naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.
Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.
@quiet_NaN also raised this point below, but I think it begs the question. "What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible. I think most Westerners today do not think of marriage that way! But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is, and what else can/should constitute "consent."
Somewhat recently, a pre-2020 essay on "maintenance sex" popped up in my social feeds, and I found it faintly amusing. The "expert" being interviewed clearly wanted to say "it's normal and healthy to have sex when you don't want to, simply because your partner wants to and you care about giving them what they want." But he kept having to dance around it, resulting in amusing elocution seeming to simultaneously suggest that the indulging partner was both willing and not-willing. It included bad advice like "make sure both partners climax," instead of acknowledging that--particularly as people age--orgasm can sometimes become exhausting to pursue, or even totally unreachable, and this doesn't necessarily make sexual activity undesirable.
As I read, I reflected somewhat on the model sometimes taught to college students today, that "consent is voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic," and should be re-affirmed periodically throughout every sexual encounter. I perceive a very strong likelihood that this can, will, and probably already has led to some serious sexual dysfunction in Western relationships. Many people find themselves psychologically unable to express sexual desire in an overt and expressive manner; this is one reason why people sometimes consume alcohol with the intention of getting laid. People enjoy being swept away in emotion and sensation, becoming inarticulate with desire, etc.
Put all this into the context of a marriage, and the idea of "marital rape" becomes incredibly fraught. Realistically, the most common application of "marital rape" laws is to prosecute men who, prior to the finalization of a divorce, force themselves on their soon-to-be-exes. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the law should be able to react to such a development--and besides, I find it difficult to imagine anyone in a healthy and functioning marriage prosecuting their spouse for anything. That seems like a clear commitment to the immediate or eventual termination of the relationship. But since the advent of "marital rape" laws, I have seen a gradually increasing number of people (usually, women) wield the concept of consent as a form of control: by default, sexual activity becomes locked to the mood of the lower-libido spouse, with no compromise (or "maintenance sex") possible. After all--wouldn't that be rape? But it seems clearly absurd that the definition of "rape" should become "any sex you don't enthusiastically desire," much less "sex you later decide you wish you hadn't had."
So when you say "consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages," my inclination is to respond, sure, not necessarily--but they can, and ideally probably should, and the evolution of "sexual consent" as a concept in premarital and extramarital contexts is in this way directly corrosive to marriage as traditionally practiced. This is what people actually mean, I think, when they say that no fault divorce erodes the concept of traditional marriage. After all, someone else's divorce isn't going to change my marriage, right? Shouldn't I just let others do what they want, while I do what I want? But here we are talking about importing "consent" into marriage, as if it is a separate thing--when traditionally, marriage was how you consented.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Have I just blocked out or forgotten the deviancy?
Bilquis?
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I agree with your final conclusion but that's why I don't see how small-l liberalism necessitates - even reading on the surface - the elimination of social opprobrium? In fact, that is clearly not what's happened and it's not what anyone actually wants to happen.
So first let me say that I do not believe that small-l liberalism necessarily aims toward the elimination of social opprobium; most people do not chase the idea of liberty all the way to Ancapistan. But "not what anyone actually wants to happen" is probably asserting too much. I don't think it's a coincidence that the essay where the term "anarchocapitalism" was coined was first printed in Playboy in 1969; perhaps most notoriously, it was Playboy Press that published nude glamour photos of a certain 10-year-old celebrity in 1975. This was one year after the initial publication of Richard Farson's Birthrights, which contains the following passage (page 147-148 in the hardback I just pulled from my shelf)--
The most ruinous situations are usually not the sexual activities involved in the act of molestation, but the community's response to the act when it has been discovered. The guilt and fear that are induced can be worse than the experience of the act itself.
This is typical of bleeding-edge conversations surrounding sex and gender in the 1960s and 1970s. Nudity and sexual activity, being "natural," could not be bad; any shame or embarrassment or reticence felt in connection with one's body and its functions was a social construction in need of deconstruction. Meaningful harms were not the result of human activity, but of systemic oppression. Practical considerations like "bear[ing] the costs of enforcing violations of a notoriously hard to prove nature" scarcely entered into the conversation, except perhaps with hidebound conservatives whose opprobrium could be safely dismissed as mere patriarchy.
In hopes of maybe steelmanning American counterculture circa 1960, it's probably worth observing that there were (and arguably are) indeed many oppressive aspects to American culture! But people fighting for "freedom" do not typically concern themselves with the nuances of application, as we see even today with the "burn it to the ground" mentality of various anti-capitalist, "woke," or otherwise revolutionary types. These often find themselves hoist from their own petard, as it is not the elimination of social opprobrium they crave, but rather it is control of social opprobrium they crave, and when this becomes evident, many of their "anti-authoritarian" views turn out to just be different authoritarian views, and they lose their punk cred.
