iprayiam3
8mo ago
Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation
I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors. I especially haven't seen this in real life.
romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get.
Again, Ive never seen this. Get better friends people. Romantically unsuccessful men are to the contrary some of the most sympathetically talked about people I know. Even where it's not sympathetic and just pathetic, that's not the same as immoral.
Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10
If you're contorting my comment into moral repudiation of someone for specifically being poorly undatable, I think we've found the disconnect.
This looks like nothing more than a victimhood mentality looking for a bully.
Even if it were somehow morally (I'm not) maligning the OP it's not for being single or unlucky in love.
If a Jewish guy stands up in a movie theater and shouts, 'AntiSemites are trying to silence me!!", His point isn't proven when people shush him.
Similarly, if you come in and say, 'how come I'm morally maligned for being undatable!", I'm not proving your point by repudiating that claim.
iprayiam3
7mo ago
Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots.
This is the part I disagree with. Much of the benefit of giving a parent the extra vote weight is the investment and stability. Only married parents should get the extra vote.
If you want to get a divorce after having kids, you've proven your future planning unreliable enough. and if you're kids are already harmed by your (or your spouse's) bad decisions, you shouldn't have the benefit of sharing that with the rest of the country.
I think stable marriages is probably a stronger lever than number of children, and would largely mitigating @Walerodim 's hesitation.
My proposal would be something like:
-
No voting under 26 unless you are married.
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If you are married your vote counts 1.5 extra
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If you ever divorce your vote reduces to .75, and remarriage doesn't affect this
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After age 40, if you are married and did not have children with your spouse, your 1.5 reduces back to 1
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After age 60 your vote reduces to 1 regardless.
Obviously that's too complicated to be realistic, but why not throw it out there for fun.
iprayiam3
11mo ago
My point exactly. (with the caveat that these people aren't conservatives. They are right-wing, republican liberals.)
iprayiam3
3mo ago
I get it... It's sad because she didn't give him any grandchildren, right?
iprayiam3
6mo ago
If you're tempted to disagree from your own emotions, then pray tell how Christians came around on IVF.
Oh, Catholicism certainly hasn't come around on that. I am absolutely one of those who welcome hurdle to your technological and human advancement both from within and outside of my Christian faith. I fully understand the animosity toward the religious from your point of view, and of course I understand the metaphorical (and cathartic) language about picking a bone with a god you don't believe in; I simply wanted ot point out that I still find it an offputting frame from the other side (though of course you're not appealing to someone like me when saying it). It's a sentiment meant for one's own side, I suppose.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
This is fantastic, compelling conversation. Not tedius at all. Tell me more.
iprayiam3
6mo ago
I'm sorry, is this a different take on our initial exchange? I thought we already shared our mutual points fair enough.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
This is a good idea if you're regularly interacting with (or married to) someone into somethign you're not. But it's overkill if OP just wants more general conversational grease.
Moreover, unless he's willing to become a sportsfan all the way, keeping up on the latest talking points will be a tedius waste of time. And he'll still end up bored and anxious of being discovered a fraud in sports talk. Honestly if you want to make good sports small talk with someone, it's probably better to know nothing about sports than to pretend you care. Consider this opener.
"You know I haven't really kept up with college basketball in a few years. Which schools are doing well these days?"
You'll get the sportsfan talking! and you don't have to pretend you know or follow anything. Plus, a little understood phenomenon - you now have the conversation's steering wheel, while the other one gets to talk and like you for getting to talk. Once you start trying to demonstrate your own knowledge or insert your own talk tracks, you actually lose control.
Instead, you can take the converstaion where you want it to by asking questions. Like history? Interject with historical questions. Like strategy and theory, ask a question about that. "So how does a good team get good..." Like the culture war, ask about that. "You think ratings have changed since ESPN has gotten woke?"
Want to get off sports? Let them give you a little schpeel, they'll like you for letting them talk. Then play a game with yourself to see how many questions takes you to X. Say, X is crypto. Sports... Sports Betting... Gambling... Crypto.
