flitter
2mo ago
It's made for a blackpilled audience. Where the world is big and doomed and screwed over by powerful forcers beyond your power. The image is for a frog that decides to confront the almost inevitable failure and fight for a cause anyway. It's worth an attempt.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/eabgr3/even_space_marines_need_artillery_support_why_i/
This essay brushes on similar themes, especially the part about Bastion near the middle.
flitter
2mo ago
Yeah there's some quotes of the Baron's thoughts:
Towards Paul:
"I'll be in my sleeping chambers," the Baron said. "Bring me that young fellow we bought on Gamont, the one with the lovely eyes. Drug him well. I don't feel like wrestling."
"Yes, m'Lord."
The Baron turned away, began moving with his bouncing, suspensor-buoyed pace toward his chambers. Yes, he thought. The one with the lovely eyes, the one who looks so much like the young Paul Atreides.
Towards his Nephew Feyd:
A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he’s through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they’ll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I’m sure he’s the one we need. He’ll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.
flitter
6mo ago
Alexis, a senior in high school, briefly worked with Charles at a restaurant. She was a hostess and he was a waiter. They liked each other and texted a lot. They slowly started dating
A few years later, Kristen Roupenian has an "encounter" with this Charles, after which she finds out that he dated someone much younger than him. She decides to write a story that includes personal details about him and the girl
Alexis and Charles would be the couple, and Kristen would be the person they "forget to ask" about whether they could date.
flitter
6mo ago
Here's three mentions I found in TheMotte:
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https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/njr5h0/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_24_2021/gzcjcw7/ big discussion pile!
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https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/njr5h0/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_24_2021/gzb7qp6/ deleted, but children quote parts show it's cat-person posting
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https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/oe16bz/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_05_2021/h4ij0lq/ small bare-links discussion of the later slate article
flitter
7mo ago
Url should point to https://i.redd.it/1cx57tluj5ob1.png
Traditional tai-chi masters are indeed in shambles from MMA.
On the other hand, Muay Thai has been proven to be effective fighting style (excuse the dramatic narrator).
This video is of showbox in 1988 between the top American Kickboxer and a Muay Thai fighter using limited rules preventing elbowing, throwing, grabs, and limiting below-waist hits to a low kick. The kickboxer gets kicked in the leg so many times he starts dodging and running around at 5:50, and ends up carried away in a stretcher.
MMA rules allow lowkicks and elbows in some positions. Fighters study techniques derived from Muay Thai, along with other lineages like Greco-roman wrestling and Juijitsu. And "MMA style" is just whatever works in the ring's rules.
Quoting https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.
But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it; there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.
flitter
9mo ago
To clarify, is the confounder sex differences in reflexes and grip strength?
EG: the best esports players are almost all AMAB.
flitter
9mo ago
Those miserable genres of media are known as Misery Porn. The reader wants to experience something about those cases (the desirability of the victim?) and can experience those thrills second hand, through the victim getting fucked by the world, much like a cuck watching someone experience what he is too insecure to experience himself. Hmm it's a stretch.
The boundary between art and porn is going to be complicated because neither concept is well defined. My view is that a few things are true:
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there is porn (explicit video) that has artistic aesthetic value alongside the titillation. (eg through camerawork)
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there is an art of making porn: where various representations of titillation are practiced.
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there is a porn-like nature to all art: where it is trying to invoke a feeling in you without involving you in reality.
flitter
9mo ago
I like the theorizing about aspects of normal male heterosexuality wanting to degrade and female heterosexuality wanting to oblige. Opportunity to study those mechanics of how sexual desire is actually related to by the person.
Those categories seem like a good start, with more underlying variation and complexity that could be analyzed more. Maybe Queer theorists have also looked at this?
flitter
9mo ago
Haha perhaps I am psychotic due to reading Baudrillard too young and getting to read such things.
