work that parrots the capital line more than any genuine transgressive feelings within the artists' vision.
Anyway, my point in making this post is to ask if there has ever been a situation like this in the past? I am interested in history but it's not my strongest subject. It feels like perhaps there are parallels with the French Revolution: wherein the masses were increasingly disgusted with the nobles and quickly defected. I remember reading that even Louis XVI was criticized as being out of touch by vaccinating his family against smallpox, as an aside.
Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick) it looks like the disillusionment with leftism is huge. I wonder how much of this is actually an interesting signal that 20th century leftism is dead, or if millennials are simply getting too old for the naivety of that ideology and we're seeing a generation go more conservative which happens with every generation.
I fully empathize with people who are sick of the leftist chokehold on discourse and culture over the past few decades (culminating in the Trump presidency) but I wonder what it leads to. Optimistically, it seems like a "back to basics" situation where people are seeing the contradictions of the recent past and trying to correct them for a new, more coherent ideology, but I also feel like it's a bit of a bizarre situation when a class of people who basically banked their entire social capital for decades on progressive ideology and LGBT/racial inclusivity are starting to tear it down. I applaud it but when has this happened before? In a way it reminds me of the shift in European art from being purely religious in nature, funded by the church, to suddenly having wealthy private clients in the Dutch merchants of the late 1500s.
Sorry for the rambling tone of my post, I just like to read the things posted here and I wanted to kind of post this as a prompt to have some discussion to expand on some thoughts I've been having lately. As an aside, no one in the artist or creative scenes I frequent seem to be able to articulate this shift, as most are still afraid of cancelation or being put out of work or shunned by social media or deplatformed or the many other situations one can get into when defecting from mainstream opinion. Or alternatively creative people are not as invested in the specifics of politics as much as people here are and would rather not engage with the situation from a political lens but rather from their personal/creative artistic angle.
aiislove
1yr ago
I do think the political shitshow behind COVID had a radicalizing effect on creatives but I don't know that it was the lockdowns specifically. I'm sure it screwed over a lot of performers and musicians and people who rely on art shows and in person events but lots of people also simply took a few months off or switched to their side gigs or sold online or got unemployment or did something else to make ends meet, at least in the US. Everyone is going to have a different take on this but from where I was, the thing that irritated me the most about the pandemic wasn't the governments restrictions, which were somewhat minimal where I was, but instead the peer pressure/social politicization and having to navigate the newly emerging social realities of the pandemic. Most creatives tend to be socially awkward or isolated to begin with so I can see how dealing with that would have a triggering effect on many of us. On the other hand I do have more resources than most people in the creative class so I could be isolated from the material concerns that many of my peers faced but I think the ideological implications are more galling and degrading than having to find new ways to make money imo
there was still a lot of anger from the artists specifically channeled at left-wing parties for "their parties" betraying them
I did not see much of this but I also have most of this type of person unfollowed or muted at this point, so perhaps I missed it- though anger from the left toward the left is nothing new
aiislove
1yr ago
Which artists?
Artists/creatives ranging from the people I mentioned in my post to friends of mine who are not famous but are artists.
And 'right wing' how?
I don't know, as right wing as losing a billion dollars for antisemitism and talking about race science openly on a podcast, which in the grand scheme of /r/themotte isn't probably very rightwing but in the grand scheme of like, NYU grads, is basically literally hitler compared to ten years ago
Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists.
Yeah, I see the mainstream elite talented artists as still being deeply left aligned, but the people with less exposure and fame diverging from that. I don't care if Yayoi Kusama or Jeff Koons goes right wing tomorrow because I don't care about their work. I care about people who have always made interesting work to me veering away from liberal ideology because I care about interesting work and seeing where it fits in the political spectrum.
Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?
There aren't even leftwing directors leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking today so I think asking for a rightwing one is pretty out of the question for now
Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left.
Everyone in the NYC/LA fashion/art scene basically knows each other, Kanye is definitely getting exposed to these people and I've heard his rants where he explains that he thinks leftists/BLM are coercing the Kardashians into believing/saying whatever they want. If Patrik Sandberg/DIS Magazine people/Ryder Ripps/Azalea Banks/Red Scare girls/Walter Pearce/a handful of other people in the scene weren't all collectively looking into vaguely alt right ideology Kanye West wouldn't have any idea about it either.
MIA is barely a "thinkier".
She has a platform and a creative oeuvre and is daring to say something other than the democrat party line so I feel she's relevant to the discussion at hand
Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?