Unless, like in your scenario, the topic is regularly the center of the activity, there's no reason to pretend to like it or to learn about it just to make small talk. It will actually backfire (without a genuine interest) because you'll be bored AND worried about demonstrating your boring knowledge.
iprayiam3
4mo ago
To be clear, the spinelessness (perhaps the wrong word) I speak of is strictly that he's too tempted by the upside of Trump losing on lawfare that he dances around outright condemnation of what's happening and won't put any skin into fighting with 'Trump' against this.
Like in a recent interview responding to Vivek pledging to remove himself from Colorados ballot, he made a comment to the effect of ' hey I'm going to compete on every ballot I can, whether or not Trump makes it on. That's the name of the game'
This is effectively admitting to 'playing' the rigged game. Ron appearing on a ballot that Trump doesn't is literally the name of the Democrats' game. It's not the name of the fair primaries game.
I loathe Trump, but Ron's refusal to do more to stand in solidarity against the Democrat bullshit reveals him as a flake, if his Ukraine flip-flop hadn't already.
I would still vote Ron over Trump all day on abortion conviction alone and for every other reason. But I'm now backing Vivek. (Not that it matters anyway.)
iprayiam3
9mo ago
So in my initial reading of your post, I missed that an in-law confronted your father. I though it was a member of your own family. That is pretty wild to say the least, and an unhelpful approach to any conversation of weight. You have all my sympathies there.
At the same time, if you're response to the others who disagree with your behavior is Deal With It, expect to be returned the same when seeking sympathy that others are behaving ways you don't agree with.
iprayiam3
9mo ago
Falwell was wrong about Tinky Winky’s supposed harm to children. But he wasn’t wrong that children’s television—and culture in general—was becoming much more comfortable with queerness.... Today, the backlash that is taken seriously by most culture producers comes not from dinosaurs like Falwell but from the LGBTQ community demanding richer representation. Tinky Winky would be right at home.
Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility: "It will never happen. And when it does, it's a good thing, you bigot!"
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I posted, but deleted this in response to a previous AI thread, but I think it actually aged better with Elon's signature to the letter yesterday and Yud's oped:
I am not a Musk fanboy, but I'll say this, Elon Musk very transparently cares about the survival of humanity as humanity, and it is deeply present down to a biological drive to reproduce his own genes. Musk openly worries about things like dropping birth rates, while also personally spotlighting his own rabbit-like reproductive efforts. Musk clearly is a guy who wants and expects his own genes to spread, last and thrive in future generations. This is a rising tides approach for humans Musk has also signaled clearly against unnatural life extensions.
“I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time,” Musk told Insider. “But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.”
and
"Increasing quality of life for the aged is important, but increased lifespan, especially if cognitive impairment is not addressed, is not good for civilization."
Now, there is plenty, that I as a conservative, Christian, and Luddish would readily fault in Musk (e.g. his affairs and divorces). But from this perspective Musk certainly has large overlap with a traditionally "ordered" view of civilization and human flourishing.
Altman, on the other hand has no children, and as a gay man, never will have children inside of a traditional framework (yes I am aware many (all?) of Musks own children were IVF. I am no Musk fanboy).
I certainly hope this is just my bias showing, but I have greater fear for Altman types running the show than Musks because they are a few extra steps removed from stake in future civilization. We know that Musk wants to preserve humanity for his children and his grandchildren. Can we be sure that's anymore than an abstract good for Altman?
I'd rather put my faith in Musks own "selfish" genes at the cost of knowing most of my descendants will eventually be his too than in a bachelor, not driven by fecund sexual biology, doing cool tech.
Every child Musk pops out is more the tightly intermingled his genetic future is with the rest of humanity's.
In Yud's oped, which I frankly think contains a lot of hysteria, mixed among a few decent points, he says this:
On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)
“Nina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It’s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I’d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.”
When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
I'm unclear whether this is Yud's bio-kid or a step kid, but the point ressonates with my perspective of Elon Musk. A few days ago SA indicated a similar thing about a hypothetical kid(?)
I once thought about naming my daughter Saffron in its honor. Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan, they would call her. “What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six”, the people would say.
In either case, I don't know about AI x-risk. I am much more worried about 2cimerafa's economic collapse risk. But in both scenarios I am increasingly of a perspective that I'll cheekily describe as "You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children". You don't have enough stake.
