haroldbkny
8d ago
I agree with you but I also want to play devil's advocate a little bit. Do you, and I, and others actually feel like it'd be better to have a society that values the strong over the weak? It's not hard to imagine how that sort of society could be dystopian, too.
And is it a binary choice, or is there a middle, too, where we can have the strong and weak valued equally, or strong is valued over weak, but not so much that we get the effects we're seeing in society today? If I had to choose a society one way vs the other, I'm not sure which I'd choose.
haroldbkny
13d ago
Well, if that's the case, then it really is an echo chamber, and there's no point in anyone playing Darwin2500's role and arguing the counter point. Also we should probably also change the banner on the side of the site.
Realistically, you're probably right to some degree. But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones. But people don't change their mind by being nagged, mocked, and provoked by an enemy. They do it when people make great points and relate to each other.
haroldbkny
13d ago
Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber
No, no one has to reflexively argue the opposite. A principled leftist would do more than just spitefully fight for the sake of fighting and as such turn mottezians further against leftism by providing examples of the ideology they despise. He would lead with empathy while providing legit counterpoints that open up people's hearts and minds and make them think.
I think you're correct. From everything I've ever seen of her, I don't think she's anti-trans, I think she's anti-men. That then cascades over into some anti-trans positions because she hates men, especially those who she deems as a threat to women, and she believes that trans women are actually just men who are infringing on female space.
But this is all a moot point, because in the court of public opinion, if you don't believe any person that they're trans, or if you say anything even remotely construable as questioning trans ideology, then you "hate trans people". And as you say, this simply becomes repeated until the point that no one questions it, and it becomes "truthy" (in the sense that Colbert used to talk about "truthiness").
haroldbkny
14d ago
That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.
Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.
haroldbkny
14d ago
Whether or not the 1913 definition means what you're implying it to mean probably depends on exactly how you define consent, and how you define the boundaries of consent. Suffice it to say, based on what I was exposed to growing up in the late 20th century, it was my impression that rape referred to a violent brutal crime, and I'm sure that most others of my generation and geographic location would agree with me. Ymmv, perhaps
It's like Jonathan Haidt says, people form their moral judgements first based on disgust, then rationalize it post hoc. People will jump through many hoops to preserve their feelings of moral superiority, especially when it comes to protecting women and how women are treated. This, in my opinion is evidence that women are not oppressed. Everyone wants to think everyone else is oppressing women but they are the one of the few good ones.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
haroldbkny
14d ago
Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
haroldbkny
15d ago
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
haroldbkny
15d ago
I don't think it's "blaming" to tell people they need to take responsibility to ensure negative things don't happen to them in their lives, to the extent that they can control those negative events. Some might say a better term than "victim blaming" would be "prevention". I shouldn't have to lock my house when I leave town for a week. But if I did that, would that really be wise? Why are we not teaching robbers not to rob, instead of teaching people to lock their doors?
I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination.
Yes, that's true. My framing of it is not a steelman, for sure. Though I do know some people who certainly act like they believe in the coordination, believe that there's a cabal of white men who are actively trying to keep others down, and they take our their anger on white men as such. I think that some groundling progressives may intellectually know some things, but have a lot of anger about their perceived injustices, and they end up having a hard time separating their angry feelings from their logical thoughts on the subject.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
A sort of nitpick: they don't think that all people are subject to circumstances out of their control. I think they only think the people who are oppressed are subject to this.
For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems to attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich off of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.
I find this sort of model very infuriating, because there's a lack of acknowledgement that we're all people, and we're all just trying to live our lives. And there really is no logical rubric for who is oppressed or not, other than inclusion in specific categories (most of which almost everyone has at least one of), and therefore, there really is no logic to who is in control of theirs and others lives and who isn't.
haroldbkny
21d ago
If you take too much minoxidil orally, you grow hair everywhere that hair can grow.