I agree some people get way too deep into cuck stuff, especially in right-wing internet circles. However I think the root cause is from unaddressed insecurity complexes, which present themselves as feeling unworthy of their desires and finding excuses including imagining superior competition in great detail.
flitter
9mo ago
Watching porn of oneself. Hm not sure how to categorize that. Perhaps metaphorically masturbatory? Because one is finding themselves hot? I dunno
flitter
9mo ago
Reading fiction is a metaphorical cuckholding when the reader is watching the characters experience the narrative and discovery that they themselves want to experience.
This is not a bad thing about fiction, and it is not-not a bad thing. I think there's an important pattern to be noticed around 'cucking' and how we experience desire. I don't want to be making the worst argument in the world by tying this pattern to the negative connotations of 'cucking'.
If you read Harry Potter and enjoy it, there may be many reasons why you enjoy it. Learning character archetypes, learning more about oneself through reading, trying to predict what happens next, etc. But if you told me that you expressly enjoyed reading Harry Potter because you would love to go on a wizarding adventure and therefore enjoyed reading about someone else who could... well. Especially if you told me you'd rather read Harry Potter than go on your own adventure somehow.
Harry Potter's adventures are more interesting than my adventures in the day, because they're more exciting and I don't have to do any work to make them happen.
flitter
9mo ago
The discussion of sexual behavior has generated some rich concepts to discuss how human desire works. Here I want to discuss three terms that have interesting meaning.
(1) virgin
A simple denotation: hasn't had sex. The connotations are varied, and change with context. It could mean:
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Something is pure and innocence, untouched by corruption (virgin landscape).
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The first time (the virgin voyage of a boat)
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Someone hasn't had a life-changing experience (skydiving virginity)
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That something is safe (virgin drinks without alcohol).
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Insulting someone unable to earn their desire (virgin vs chad)
(2) pornography
Pornography is famously difficult to define outside of "I know it when I see it". Coming from the greek pornographos (writing about prostitutes), it most commonly refers to sexual images and videos that stimulate erotic desire in the viewer.
When used as a metaphor, the scope of "porn" expands to something like the passive observation of the desired object without without the work to actually access it. To fully enjoy it, the viewer must suspend disbelief, and imagine they are a part of the porn in order to pretend the simulation satisfies one's desire for the real thing. However someone who has only viewed porn is often still considered a virgin (but not innocent!), because they haven't actually experienced the desire fulfilled yet.
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The SFW porn network (earthporn for nature, quoteporn for inspiro) is pornographic.
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Most of reddit has a pornographic nature to it. (eg: relationship drama)
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Streamers and podcasts are friendship porn.
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Cooking shows are food porn and online cooking videos are pornified
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Instragram is status porn (and sometimes regular porn).
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Sports competitions are both porn of the game being played, and porn of victory feelings.
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Careless blogposts can end up as insight porn consumed for pleasure.
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Cards-against-humanity game is transgressive joke porn
(3) cucked
A cuckooo bird will lay it's egg in the nest of another bird, tricking them into raising the cuckoo's hatching. This naturally evolves to refer to situations where a parent (usually the dad for obvious reasons) is raising kids he thinks are his, but are in fact from another man. Which then simplifies to the actual act of watching someone else have sex with someone you want. Nowadays known as a cuckhold fetish.
The concept of cucking has become so broad and complicated that a psychiatrist could write a whole book about it. A sample story might have a husband watching someone else fuck his wife. Which raises the question at the core of the cuck fetish: why doesn't she fuck the husband? A full understanding of cuckholding requires explaining all three motivations. The cuckhold is usually motivated by (suppressed?) feelings of insecurity. He his not capable or worthy of having sex with her. The bull is motivated by either lust or rubbing superiority of dominance hierarchy in the cuckolds face. The cuck-er similarly may be lustful, or could also be sadistically belittling the cuckold.
Racial dynamics add to this swirl. The common case is a white man watching a white woman fuck a black man (with a large penis). This fantasy props up so much there are entire porn sites based on this concept, and plenty of alt-right fanfiction about it. Racial insecurity. There's a secondary market for asian men watching an asian woman fuck a white man (with a large penis), which is related to WhiteMale-AsianFemale couples, and asian masculinity in general.