But there are purists out there, whether by naiveté or aspiration, who either believe or at least aspire to believe that what would really be best, is total independence from the all the pressures imposed by society. I think it is an unrealistic attitude. But I can grasp the appeal, the dream, of simply doing as I please, all the time. For the wealthy and powerful, it is more often a live option, and their revealed preferences routinely paint a startling portrait.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
No, that was me failing to open the italics properly, sorry.
Infidelity is wrong, but discreetly (discretely?) having a mistress is not the same as carelessly sleeping around, which itself is not the same as whatever degenerate stuff this guy was doing...
I agree with you to this point.
If "consent" and "fidelity" are your only measures of correctness, and only on a "yes/no" basis, you're bound to end up with a Puritan <-> Borderline Sex Criminal barbell.
This doesn't seem quite right, however. While I'm not sure where it takes the argument, exactly, I feel it necessary to point out that both adultery and fornication have been, and in many places still are, sex crimes. They are not prosecuted in the same way as groping, which is not prosecuted in the same way as rape, so it does seem like societies are capable of recognizing gradations while still maintaining a clear line (essentially: formal social approval in the form of a marriage certificate) between "yes" and "no."
In the 1960s/1970s, feminism and the hippie movement decoupled sex from marriage on the view that this was liberating individuals from the shackles of social opprobrium. That doesn't seem to be wrong, prima facie; the idea that my community should have any say in my sex life seems like a pretty obvious violation of liberal (and libertarian) thinking. "Behind closed doors" wasn't even part of the equation--the sex and nudity of that era was often quite public!
But to whatever extent society is going to punish sexual deviance--every consequence from ostracism through to actual legal penalties--should be attached to reasonably clear expectations. A marriage certificate says, presumably among other things, that "society approves of sex between these people." This was the substance of the Obergefell case--that society should formally approve homosexual relations as socially legitimate. One of the most interesting arguments I ever heard against gay marriage was from a young gay man whose reaction to this was that this was a total abandonment of the "queer" ethos; that the point was not to become accepted by society, but to break down its oppressive norms.
I do not know, but strongly suspect, that this is the mindset of people like Gaiman. "Look, I'm a brilliant, caring, utterly free individual who has transcended the boring, tradition-bound nonsense against which you youngsters rail. Behold my boundless freedom! Partake in it yourself by gnawing upon my engorged genitals, you free, sexy rebel, you." And of course, his critics can be easily dismissed as uptight religious whackjobs, or uptight feminists.
I also don't know what the answer is. My own inclination is toward freedom! I have always enjoyed Gaiman's writing, for whatever that's worth. I am inclined toward smaller government, however, which Gaiman generally was not. I don't want to make marriage a legal requirement for sex; I don't want us to prosecute fornication and adultery as a matter of law. But I'm increasingly concerned that we haven't really come up with a good alternative. The "consent model" seems like a failure and a burden. My instinct is that it would be best to have strong cultural norms in favor of traditional monogamous marriage, without legal requirements. But in the absence of those cultural norms, it seems like we as a culture are asking for the return of legal norms along those lines. This puts me in mind of Ben Franklin's (somewhat ironic) proclamation:
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality, homosexuality, BDSM, child abuse, and rape, just off the top of my head.
There was also a lot of nudity, which was arguably "artistic" but was not usual for mainstream comics at the time. My personal experience of the 1990s was that I often encountered neo-hippie arguments about nudity being "not inherently sexual," which in retrospect seems like a pretty obvious motte-and-bailey approach to the matter.
(The ninth episode of the second season of The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," which first aired in 1990, ends with Marge conceding that it is hypocritical to censor a children's cartoon but not a field trip in which children see Michaelangelo's David. The episodes remains culturally relevant to this day.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I'm not sure being married to palmer would have helped
...well, yes, but they are married, have been married for 14 years, and are going through a divorce.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I mean, maybe Gaiman is a creepy sexpest, assuming the truth of the allegations. Certainly the evidence seems to be that he is quite promiscuous, like so many other men of similar repute.
Will he be cancelled entirely? Is this evidence against the plausibility of "open marriage?" Should we accept the article's allegations at face value, or question the veracity of the claims, victim-blaming style? What is "consent," really?
There seemed to me to be a plethora of culture war angles--that's all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Guy really went down the deviancy rabbit hole.
Yes! But I feel like, having read American Gods and Sandman, this is totally unsurprising.
My memory is that Neil Gaiman's name occasionally pops up around here (edit: here). New York Magazine pulled no punches today. Headline?
There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
The headline is false, though maybe not for the reasons you would immediately guess. As far as I can tell the story itself is not a scoop so much as a rigorous summary of things already known. It's difficult to know where to begin, commentary-wise; probably this belongs in the long tail of 2017's "#metoo" movement? But maybe we should begin with Sandman.