Applied topically, it works just as well for beards as bald patches on the scalp. Check out /r/Minoxbeards , I can personally vouch for it, and my brother who was a stickler to the routine had even more startling results from a worse start.
I mean, I definitely know that rogaine will do that, which is why bald people are usually careful to not let it drip onto their foreheads. But I didn't know that anyone actually deliberately puts it on their face to grow beards, that it would have desirable effects.
haroldbkny
22d ago
I'm tall, charming, with a beard that's far less scraggly after some (poorly adhered to) minoxidil, in a promising career (hahahaha),
Do people use minoxidil to grow hair on their face? I've never heard of that before.
so please skip the kind of blue pills (psychiatric pills) you'd feed the dearly departed Skookum and the like.
Uhh, I hesitate to ask what this means. Do you mean departed like he's not on the Motte, or do you mean departed like he died while attempting to do the Scag (or whatever that wilderness thing was called that he was doing)?
haroldbkny
22d ago
I think dreams are pretty amazing, for a few reasons.
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I get to experience stuff I don't get to in real life. But, like I'm really experiencing it. When I fly in a dream, it really feels like I'm flying, and it's amazing. When I play instruments that I don't normally play, it feels amazing. When I have sex dreams with women I fancy but will never actually have sex with in real life... I enjoy it.
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I think it's really interesting when I have creative concepts come to me through dreams. I've written my best music that way, and sometimes had real insights that I don't think I'm clever enough to come up with myself. But the weird thing is that those insights did, in-fact, come from me. It couldn't have come from anyone else, unless there are 4th dimensional creatures injecting thoughts into my dreams or something. I think it's amazing that there is a method of unbinding my mind such that I'm able to think more creatively than I ordinarily do.
haroldbkny
24d ago
I loved dune 1, but I didn't really like dune 2. I'm okay with movies being different from books they're based on, but this movie quite simply did not deserve it's running time. They could have done so so so much with 3 hours and touched on so many great themes from the books, but I'm left with the feeling that they simply squandered the running time. Many decisions I simply don't understand for this. Some of which are: why condense it all into less than 9 months? Why cut out Alia? Why cut out the spacing guild? Why cut out Paul teaching the fremen the weirding way? We are left thinking that the only reason Paul wins in the end is just because he used nukes
haroldbkny
24d ago
She is also portrayed as a much more antagonistic character in this movie than in the books.
Just because it's happened before, does that mean it's good to do? I love Citizen Kane and think it's an amazing movie, but would I feel like it was crossing a line if I were of the time period when William Randolph Hearst were a prominent figure? Maybe.
I also know that Citizen Kane is clearly driven by an artistic vision, more than just character assassination. I don't know if it's something I can quantify, but I can tell you that Knives Out is no Citizen Kane. If someone is trying to tell a great story and that happens to be inspired by someone real and portrays them in less than perfect light, that's far different than specifically trying to make something just to make them look bad and pander to a political audience.
One way perhaps this can be measured is in how sympathetic the movie is to the character in question. Charles Foster Kane was clearly a sympathetic character. We were taken along for the ride with him his whole life. Even if he is a ultimately a tragic figure, he is still a great figure, and one that we can understand exactly what happened to him and see ourselves in his shoes. When Knives Out portrays Musk and Rogan, there is no sympathy, and they're just portrayed to be incompetent, bratty, lucky, talentless backstabbers, and we are made to feel like only the most wrong hearted and selfish people could ever end up like them.
This reminds me very heavily of what I wrote last year regarding how I believe that movies like Knives Out are basically trying to implant progressive "brain worms" into people's heads, to kind of overwrite their perception of famous people:
The movie just seemed like a pulpit for Rian Johnson to talk about how much he hates Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and various other people. I almost feel like the entire plot is really the secondary goal. The main goal of him making this was to implant and grow a brain worm in the audience that every famous rich person is connected, really part of a cabal that got what they got through no talent of their own, took advantage of individuals and the world at large, contribute nothing, and are evil, vile, worthless, and bratty pieces of shit.