Some use of "cuck" in practice simply mean coward. Someone with "cucked beliefs". Or a cuck-servitave (cringe conservative). This dilutes the richer meaning of cuckholding. A more proper usage is the bike-cuck meme, in which a man copes with the loss of a bike by imagining someone else enjoys riding it more than him. Perhaps he'd like to watch too. An additional meme is the copypasta that raising a daughter is cucked because the dad is spending his time and effort helper her grow as a person for another man to enjoy. Which is an interesting broken perspective.
....
All porn is cuckhold porn. The object of desire (the sex) is happening on a screen and is inaccessible. The viewer must either accept the cuckholding, or delude themselves into thinking they are a playing a part. This process spirals into insecurity, first from feeling inferior to the object of desire, which leads to a cuckhold fetish to the porn itself, a feeling that one doesn't deserve to fuck reality and should be constrained to the porn. Giving up and accepting that fucking reality is too much wok.
flitter
10mo ago
there are still social rules around how you should treat others
Yeah I think this is an example of early forms of local "dove" behavior out-competing the hawk memes for how to treat those around you.
So civilization is the process of expanding the moral circle (I've heard that one before) through competition: brothers outcompete loners. Families outcompete brothers. Tribes outcompete families. etc etc etc.
I'm reminded of the fremen mirage blogpost, which argues that throughout history the expanded (decadent) civs have outcompeted the more spartan "fremen" go-kill-and-take-their-stuff gangs. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
flitter
10mo ago
Agreed, but I think OP would also agree with you. Genes are the primary reproductive unit right now. The secondary reproductive unit right now is the ideas on top of genes. Genes are currently the smallest reproductive unit, the recursive loop of evolution. Memes form on top of them and are influenced by them (see Idiocracy for fictional evidence), but in the future with bio-electronics or large matrices the ideas could create a new primary reproductive unit whose behavior would begin influencing the ideas instead of genes.
flitter
10mo ago
This makes sense to me, even if I don't fully agree. There's some truth to how these "hawks" and "doves" will have a overpopulation life-cycle.
On the other hand I suspect there's an underlying structure to these positions (motte) that would suggest that there are stable "optimal" environment behaviors (bailey) that suggests an underlying weak-ordering to how moral a system is (double bailey)
flitter
10mo ago
It's a very strong argument against naive whiggish presentism. You've given good argument that some moral principles merely followed in the wake of technological abundance, and weren't "self evidently" adapted until the economics changed. Perhaps the average morality as practiced is accidental and self congratulatory.
Something hinted in this post is that an individual "weak" morality is a strong meme, and can convert others faster than they destroy the carriers. The "go kill people and take their shit" meme builds a large empire through conquer. When material conditions improve it seems like "tithe to the poor and hungry" gains a footing and starts taking over though. Either through Fashionably irrationality or through moral discovery who knows. A prime case study of this is the spread of Christianity through Rome. Or the final boss Fukuyama.
The core question is what happens to morality over time when material conditions don't improve. Do the social structures remain static? Or do they develop on the same converging fixed points but more slowly. You mention George Washington was a strong supporter of slavery during a time it was seems as economically necessary, and yet during that time there were also abolitionists, who opposed it purely for moral reasons. This seems contrary to the simple thesis you've presented,
For me, I think the nature of morality is too early to call, and depends on deeper studying patterns of history and some questions about how consciousness exists and such.
flitter
10mo ago
The flipped version is likely prostitution. Men who are down on their luck can't sell themselves. Woman who are down on their luck can (to some extant). This is an extra option for women, but it's generally not an appealing one, so isn't seen as an advantage for women.
flitter
11mo ago
In the way that a sculptor discovers the statue, the Hock will break you until only Strength remains
Freedom depends on uncertainty
This post is an abstract framing that the trade off between freedom and authoritarianism is a proxy for how uncertain we are.
