haroldbkny
10d ago
Definitely check them out, they're incredible and transformative. I think Untitled is the one most focused on patriarchy, but I like Social Justice and Words Words Words the most, it has a really great ending.
haroldbkny
12d ago
I think this confluence is interesting. Many women, including many feminists, notice and resent that Feminist™ ideas frequently serve the interests of a privileged few rather than women in general.
And their solution is generally to denigrate white women the way they denigrate white men. Though only in very specific situations where we can paint it in a very clear oppressor-oppressed narrative, such that white women are oppressing black women. But add a white man into the scenario and he's immediately the oppressor again.
I don't disagree with what you wrote at all. In fact, I wholeheartedly champion basically everything you said. My first exposure to that kind of feminist sophistry first got me totally tongue-tied and I didn't know how to fight back against it, but I knew that they were doing something wrong. Then when I saw people like Scott calling out this sort of thing as a motte and bailey in posts like Social Justice and Words Words Words, Another Brick in the Motte, and Untitled, I was able to recognize exactly where the sophistry was, and I grew to hate feminists for their abuse of logic, and getting large swaths of society to fall in line, because they make fallacious arguments that aren't super easy to spot and refute as such. After all, the way to win a debate with a 2 minute speaker limit is to make arguments that take 2 minutes and 10 seconds to refute.
But all of this was pointed out by tons of MGTOWs, MRAs, and other anti-feminists, along with the more scrupled people in the rationalist movement like Scott back in 2015. I'm sure that 99.99% of people posting on the Motte already know that patriarchy theory is one of the biggest divisive arguments of the past decade, and I'm sure that 95% of Mottezians would agree with you that it is pure sophistry, and one of the more infamous and abused motte and bailey arguments. This is all to say that I think that everything you said is old news, so I'm wondering, why did you bring it up? Is there some greater context surrounding your post that would be relevant to it, that would cast it in a new light, to spark debate amongst the Motte?
Sorry, I don't want to be too hard on you as a first time poster. I'm far from the arbiter of what's insightful and what's old on the Motte, and it's not like I've never said anything that was obvious to others before. It's just that people on the Motte are always (rightfully) wary of us becoming an echo chamber, and I worry about that, too. So I'd rather focus on new things that we have lots to say about as opposed to retread ground.
haroldbkny
15d ago
Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives.
Sort of serious question: Is this actually true? It seems to me that we have a long history of looking at other groups, and our own people in semi-recent history and repeatedly saying, "look how they treated their women! Appalling!", regardless of the truth of it. I always hear leftists saying things like "just 100 years ago, women were treated like chattel", and the like, but to be honest, those claims don't really hold up. Yes, legal rights have changed. But that means nothing unless we understand the context around which prior people had understood and thought about (or simply not thought about) those legal rights.
A little more than 100 years ago, women couldn't legally cast a vote. But that doesn't mean they were chattel. People didn't necessarily think about being unable to vote as being chattel. Women throughout all of history have had the strong ability to get what they want, despite being unable to vote, even dating back to ancient Rome, when women successfully did things like protest austerity taxes they didn't like. Men generally listen to women, because men are actually really close with women. They're not two competing groups. Men generally define themselves first and foremost by their relationship with their most significant others in their lives, which are their wives. Do you really think that men would treat women like they owned them and be completely happy? The phrase "happy wife, happy life" is well over a century old!
So now we come back to marital rape. I don't know the true answer. I do know that marital rape was outlawed fairly recently, like within the past 50 years, in the US. But does that mean that it was socially acceptable to force yourself on your wife? Does that mean that it was common to do that? I'm skeptical, myself. It might just be a part of the repeated cascade of "look how bad people used to treat women" of our modern world.
haroldbkny
19d ago
I understand what you're saying, but I think that OP's point is that it means a different thing when the woke do it, as opposed to when us anti-woke folk. This is because the woke have stated exactly what it means to them, that they do think that this sort of representation can have a negative influence. So it speaks to them trying to have negative influence on certain people, that they hate white men, and they're not just trying to bring other people up through positive influence.
