georgioz
18hr ago
I believe it was the famous The Control Group Is Out of Control where he compares quality of psychology and parapsychology papers - where parapsychology studies phenomena like telepathy etc. He deliberately used parapsychology as a control group, as the modern papers use the same methodology as psychology papers. And unsurprisingly, parapsychology fares quite well. If it was not for the fact that parapsychology is so suspicious of a field, these papers would be part of our scientific arsenal and would inform host of policies and self-improvement programs as the psychology does.
georgioz
19hr ago
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
You are just assuming your position. You are throwing moral and metaphysical words such as "private life" or "freedom". What are they, how are they justified, why are they valuble, why should they be protected and elevated? I will give a steelman of somebody from either camp:
- Pro-Church: "Everyone must become Catholic; tithes will get taken out of paychecks with other taxes; people get fined for missing church."
- Anti-Church: "Religion is banned; there's an excise tax on Church donations and we'll pass regulations to prevent services from happening."
- Small Government: "Everybody must become libertarian, we must enshrine moral value of "liberty" and "private life" in our law as the the highest policy. Government has to care whenever any of these things are in danger and ban tithes or various taxes.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
You just need to read the article, which basically boils down to the "our democracy" rhetoric of The New Left. The way their democracy is endangered is as follows:
- More power to CEOs and corporation to establishes special economic zones etc.
- Dismantling federal regulation and bureocracy via activities like DOGE. Dismantling various policies and structures such as US AID.
- Promote cryptocurrency and other ways of evading government ability to follow money trace, excise taxes etc.
- Create political coalition among Gray and Red tribe to purge Blues from position of power in order to enable their prefered policy.
The thing is that when the new left talks about democracy, they are not talking about some technicalities. They mean that true democracy is only achieved if their preferred policies are implemented. Therefore any pushback against their policy big and small are dangerous - be it political defeat of Democrats in San Francisco, dismantling of US AID up to dismantling the Federal bureaucracy. That is all.
Sure, I got all that. But in the end the father was inconsequential unlike Harry's mother who was key to the whole story. And even the stepfathers had their own agenda. Dumbledore literally had plan to martyr him, Snape had his own issues, Black was more like an uncle etc.
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Lily managed to do that: via memories and her protective spell fueled by motherly love. Harry's father was ultimately a disappointment and his best qualities were to correct his boyish toxic masculine ways, marry Lily and then leave the story.
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
As for Voldemort's mother Merope, this is absolute twisting of her story in the books. She is a victim, abused by her cruel father Marvolo, impoverished and left alone by everybody dying in childbirth giving life to Voldemort. She is no evil slave owner who loves to torture people, including let's say poisoning her naive husband who loved and nurtured Riddle to take his money, and who created Voldemort by wizard superiority Nazi indoctrination or whatnot. That would be the twist I am looking for.
Instead, she is of course a victim, she was shunned by Riddle's aristocratic muggle father, who saw her and his son as an embarrassing mistake - literally mocking her and telling her she is a tramp - and who let her and Riddle die, not even knowing that he has a son. It is Voldemort's father who is behind Voldemort's hatred of muggles, why he literally uses the ritual to purge his half-blood away and why he has such a boner to create pure blood society. Voldemort's mother conveniently died after his father abandoned her in order for Voldemort to become a villain, he did not get the dose of Lily-like motherly love because of his deadbeat father. In fact the act of patricide of hated father and grandparents, reneging on his patrimony at 16 was the first instance when Voldemort created his first Horcrux out of the family ring. Absence of his mother also led him to not exactly hate her, but disrespect her for "muggle weakness" where he was flabbergasted how a witch could succumb to such a ploy. But it was not exactly hatred like he held toward his father, it was just disrespect created by absence of corrective motherly love exacerbated by systemic abuse in orphanage - not in terms of actual physical abuse by wicked female staff who would give him to child molesters or whatnot - they were just overworked and underfunded, so any emotional damage on Riddle was there by virtue of being isolated from nurturing motherly love.
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
I am non-feminist and moreover I am a Catholic. I ascribe to virtue ethics that are the same for men and women in full, be it seven heavenly virtues or their counterpart of seven deadly sins. I hold men and women to be of the same ontological value and dignity and all the virtues and sins apply to them both. However men and women are not interchangeable due to physical nature, I'd say that ranking of the virtues is different for men and women.
What feminist and even broadly modern literature does is either explicitly or implicitly is ascribing to feminist power structure story, standpoint epistemology stemming from hierarchy of oppression where virtue and sin is not decided on personal agency, but on systemic effects. So women being nasty and nagging is okay, because it is just giving valuable piece of information to men from superior standpoint of female lived experience. This is especially jarring as in most fantasy and sci-fi setting they are supposed to be equal in power of violence either through magic, stat points etc. But they still retain their oppressed nature and men still have the privilege to be put down. To tie it to my previous examples - Hermione preparing her plans and then grabbing Ron and Harry to teleport them without their consent or knowledge is okay. If it was the other way around, it would be seen as problematic stripping of agency.
As I said, it is a very disruptive element for boy or male stories. As soon as there is even some powerful and competent female character, it changes the interpersonal dynamics. Even if she is 100 times more powerful, she still glares at men, and has no problem to punch down. Even if the female character is equal or even weaker, she engages at tone policing, as it is implicitly assumed that men have to walk on eggshells when expressing their points. Suddenly orders have to go through committee making sure nobody was emotionally hurt, either before the decision or there will be talking about it afterwards. You will never see a true banter such as if a female character rolls her eyes with some snarky comment and hero would shut her down. Or even mildly "offensive" comment such as Harry saying "Shut up Hermione and do as you are told". There is inherent tension there, even in Harry Potter if he tells both Ron and Hermione to shut up, there is immediately some internal monologue about his guilt of how he almost made her cry or some such nonsense.
Which is completely lacking in boy/male literature where the hierarchy is much more defined, it changes via action, and banter is really there for play and tension relief not for psychotherapy session afterwards. As I said previously, in modern literature it easier to follow a format where you write character such as Conan with all his lines and just turn him female. Suddenly (s)he can berate a rescued princess for being childish dork, tie and gag her if she is annoying etc. The Ellen Ripley treatment who was originally written for male named Martin Roby, and they changed him to Ripley specifically for subversion points without rewriting any line. That is the "non-feminist" things that I notice.
The fact that this is so ingrained in all modern writing, television and movies is the main point. It is definitely not so even in literature as late as 1960s. That is why some commenter above accused me of not wanting women in the books. It is not that I do not want women there, but it is exactly because in modern writing the authors cannot help themselves and bring about all these themes that are hard to unsee.
By the way to me it seems interesting how many people have such a different understanding of the books like here with Voldemort. It is really fascinating.
I mean how could you not do that? You will always evaluate individuals based on some standard: you are a good student - for an inner city black man. You are an excellent basketball player - for 5'3'' Asian. The baseline of average is always there and tabula rasa nukes the universal baseline from orbit.
In a sense the DEI crowd is more honest here. They at least know that there are these huge disparities and they want to equalize them here and now with hope that power of representation and reeducation will erase them in the future. It is classical liberal position that is unattainable - even 150 years after emancipation the blacks are not doing well. Heck, it may take another 150 years of access to equal opportunity to fix it, nothing else to see here. That is why the liberal consensus was so easily hacked by Social Justice crowd - it plays on their hidden assumptions.
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