I. Game Theory
Simple game theory problems are a domain where the goal is well defined and we can mathematically model optimal policies. In this extreme case "freedom" is meaningless.
The prisoners dilemma and the fish-farm coordination problem are examples where agents might behave in different ways (have some freedom), but the optimal global strategy is to eliminate those freedoms.
These coordination problems happen because of freedom to choose the 'wrong' option. The libertarian solution is to allow contracts (enforced by other contracts I guess) that reduce the agents' freedom. The authoritarian solution is to have some Leviathan enforce the optimal policy (for some self interested reason).
II. Creating Laws
If there's uncertainty about what policy leads to the best outcomes then solutions include some freedom.
Agents explore different policies and learn more about the situation. They can teach younger agents about which policies lead to better outcomes (mentoring).
Society can start with very simple rules like "don't eat those berries". Over time society has built up metis for understanding a lot about what kind of rules work.
Nowadays our laws are complicated, and we use police to enforce them. Rules are everywhere. Parents and teachers give lots of them to children, but there are also rules about what rules can be given.
These rules are enforced because authorities have better policies than the subjects. I think this is a good basis for why force is used in society at all. Like why we allow parents to have control over children.
However these situations also have a degree of freedom. Authorities can't make all the decisions for multiple practical reasons like aging. But also because they don't know what the best policy is. They know a lot about failure modes to avoid, but don't have all the answers. Leads to a hands off parent that stops their kid from seriously injuring anyone, but otherwise lets them roam.
III. Compromise the Laws
In the real world people also disagree about what the "the best outcome" looks like (if it even exists at all).
Sometimes they resolve this using violence. If a kid is following a bad policy they would be overruled. Criminals might be punished proportionally. Rival tribes conquered.
However this is limited because violence sucks, and hurts all combatants. So sometimes they compromise and create rules that acknowledge some uncertainty in end-goals. We get radical laws like the first amendment, and religious compromise.
This is speculation about history on my part: that historically this compromise was always reluctantly made. All the initial individuals were convinced that their way was the best way, but agree to be ruled by a blind system because it reduces violence. And then later the concept of freedom is concertized so that there are actually people born who earnestly believe in the uncertainty of end-outcomes.
IV. Increasing Agency
Then when there's uncertainty even about what the nature of "the best outcome" is (if it exists at all), authoritarianism starts to become incoherent.
You can no longer justify arbitrarily overruling others. The best rule we can use here is Kant's standard to "Act in such a way as to treat everyone always as an end and never merely as a means".
With actual uncertainty (instead of the reluctant compromise above), we get the things like The Spirit of the First Amendment. And radicals saying "I disagree with everything you stand for, but I will die for your right to say it".
The most authoritarian frame is paternalism about enabling the development of freedom in the student. Instead of directly enforcing policy, the teacher guides the student to avoid self defeating loops like drug/rage/greed/power/addiction. In this view a parent shouldn't dictate what end goal their child will pursue, but help them develop into themselves while avoiding traps and tricks.
It's about increasing agency to deal with uncertainty. The opposite of the game theory section were we spent all our efforts reducing agency.
V. True Neutral
Finally with total uncertainty about what "the best outcome looks like" we get a sort of nihilism. I don't know enough to contrast this nihilism with other philosopher's understanding of the term. In this case it's a complete rejection of authoritarianism in the abstract.
I see it as a True Neutral saying "whatever happens, happens".
We can't even justify limited paternalism. Suppose I am powerful and notice some small entity is acting in self destructive ways. Something like small weak creatures are being authoritarian to each-other. I could easily interfere to increase freedom of their system, but what makes me sure that increasing freedom is even a valuable? Only physics will determine what happens to those creatures.
VI. Summary
In low uncertainty environments authoritarianism is natural and optimal. As uncertainty increases authoritarianism becomes worse and worse, until becoming incoherent as a concept.
I think this dynamic is fundamental to how these concepts interact. And provides a useful framework for talking about freedom in various settings.
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