And here
The redpill manosphere streamer character also doesn't really fit Rogan. Rogan of course didn't 'lucky break' his way into prominence, he had a lengthy career as a comedian and hosted mainstream TV shows before starting his podcast.
This is all a part of how I think Johnson is trying to implant brain worms. It's not the truth he's written, but people will walk away from this feeling like they understand Joe Rogan and Elon Musk better, even though they're just watching fictionalized versions of them. They'll feel inside like they can just write them off as well-connected lucky backstabbers. Whether the characters are actually similar in deep ways to Rogan and Musk doesn't matter, because they're the first people who will come to mind for the general populace when they see this movie, due to their cultural prominence.
I haven't noticed this blatant trend so much these days, but maybe it's because I simply am checked out of modern media and the culture war.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I feel like any life script involves people going into a dominant industry. It would have to be known for years that this industry is up and coming or well established enough that it can accommodate everyone at good salary for their entire lives. I know that I personally want to instill the value into my kids that they when they come of age, they should have a good look at the world, consider what are the major dominant fields, and get a degree that will help them get a job in a dominant field. Doing this drastically reduces the luck required to be and stay gainfully employed. I know too many people with English degrees who have far too much trouble finding work, or finding work that pays more then $50k/year. Also, any industry where the labor market it demand-driven is going to make employees more comfortable, whether we are talking about salaries, benefits, or even just the leeway to not have to be "on" all the time.
For the boomer generation, I'm tempted to say that this dominant field was education. For whatever reason, I know a lot of teachers from that generation. And I certainly know that they were paid much better then teachers are now, including amazing benefits and pension. However as we all know, education generally no longer offers benefits like that and no longer offers even middling salary.
For our generation, perhaps the dominant industry is software. Of course it's possible that now software is under threat of no longer being able to hold this title. There are fewer jobs, lots of layoffs, lower salaries, and everyone feels under threat. Perhaps this is what happens when the boom is over and an industry is no longer dominant. In which case, I only hope that there will be a new dominant industry that springs up so my kids (or even I) can feel like there's a new, safe way to have our lives be supported.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I think this is an interesting topic. I try not to believe in conspiracy theories much, but sometimes complex systems can take on aspects that seem like conspiracy. One thing I'm wondering about, and I'm not sure if anyone would really know the answer here, is what incentives do the experts who are telling us that everything's great have for telling us that? What incentives do they have for telling us that things are not great?
Here would be some guesses, but they're really just guesses. I know nothing about these systems and positions, and I don't even know who the "usual suspects" are, besides the Treasury Secretary and/or former Treasury Secretary who you listed above.
Incentives for telling us that things are great:
- if people believe it then it's more likely that Biden will get reelected (though this sort of then raises the question of whether these experts are incentivized to get Biden reelected. I know little enough about the system to know whether that's the case either way)
- avoiding panic that could lead to more crisis
Incentives for telling us that things are bad:
- if things are truly bad, and they tell us things are great, people will lose trust in them as an institution
- if things are truly bad, then they can start enacting policies to make things better
Any other incentives people can think of?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
The court has sought to lower the political temperature as a primary goal
Do you mean the current Supreme Court? I don't follow much SCOTUS news in general, but I thought that people felt that this court was doing the opposite of that. They had two landmark rulings within the past two years that both pissed off leftists, hard: Dobbs struct down Roe in 2022, and last year they overruled affirmative action.
Could you clarify? I am likely just not understanding what you mean by political vs partisan, or by political temperature.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I haven't read A Princess of Mars, but I watched John Carter last year, which I understand to be a fairly direct adaptation of it. My wife thought it was too hard to get into given the strange world building, but I thought it was a super fun adventure romp. I didn't know the history going in, but I remember thinking "wow, this is practically ripping off Flash Gordon, almost scene for scene".
Needed more Queen, tho.
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
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