haroldbkny
9d 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.
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
16d 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.
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
16d 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
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.
haroldbkny
16d 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?
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
15d 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.
I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
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.
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
15d 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.
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.
haroldbkny
24d 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
15d 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
I just heard what I think is a terrible atrocity (granted on the much milder-end of terrible atrocities) that no one seems to know or care about. Apparently Maryland requires that if you have been diagnosed with sleep apnea:
- you report it to the DMV
- you have to use a CPAP machine (edit: if that's your doctor's recommended treatment)
- your CPAP machine has to send data to the state showing that you're using it regularly for 70% of each night (edit: if CPAP is your doctor's recommended treatment)
Failure to do this will result in your driver's license being revoked.
This really makes my blood boil. I found out about this because my friend in Maryland is one such person affected by this, with her extremely mild case of sleep apnea (that probably 75% of Americans actually have). She didn't bother with or really need the CPAP, but now, the DMV found out, and is threatening to revoke her license, so she has no choice. Hell, I'm a person who's been diagnosed with very mild sleep apnea, but I chose to not use the CPAP machine, because I couldn't stand having an intrusive device strapped onto my face with tubes running on my bed, pushing air down my throat all night every night. Provided I didn't sleep on my back, I was completely fine, and I didn't need to use the device at all. Since then, I've lost weight, and I don't have sleep apnea anymore, or at least not as much, but I don't even know if they ever declare someone as "no longer having sleep apnea", or if I'd actually pass that threshold, or if the DMV would care. My only saving grace is that I don't live in Maryland, but man, this makes me so scared about what might come next, and how long I'll get to keep my driver's license for before this either comes to my state, or some other health-related driving restrictions start cropping up.
This seems like such rampant safetyism to me that it honestly makes me so angry, probably angrier than I should be. I guess this seems like such government overreach, much in the same way as covid restrictions. Except that these restrictions really could last forever, and expand to other states, and never go away, unlike the covid restrictions. Did Maryland honestly have rampant cases of drivers falling asleep because they were so tired from their sleep apnea that they needed to mandate an intrusive, ongoing, never-ending medical treatment to save people from crashing their cars? Does this help anyone at all, or were they just looking to do some security theater?
I really want to do something to fight this before it expands. Is this the sort of thing the ACLU would take up the fight for? Are there any organizations that would actually fund and spearhead a class action lawsuit for this sort of thing?
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
One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist.
I hope you're right! But I've always viewed the crazy COVID response itself as being because of leftism. I remember the leftists in my life talking about how COVID was Trump's fault and saying they need to take the pandemic response into their own hands. And people did this, making everyone think that COVID was the most serious illness ever that was going to destroy our country, which caused businesses to have everyone work from home because they didn't want to seem like they were uncaring. And before you know it, we had 3 years of lockdowns. I think that if a disease as non-deadly COVID happened 20 years prior, it's possible we wouldn't' have locked down like that, it was maybe only because the leftists had such groundswell power.
The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged
That's what I keep thinking, but they keep proving me wrong!
most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey
This to me sounds pretty strongly like the perception-of-reality-warping whining that leftists did under Trump (see where I talk about it here). Trump needed to do exactly what the leftists told him to do. When he didn't do that, the leftists got everyone to believe that Trump was the one making a partisan issue out of it.
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.
haroldbkny
25d 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
1mo ago
I really hope you are right! But... "fool me once". I've seen so much that strikes me as going past the point that I ever thought our society would go, that has shattered my notion that logic and reason can win out over mob mentality spurred on by the media's desire to push a juicy story. And it kept coming back again, and again, and again. It was not one year ago that I had coworkers sharing with me the joyful news that Trump was indicted for the whateverth time, as if I care or want to talk about it.
I really wish you are right, but I'm afraid that we're just in a lull right now.
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?
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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