haroldbkny
23d ago
I don't even think you need implicit bias to account for this! It's quite overt. I remember seeing some video from one of the big MGTOW/anti-feminist guys back in like 2014 when I was first being awakened to anti-wokeness. In it, he talks about how he was a psychologist, I think, and he used to give seminars on gender relations or something many years prior. He'd go to a chalkboard and write "women are..." and people would complete the sentence. Overwhelmingly, he'd get the crowd all chiming in with "hard-working", "caring", "empathetic", "smart", "strong", and every other positive affirmation you could get, and he'd write it down. Then he'd write "men are..." and people would chime in with "pigs", "assholes", "stupid", "lazy", etc. And then he'd ask the crowd, "so what does this show you about the true nature of sexism?". And then everyone in the seminars would hate him.
haroldbkny
23d ago
The movie still works if both Malcom and Cole don't know he's dead. I don't see why the movie should hinge on Cole knowing anything about Malcom being dead or not.
haroldbkny
27d ago
Okay
A little pointless thing: I found a fairly benign, non-political, scissor statement. I was watching the Sixth Sense and wondered whether Cole knew Malcom was a ghost all along. My wife thought differently than me, fairly matter of factly. I took to the internet to see what others think. Everyone seems to have their own answer, with their own strong convictions, and they think everyone else is a moron for not seeing it their way. I personally could see it either way. I guess I always wanted to believe that Cole knew Malcom was dead, but also didn't think there was enough supporting evidence from the film to justify it. So I'm strangely more on the "he didn't know," side , even though I would rather the movie had convinced me that he did know. What do you think?
Being Jewish ends up counting in woke terms sporadically. Whenever there's some right-wing antisemetic comment that happens, or even something that borders on being antisemetic or could be construed as being antisemetic through wild interpretation (like how Marjorie Taylor Greene's dumb comment got morphed by the left into being about "Jewish space lasers"), then the left always takes the opportunity to pounce and decry the right as antisemetic, and implies that Jewish people are oppressed by the Right. And then Jewishness gains a little bit of woke traction. But then it goes away again, mostly.
I went to what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the area, possibly in the country, and I didn't hate it at the time, but in retrospect, I do think that there really should be better alternatives.
Regarding interactions with other kids, I wasn't beaten up, and I had friends, but there is a degree of psychological bullying that happens there regardless. Your popularity was determined by how little you cared about anything. Being passionate about hobbies made you vulnerable to ridicule by the greater school body populace of the cooler kids, and people thought you were lame for it. That seems perverse, as we should be encouraging people to pursue their passions, not ridiculing them for it. I think trying to fit in with that system did leave some lasting personality problems for me. And I was very shocked in college that the opposite was true, and the people who did nothing but ridicule others for being passionate were not considered the top of the popularity chain.
Then there's the education aspect. I was in every advanced class that I could take, and it was still entirely underwhelming with regards to what I learned. I feel like if I was challenged and allowed to grow, I could have learned at least 5 times as much as I did. Instead I wasn't challenged to really learn, and instead was swamped with tons of busy work every day.
In the Year of Our Lord 2023, is that really the case? My sense from the doctors I know as friends is that they are absolutely loath to suggest, "Ya know, diet and exercise could help with..." because they know 1) Patients don't want to hear it, and 2) They aren't going to do it anyway.
From my experience, that's completely not true. Every doctor suggests it as if it's a novel idea you've just never thought of. They don't have many suggestions beyond that, other than to tell you to go see a specialist, who also doesn't have any ideas to help.
