daezor
9d ago
the things most people seek from others, like physical intimacy, family and children, good food and mirth, are not intellectual.
There may be a bit too much romanticization of "salt-of-the-earth normies" going on here. Last I checked, the social atomization trend (friendship- and sex-recession) is just happening across the board, while many (most?) career-intelligentsia derive satisfaction both from their work and from those other things. It's not that one is a substitute for the other.
It seems that you acknowledge this ("This is true even for many people with decent-IQ white collar jobs"), but then you posit "someone who has spent a lifetime cultivating an identity built around an intellect that is no longer useful to anyone, least of all themselves". Who are these people, exactly?
daezor
14d ago
Not now that dinergoths are the ones making the hiring decisions. Plenty of people get away with non-median social aesthetics now, and still make plenty of money and have successful social lives. The archaic social norms no longer matter at any stage of life (other than maybe for boomers, but soon they will be retired and irrelevant).
This thread is veering off topic. If "dinergoths" exist at all, they aren't working as well-paid professionals, let alone as hiring managers for said professionals. They're going to be in dead-end jobs commensurate with their poor social skills, as remnants of the hollowed-out working class.
As much as engineers may bemoan getting bossed around by Woke HR Karens despite their lack of "real" skills (as in, pertinent to the company's stated purpose), becoming adept at Machiavellian court intrigue isn't exactly easy either. Your typical socially inept Dinergoth would never make it in HR.
daezor
14d ago
I don't think anime was ever "highbrow" like French cinema, but in the Millennial anime period (maybe 1995-2015) it did have a certain edge to it, like all things Japanese (think: karate, console games, cyberpunk, sushi, Zen). You probably had to have an above-average IQ to be into these things (although whether that translated into social status was another matter). If Dinergoth is real, that's no longer the case today.
An artifact frozen in amber:
daezor
15d ago
There's something sociolinguistically peculiar about treating government form submissions as in the same class as conversations among peers or speeches in the public square. Reserving judgement, I would venture to say that most people worldwide treat government bureaucracies in a purely utilitarian way, as an alien beast that must be appeased by certain sigils or spells that are otherwise meaningless.
(Presumably there's a statement on this Irish citizenship form like "I swear under penalty of perjury that the above is true and correct", but is the transwoman in this story really worried about the Gardai busting down their door on charges that they lied about their gender identity? I strongly doubt it.)
It seems like this attitude towards paperwork is a relic from an earlier time, when the State really was "just the things we do together" and not something imposed from above. Which is not the case anywhere anymore, but it's nice to be nostalgic about.
daezor
15d ago
Is Dinergoth a real thing? (soft-paywalled; use reader mode to get the whole article)
Before we get carried away with narrative, let's do a reality check. Is "Dinergoth" pointing to a real cultural phenomenon? Can anyone provide anecdotal evidence?
I can probably think of one or two people I know who meet this description, but that's not enough to validate the claim, which is that:
- Dinergoth is not a subculture like the goths/otakus/furries of old; it is the mainstream culture of today's youth.
- When Dinergoths identify as queer or trans, this is entirely apolitical for them. Far from being woke left-wing gender activists, they are completely checked-out and apathetic about politics, including LGBTQ+ issues.
- Dinergoths live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects. They are not urban elites or "PMC" types.
The problem is, this archetypal Dinergoth is, by construction, invisible to anyone who's not one of them. They can't afford to live in big cities, so you'll never encounter them there. Even in a small town, the Dinergoths are shut-ins who never leave their (parents') homes and never venture out into the community to meet people. Instead they (supposedly) spend all their time chatting with each other on Discord (hence, so the article claims, the flattening of regional accents among the youth - although I think that trend is older than gaming chats).
And now that I've read this article, the next time I run across one of those obese 20-something piercing-having pink-hairs I occasionally spy at CVS or Walmart, I'll update my stereotype of them from "Antifa" to "Dinergoth"; but really I'll have no evidence either way unless I talk to them and get to know them, which I won't.
Perhaps some of you reading this are Dinergoths yourselves, although I rather doubt it.
daezor
24d ago
Does ICE see itself as the right-wing version of Antifa from 10 years ago? Like, I remember there was an effort to shut down right-wing demonstrations by means of violent masked mobs (bike lock guy etc.), and I'm sure it's not hard to come up with an argument that those "anarchists" were effectively agents of the state, just like ICE is now. But I don't remember that violence rising to the killing of right-wingers, and so the present ICE action is an escalation from that. (Or am I wrong, and Antifa did actually kill right-wingers, and I just never heard about it?)
Basically I'm wondering if there's a plausible turnabout-is-fair-play narrative that the ICE-sympathetic side is going to adopt.
daezor
1mo ago
There's a sense in which "culture" is an inherently otherizing concept. Culture is something for those barbarians over there, not for us civilized folk. We're not having a cultural festival, we're just having a good time. What we eat is not ethnic cuisine, but just normal everyday food. We're not imposing our values, we're just doing what's right.
So, for one to talk too much of "American culture" comes across like a concession that the hegemonic project has failed. It is a project wrapped up in an ostensibly universalistic ideology (in this case, something having to do with democracy, freedom, human rights, etc.) which is what justifies America's influence all over the world. If "Americans" are just another culture or ethnicity (spoken in the same breath as "Samoans", "Maltese", "Tutsis", etc.) then the whole ideology falls apart, and we become just so many decorative artifacts in a museum display case.
