madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
2d ago
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia.
I was a kid in the 80s and I remember thinking about 80s movies as a distinct category in the 90s. I'd imprinted on the specifically 80s thing where movies had a central scifi or supernatural premise, took it reasonably seriously and had plenty of practical special effects. Aliens and Blade Runner were ten years old but they still had huge cultural cachet, as did the Star Wars movies with the newest one being from 1983. I remember wondering what happened to 80s moviemaking and why new movies in the 90s didn't feel the same anymore. I still feel like there were clear inflection points in movies around 1980 (maybe because Star Wars introduced the scifi blockbuster concept) and then again around 1990 (maybe CGI effects changed the aesthetics and cheap direct-to-video stuff started eating the market of the expensive tentpole films?)
madeofmeat
10d ago
There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
madeofmeat
14d ago
Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
madeofmeat
14d ago
It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.
madeofmeat
16d ago
That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.
Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.
madeofmeat
22d ago
Like, okay, let's just focus on the problem then. We want a society where you go to jail if you do a crime and where you get a PhD if you write a thesis, with the same criteria for a crime and a thesis for everyone. Every time we set something like this up, we see outcomes differ by race. People will then use the outcome differences as a pretext to try to destroy the jail institution and the PhD institution and eventually dismantle any system of society setting up formalized expectations for behavior and rigorous standards to aspire to. How do we fix this and go back to being able to have standards that apply equally to everyone?
madeofmeat
22d ago
Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.
Wasn't this pretty much what people said you were supposed to do from 1980 to 2010 or so? And then it fell apart in a concentrated program to dismantle it that most everyone just went along with for whatever reason where people started saying no, that's not what you are supposed to do, you're not allowed to do that. The system is fully tainted by structural racism, which you can infer from the different outcomes it produces, therefore it must be demolished and the structural racism (which we don't know how to fix because it's inferred from outcomes, not causes) be fixed before anything else. Before 2010, there was a tacit agreement not to talk about race. Then the wokes showed up, realized this lets them go wild with the disparate impact fallacy and started putting race front and center all the time to attack the system, and people couldn't respond to the criticism without arguments that were not permitted in polite society. So what's the next move?
No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime.
I'm not really sure why you keep pulling things this way. We want a society where you go to jail if you do crime and you get a PhD if you submit a thesis that makes an original contribution to your field. But also one where people won't succeed with campaigns that jails must be abolished because too many black people end up there and PhD programs must be abolished because too many Jews end up there.
How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it.
Progressives have been doing this a hundred years, people dealt with it fine. The difference here is that now everyone agrees that the criminal did the crime and the criminal justice system is working as it's described. People can and will argue that we should have an entirely different stated purpose for the justice system, but then they need to make a case for that first. They don't have an option of campaigning for closing down the current system right now, because they're successfully making a fallacious claim that the system is fully corrupt, egregiously failing to work according to its stated mandate, and who knows the whole crime problem might just be made up because of structural racism everywhere.
madeofmeat
23d ago
Now the argument hinges on "cops police and sentence them harsher in the same situations" which you need to demonstrate as true without just pointing to the higher rate of black criminal convictions as direct evidence. This sounds like a much better situation than the one where you can't have an outcome disparity that makes minorities look bad without being blamed of racism. If you can prove that's true then sure, whatever actual thing you dug up is something we can look at as a problem to fix. If you end up getting nothing, then it's back to just arresting people who do crimes.
madeofmeat
23d ago
I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you?
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate, and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo and can't be uttered in polite society. If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
madeofmeat
24d ago
At this point, I think Progressives need their own small army of Tim Kellers - public thinkers who are willing to endure the hardest critiques of the fundamentalisms of their movements, actually hear those critiques, and publicly endure the truth in them in good faith and engage with them.
I'm not sure I see how this would work. Progressivism doesn't have the sort of separate magisterium firewall we've been culturally evolving for recognized religions probably since the Roman Empire, where people agree to a game of partial make-believe around it. By its own lights, it's supposed to be the for-real, actual undistorted picture of reality, no myth-making or noble lies. So if it turns out there were noble lies placed into the foundation after all, it's not an idea you can entertain in a discussion, it's an existential threat, you need to set up a totalitarian system of suppression and taboos around them or risk your whole edifice crumbling.
I feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
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