The most frustrating thing I find is that doctors also don't want to tell you to just eat less, which is in my experience the only thing that'll cause you to lose weight. If you adopt a strategy of severely limiting calories or working with some strategy that works for you but is not officially approved (like being really strict but having cheat days), then they think you have an eating disorder, and they warn you about that. They tell you to just lose weight, but don't approve of options that actually work for you.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I don't know, I thought he was implying that my first principles were just that I'm conservative and I hate the other side or something, which is not true. I think my values in many ways don't really simplify down to first order principles, depending on what you mean by that. They really are meta level. I am against self-righteousness and people who are so sure of their own convictions that they become bad people themselves. That really seems second order, not first.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
admit to yourself that you actually have first order principles
Which would be what, exactly?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Well, for whatever it's worth, I've always been someone who hates people who hate other people for hating people. That's just the way I am. I'm a 3rd order hater. I guess I feel like the proper response to dealing with bigots is to admonish them, but try to do better yourself, not to debase yourself like they do, and not to play the victim.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.
It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.
This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor.
You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction.
No I don't. I don't think there's much positive to fat-detraction, and I generally dislike fat-detraction entirely, pretty strongly. I know there are hate-filled people who hate fat people. I dislike them greatly. That doesn't mean that the hate-filled fat acceptance movement people are any better, or are suddenly noble. I despise those squeaky wheel social movements who try to shame everyone around them.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Those people aren't on my side. That's a separate party, the group of people who hate fat people. I'm not a part of that group of people, and I dislike and disavow that group of people. Whereas my wife would say that she does feel that the fat acceptance movement is a fundamentally good thing, that she does like, and she would not disavow them. There's the big difference.
The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Pm me, and we can see if you're local. If so, my wife would meet up with you.
Also my wife says, maybe Emily Oster and her substack could be fruitful for you.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Speaking as such an atheist (or something close to an atheist), well, yeah, there is a portion of me that sometimes thinks about life, and comes to the conclusion that life is all about distracting yourself. And I choose to distract myself.
I don't think drugs or most things that will make you "happy" easily are that appealing, because they don't really make you happy. I know this because there were times when I drank or smoked too much in college and felt strung out. Anything that's addicting starts to feel bad in some way, you feel bad when you see you are acting differently and shamefully, and you feel that the happiness it gives is short term and false in some way. You can feel that your brain starts to crave and expect it more, and you can't keep up with it all the time, and if you try, you suffer physical effects. Heck, even watching porn or playing video games too much will make you feel that way. It's pretty apparent to me that if I did harder drugs, it'd turn my life into a nightmare, and the pleasure it gave wouldn't last long before turning into pain and problems. It is not pleasurable at all to spend all your money on drugs, live on the street, resort to prostitution, and have to struggle to try to live another week.
Then there's also pride and shame. Even if we know all of it may be constructed and somewhat meaningless, we are social beings. I respond to the thoughts that if I killed myself or became a druggie, the people I know would be ashamed of me. I don't really want that, even if I think that their lives are as meaningless as mine. It's just the way social animals are, we are optimized to care about that.
I should also say, for what is worth, that I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I do have pascal-wager-like thoughts. But I sort of think that if my life is going to end anyway, why end it now, and why have it be shitty? May as well at least try to live a "good" life if all of it may not matter anyway, but also may matter.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Maybe in the last 70 years, but in the last 15 years, it has pretty definitively gotten more expensive. Anecdotally, my grocery bill has nearly doubled (adjusting for inflation) in the last decade, and everything I've found in a quick google search has supported this conclusion.
Could you share your calculations?
Is this really worth paying attention to any more than the last 17 times Trump was supposedly nailed for some criminal activity, and half the country said "got'im!" The last time was just like 2 months ago, and I haven't heard anything about it since then! This is so exhausting. I'll pay attention to this and study up on it once it actually seems different than any previous instance of him being brought under charges.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I never understood colognes at all. Could someone explain it to me? Under which circumstances does a man want to wear cologne? What does it buy him by doing so, vs just wearing nothing?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Work on a supportive team. They'll have runbooks to help you through it, and if you find the runbook isn't working for you, the runbook author and/or senior engineers will be around to help you through it.
Is it still that hard? I'm sure it was that hard back before we had modern medicine. But I gotta say, my wife is an extremely pain averse person (she either feels pain about 5 times as much as I do, or she's kinda wimpy about it and doesn't cope with it well), but once she got that epidural, birth was not too bad. It became more like something that took some effort to do as opposed to something harrowing.
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