He's a talented graphic designer making interesting work, you spelled his name wrong
Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?
I don't know, I'm not claiming there is such a person
To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.
What are some examples of artists moving left to right en masse? Historical precedences for this, specifically? That's what I was curious to know about.
You may characterize the movement I see as small but I don't see the movement ending where it is today. It's gaining enough traction with enough tastemakers and cultural producers that are young enough that it could be the genesis of some broader right wing thing moving forward and that's what interests me, not really in just the small shift that's happened already.
Which Mishima are you reading? I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion a few months ago and thought it was great. I couldn't get into it when I tried reading it a few years ago but this time around I found it enjoyable and relatively light but with an interesting perspective. Cool, stylish imagery and a funny takedown of Buddhism that uncannily mirrors a lot of criticism of academia today.
aiislove
1yr ago
I'm not familiar with that one, but scanning the wikipedia article on it it looks a bit more dense than The Temple. I'd recommend The Temple if you want something that's not too hard to get into.
aiislove
1yr ago
The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.
As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.
I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.
As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.
aiislove
1yr ago
Interesting post. It reminds me of the concept of reaction formation.
aiislove
1yr ago
I like to get some fresh air and a change of scenery on the weekends. Take a long walk at a park. I usually avoid shopping and restaurants on the weekends because they're always packed with people, so I like to do those things on weekdays. I prefer parks that are large enough to avoid too many people. If the weather isn't nice for walking, I'll take a long drive in my car.
I like your premise. In a similar vein, I have been imagining reality as more of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant represents reality, it's a violent force that acts as it wants and can stomp us dead at any time, and we are all the blind men trying to stay away from the dangers of reality/nature. I don't think the "powers that run society" are any better informed than any of the rest of us- they too are blind men, attempting to secure their safety in light of the elephant that wants to harm them. I don't really see the people redefining power as acting from malice, but rather they're working on a faulty conception of reality that they inherited from generations of faulty thinking that are metaphorically saying: there is no elephant, or the elephant can't hurt us, or the elephant is actually a horse, or hey don't you think we should befriend the elephant.... basically everyone has become so detached from reality that the elephant is thought of as something else. Now that we see nature rearing its ugly head (covid, war, breakdown of trust, lockdowns, everything else going on) it seems like the inteligentsia is quickly moving right ideologically to try to get a better understanding of reality rather than sort of lingering in the weird philosophical theory area that doesn't have a particularly firm grasp on reality on the left.
I believe the arc of the 2010s was basically an entire generation of people (millennials) raised on a flawed model of reality attempting to direct the world into its unsustainable idealized world and then clashing with the underlying fundamentals of nature that can't be theorized away. But perhaps I'm basically just describing my own personal experiences of becoming an adult and projecting it onto the broader culture- but more things seem to corroborate my position every day.
This is so gross and scary and horrible to me. It makes me feel like I'll never be able to commune with reality with everyone living around me and I'll always be doomed to pointing at the shadows on the wall. Everyone preaching blank slatism and gender theory makes me feel so gaslit when my lived experiences reveal time and time again that certain people are predisposed to certain behaviors and so on. This might be my paranoia talking but part of me is frightened that if culture doesn't steer things away from these lunatic blank slate conspiracies, humans using technology will conspire to enforce the ideologies until they've sanded away reality to the point of everyone actually becoming a blank slate. This will be sold to the people as a beautiful thing- everyone will be equal and have a perfect chance at happiness, and the class of people enforcing it will believe they're doing the right thing. But in my mind, it's completely degrading and dehumanizing and the worst possible route for humanity to take.
Excuse my ranting. I've been traveling internationally for the better part of a year and the new, different cultures and people I see in every country I visit is to me one of the most beautiful experiences I can ever imagine having and the thought of every person being degraded into someone without history or culture or context but rather is just a droid to sell netflix downloads to is truly the worst vision of the future I can imagine. And for what? So that rich Americans can feel great that they've created the shining tower on the hill that allows everyone to feel equal, and that they're not racist, because they've shoehorned every person into a box that says "person number 6,xxx,xxx,xxx" instead of some more humane and descriptive understanding of their unique history and place in the world. It works until everyone starts defecting and society starts breaking along tribal lines, which appears to be the current state of the US and perhaps the broader west. All I can do is hope that the powers that be start to see the horror they're directing us toward, maybe covid was a wakeup call for people, and I do feel hopeful that people are starting to have a more nuanced vision of things, but part of me isn't so sure.
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