I have growing distrust of those of you without bio-children eager or indifferent to building a successor race or exhaulting yourself through immortal transhumanist fancies.
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, "...". 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.
So you begin by acknowledging and distancing yourself from people on your side of the debate that seem hateful, then immediately turn around and accuse your wife of sane-washing when she does the same? Holy Russell's conjugation, Batman!
I have pure motives, unrelated to those on my side who are motivated by hate.
You are sane-washing the haters on your side.
He is a hater lying about his motivations.
yes we can all play that game. There is plently to criticize about the fat-acceptance movement, but pinning them as the side more prone to being motivated by hate / disgust is just lulz. I am sympathetic to an argument that hate of the person has nothing to do with it / one side is objectively correct / detraction is the appropriate response to unhealthiness, even if it's expression should be tempered etc / that shame can be a powerful way of patrolling unhealthy social contagions, etc. But the frame that it's the other side who is hate-filled is more DOA than Dems are the real racist type of rhetoric
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I understand, and am generally inclined to accept this point. Mostly, it is only my tribe with children who I trust the most. However, tribes are concentric circles, and here, I don't think your objection applies if we are talking about existential crises.
I am sure that Elon Musk would do a lot of (indirect) harm to me to see his children survive, thrive. But if AI has the possibility to conquer / destroy the whole world or flip the whole Western economy into unpredictable pieces, then my entire point is that a parent saving their own child, will necessarily care about saving at least some of humanity. Certainly more so than a singleton who abstractly reasons that a successor race of AI reaching the stars actually extends our legacy best.
If you have a button that might blow up the whole world or give you riches, I believe the risk reward calculus changes if you also have children and moreover the way you approach the question is less alien to me.
ON the other hand in the case of just economic board flipping, I think it's not coincidence that the two most hyped transhumanists on the board are non-Westerner expats from their own countries, and at least one of whom has no children. I trust the future most to those with families invested in a Western, Catholic, American life and move outward from there.
iprayiam3
11mo ago
Not everyone has the luxury of tradition, religion... Try to get a traditional relationship as the average Western 20 something now, see what happens. Fucking try. There literally aren't places for you to even look for those things anymore.
It's not a luxury, it's a choice and a difficult to substitute ingredient. If you want a traditional relationship & family, get religion. If you don't want religion, accept that you might not get the relationship.
Jeffrey Atomic asks Danny Familyman what he's eating, because damn it smells delicious. "It's called pizza. It is delicious, and pretty simple. Highly recommend!"
Jeffrey: "Maybe for you, but I don't have the luxury of a pizza dough. Try eating hot cheese and liquid sauce out of your hands. Fucking Try."
Danny Familyman: Yeah that sounds terrible. Why don't you get a pizza dough? People are offering them literally all around you. Here have one of mine!
Mr. Atomic: "I don't want dough!"
Danny Familyman: Ok, then you don't want pizza. Delicious sauce, cheese, and toppings are all founded on the crust.
JA: I want the deliciousness of pizza! But I don't have the luxury of wanting the dough.
Danny Familyman: OK. But you will have to find that deliciousness some other, much harder way. And the dough is right here available for you. If you don't want the dough, you don't really want pizza, and your desire for pizza without it being pizza isn't a real or coherent wish. This isn't a luxury, or a cheat code it's the foundation.
iprayiam3
9mo ago
You'll be shocked to hear then when two students meet and marry in med school (another common practice), they will try to keep them together or compatitble when assigning their internships and rotations.
I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.
iprayiam3
10mo ago
I think this kind of discussion gets wrapped up too quickly in accepting a liberal feminist frame to even make sense. Now sure, we can talk about the merits of specific policies or realities in isolation, which have gendered outcomes and discuss approaches. But to try to wrap it into 'men' as a class vs 'women' as a class and holistically discuss the social deal, cedes the entire frame that this is the appropriate way to modularize social policy.
When I think about how good or bad I have it, I think about my family in a unit. What's good for my wife is good for me and vice versa. Within our family, my wife certainly has it "worse" than me because she had to go through childbirth to get a child, where I didn't. Everything else is an equal share of reward and burden, even if we divy it up differently, because we are one unit yoked together. I feel sorry for people incapable of thinking like that.