It's easier to see this pattern from the outside looking in. Every great empire-building people has to believe that they have transcended "mere culture" and have achieved some special calling that sets them apart from all the other peoples in the world - the Greeks with their philosophy, the Romans with republicanism and later Christianity, the British with their rule of law, the Russians with communism... But when the empire fails, what are they left with?
daezor
1mo ago
The anti-ICE protesters shout "Get the fuck out of our neighborhood!" which seems to evince some sense of ingroup territoriality, just one whose boundary is drawn differently.
daezor
1mo ago
And the public telling of the traumatic narrative would be a communal art form to supplant earlier and outmoded forms like the folk song or the heroic myth.
My first thought is that heroic myths often do involve stories of traumatic childhoods. And this trauma is not merely incidental, but is often a key part of what motivates the hero (to seek revenge, or whatever). So, what's new? Perhaps the absence of catharsis? Or the sense that trauma itself is what confers moral worth? (If the Romans honored Romulus, it was not because of his trauma!)
daezor
1mo ago
I should register the customary skepticism of hunter-gatherer (ad venatorem-collectorem?) arguments:
- Present-day hunter-gatherers don't necessarily live lives similar to those of the distant ancestors of present-day non-hunter-gatherers, because it's only in very distinctive environments (e.g. places poorly suited for farming) that that lifestyle persisted.
- The 10,000 Year Explosion and its ilk would argue that evolution has continued apace in historical times, so even our own hunter-gatherer ancestors don't necessarily share much in common with us.
daezor
1mo ago
Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions
Doesn't the increasing population lead to an increased demand for rabbis?
daezor
1mo ago
A common objection might be that math or logic is not physical, but mathematics and logic can be instantiated in the physical - one can count apples, one can apply inputs to silicon logic gates. Let me clarify a bit. I am not saying that math and logic are physical. I am saying that despite the apparent ontological cost of introducing new categories, that cost is in reality dramatically reduced because as we can see by instantiating them physically they are not separate magisteria but manipulations of this one.
There are fields of mathematics about things that can't exist physically - geometric objects in dimensions greater than 3, infinitely-detailed fractals, higher infinities, etc. And before you say "we can program physical computers to write and check proofs about those objects" - this is a confusion of levels. What exists in those computers is a bunch of symbols describing the objects, not the objects themselves.
daezor
2mo ago
I started to see this with the Brian Thompson shooting last year, where in the immediate aftermath, people online were commenting about how the as-yet-unidentified shooter could escape by taking such-and-such bus route to a particular Canadian airport that has direct flights to the following non-extradition countries, etc.
There was a little of this with the Charlie Kirk shooting also, with the added spectacle of the FBI claiming not once but twice that they caught the guy, only to realize it was the wrong guy, during which time it seemed like the actual shooter could have easily gotten away if he had made any effort to do so.
I do worry that if people start to actually get away with murder in this way then it'll spell the end of what little privacy and civil liberties we still have. ("What are you doing, citizen, trying to ride the bus without your papers?")
daezor
2mo ago
The shooting at Brown seems to have targeted the class of a professor of Israel-US relations.
I have to squint really hard to discern any kind of motive for the Brown shooting. The aforementioned professor was not present at the time since it was just a weekend study session led by a TA and not an actual class, and anyone who was specifically targeting her would have known this. Meanwhile, the two fatalities are a Christian student and a Muslim (-sounding) student. (Source: Wikipedia).
daezor
2mo ago
The first sentence contradicts the second - cultural relativism and identitarianism assert that we are inescapably bound to the particularities of who we are, and are therefore precisely a rejection of overarching metanarratives and objective truth. So it's not clear what stage in the process you think we're undergoing now.
daezor
2mo ago
I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:
- Modern: science, reason, secularism, progress, legibility, imperialism, hegemony, technocracy, evenly-spaced rectangular grids, communism, capitalism, centralization, globalization
- Postmodern: mysticism, ways-of-knowing, holistic, degrowth, localism, populism, -core/-punk, stuff like this, decolonization, marginalized voices, identity politics
So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?
daezor
2mo ago
It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.
perhaps 0.02% of the English population suffered death by execution in the average year of Henry [VIII]'s reign
Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.
I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.
daezor
2mo ago
daezor
3mo ago
ICE is deporting lots of people.
This is not really true; deportations now are being done at a lower rate than the Obama admin's average, and pretty much the same as in 2024 under Biden. See https://factchequeado.com/teexplicamos/20250820/obama-deportations-trump-biden-numbers/
The "theatricality" with the street recording / media backlash / DHS rebuttal cycle seems to be part of a PR strategy by the Trump admin to make it look like they're being tough on illegals without actually doing anything different.
daezor
7mo ago
daezor
7mo ago
Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.
Maybe someone can start a college that only accepts 14-year-olds (but otherwise has the same admission standards as regular colleges).
daezor
9mo ago
It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.
Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.
daezor
9mo ago
This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative.
To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.
daezor
10mo ago
The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
See this comment in response to this point.
The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people.
Whatever one may think about universal rights in an abstract philosophical sense, the fact remains that the US government is not an all-powerful deity sitting above humanity in judgement thereof, but is a collection of finite human beings who live in a particular time and place and have only a limited capacity to impose their will on the world. When the US goes around the world trying to spread democracy and human rights by force, it has generally not been very successful. It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
What are some examples?
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