I fully agree that at a social level, 'women are victims but also exactly the same as men' thinking has poisoned the well, and I don't disagree with pushing back on that thinking generally and in specific policy or social norms. I don't think men should just roll over at problems that affect men. But I completely disagree with simply taking the feminist frame and trying to reverse it.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Well Catholicism has the additional advantage of a sub-philosophy that suggests all these morals expressed within Natural Law, which doesn't necessarily have to be founded on "God".
But you're going to run into the pushback you find in the relativism across your other responses. You're framework is dismissed as an aesthetic complain because the moral relativist, the materialist, and the moral liberalist are married in gnawing at an object morality as arbitrary.
A Natural Law view offers a complete and coherent opposite view (while other conservative or Protestant viewpoints don't imho), but it doesn't and can't address why this not that. I suggest biting the bullet and deriving a religious foundation for your moral intuition or accept being homeless in a neighborhood of transhumanists.
iprayiam3
9mo ago
In theory, you’re making an argument about ‘personality’ versus ‘IQ’, but what you actually propose is blood versus everything else
I don't agree completely with @2rafa but this absolutely isn't what she's saying. It's not even a strawman.
Sure, hereditably personality and bloodline will work into it, but the central idea of @2rafa 's scenario is the stability of the institution, which can then be (overtime) refined toward a direction.
Meritocracy, through both speed of turnover and by it's nature, offers 'seats' which are themselves insubstantial, and entirely shaped by the person in them. Whereas a system where the seat makes the person, they defects of the individual are swallowed up by the nature of the seat, and when they are hereditary, they evolve symbiotically.
I don't personally agree with even @2rafa 's focus on class and heredity, so much as I agree with the concept of strong instututions, which offer a rigid and slow moving hegemony that doesn't fold like a lawn chair to whoever has the most raw "meritocratic" capacity to obtain it.
Essentially, is the legitimacy of the throne defined by the will to power of the person in it or is the legitimacy of the person's power defined by the institution embedded in the throne? Meritocracy is the former on steroids.
Imagine two neighboring island nations Meritocita and Institunia. Both have a similar native population. One day they are both met by several boatloads of foreigners fleeing a famine who wish to rehome and integrate into these societies. Generally speaking they come under no kind of colonialist or conquering mindset. Overall however, they are of greater intelligence than the natives. They are warmly welcomed into the respective nations
In Meritocrita, very quickly, due to their high IQ, the aliens work their way into centers of power and leadership. Not only that, it is disproportionately the most power-hunger and greed-thirsty. While most of the Aliens are nice and integrate into the middle of the society, the percentage with sociopathic, greedy, selfish, etc tendencies disproportionately take over the ruling class. In a generation, the natives of Meritocrita are ruled by a class including the worst of the Aliens. Because IQ is hereditable, this also serves as a de facto class system. Only the people most able to climb into it are those from the population most disproportionately thirsty for power.
Meanwhile on Institunia, the Aliens have the integrate themselves into existing, and much more rigid centers of hegemonic power. Again, the most intelligent and power-hungry are going to find paths into the system, but there willbe much more obstacles, their total ability to amass / concentrate power will be limited to the confines of the instituions, and they generally have to integrate further toward the institutional values to get there. For a power hungry Alien to work their way into a role of religious influence, he is forced to adopt the pieties and reenforce the religious values of the system. Another sociopath becomes a community leader, but excercises his power, furthering the goals and community fo the social club he has infiltrated, because that is necessary to retaining the power.
All the while, High IQ aliens who actually expemplify the existing native values have a leg up on joing and re-enforcing these institutions.
A few generations later the Aliens have conquered Meritocrita and integrated into Institunia, even as their 'bloodlines' have similarly dispersed into the native population. In fact, Institunia over time becomes less genetically sustained than Meritocrita despite having a more heredity and legacy oriented society on the margins.
I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.
Obviously the reverse causality makes sense: bad people should be less datable. But i e never even heard anyone suggest this should is an is as it's plainly not real.
Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from? You need to justify the premise, because it sounds like extrapolated wallowing or self-loathing.
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