If you don't know who Neil Gaiman is, he's... a writer! A talented writer--not so talented a comic writer as Alan Moore, not so talented a novelist as Neal Stephenson, not so talented a screenwriter as Joss Whedon, but what makes him remarkable is that he is almost as good as every one of those writers within their respective mediums of mastery. He became Alan Moore's protégé; he collaborated with Terry Pratchett (Discworld) on Good Omens (1990). But it was his new take on an old DC character, Sandman, that became his own personal magnum opus. Running from 1989 to 1996, the book briefly outsold even Superman and Batman as DC's top title.
If you read it today, you'll see a lot of English punk, a gothic flair, deep cut literary references, edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not. Hence my suggestion that the headline is false; as near as I can tell, Neil Gaiman never hid the darkest parts of himself from anyone, ever.
In fact, owing to decades of involvement in fringe geek fandoms, I have had a handful of glancing personal encounters with Neil Gaiman. The first thing to know is that he basically sweats charisma. Where Alan Moore is a spectacle, where Joss Whedon is a douche, Neil Gaiman is patently avuncular. He is warm and articulate, a storyteller every second, and when you meet him you know immediately within you, down to the marrow of your very bones: this man fucks.
And as far as I could tell, he made absolutely no secret of it. By no later than 2010 I had heard multiple totally separate stories from women claiming to have accompanied Gaiman to his home for playtime, hippie-style (or rationalist style, if some of the things I hear about San Francisco group homes are true). It is entirely possible that some or all of them were lying! Certainly they were all boasting. One was very clearly imagining that this would be her big break into the literary world, which seems like a strange hope to express if you are lying about the sex.
This is not the sort of behavior I want to encourage from anyone, for a variety of reasons, but it's probably worth noting, very clearly, that this did not seem at all surprising to me. I remember Bill Clinton, I remember Bill Gates, I know what a groupie is. Famous, powerful, wealthy, men have for all of history been inclined toward promiscuity, and women have been inclined to indulge them that.
The article seems to confirm my own, limited historical experiences:
It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual.
Inevitably, it seems, in such contexts there is never any shortage of... misunderstanding. The article gets into pretty explicit detail concerning accusations of outright rape--often, however, with women who had been involved with Gaiman for some time, and continued to be involved with him for some time afterward. His second marriage (to a C-list celebrity in her own right) was "open"--
During the early years of their marriage, they lived apart for months at a time and encouraged each other to have affairs. According to conversations with five of Palmer’s closest friends, the most important rule governing their open relationship was honesty. They found that sharing the details of their extramarital dalliances — and sometimes sharing the same partners — brought them closer together.
Indeed!
In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”
That sort of thing only lasted a few years. Eventually, Palmer was pregnant and decided to try to close the marriage. This seems to have been the beginning of the end of that, and the New York Magazine story could be viewed through the lens of "hit piece intended to influence the drawn-out divorce proceedings." I do not (and cannot) know the truth of these events for myself, but it probably doesn't matter; his career has been drying up for a while now, and once studios milk the requisite profits from their current investments in his IP, those contracts seem likely to be among his last. Well, he's in his 60s and he has plenty of money (even if Palmer absconds with half of it), I don't feel too badly for him.
But the whole charade does remind me once more of the peculiar way in which Western culture has come to insist that there is nothing problematic about sexual promiscuity. Marriage is just one choice among many! Homosexuality, polyamory, open marriages, monogamish couples, as long as it is consensual then it's fine, right? Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries. Gaiman's putative victims do not say that they unequivocally rejected his advances; some, indeed, texted him after the fact with reassurances that their encounters were in fact consensual.
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote.
That's the kind of evidence that keeps Gaiman out of jail, regardless of what social media mob justice decides on the matter. Even assuming she was being completely honest when she later said, in effect, "I texted him lies because I was scared," there's no evidence of what she was thinking at the time, except what she actually wrote. A world with clear relationship-grounded boundaries around sexual activity alleviates such ambiguities!
I am sort of peripherally aware of some of the "sex pest" stories that occasionally circulate in rationalist circles, and certainly I am aware of the polyamory (and e.g. Scott's occasional defense of it). Apparently it can work, for some people, at least for a time. But more often it seems to end up like this: if you want an open marriage, probably you don't really want a marriage in any robust sense of the term. And wealthy, powerful men who do not commit themselves to monogamy wholly and from the outset, Pence style, will be promiscuous, and it will eventually create headaches for them, of one kind or another.
Hm. Maybe someone should write a comic book about that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
We already told you to use the contact form. Or you could respond to this comment! Spamming the site does not endear you to us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
This is sufficiently "culture war" that you should post it in the Culture War thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
What is up with the top-level post here (I am unable to get a direct link)? It says "Removed" but no modhat comment.
It looks like that user went through and deleted all their own comments.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Just to add to @Amadan's take on this, it's hard for me to take you very seriously in a discussion about "good faith" when you link to that comment I made, without also referencing my direct reply to you in that thread where I elaborated:
...I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this a
place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
(Emphasis added.) Your refusal to engage in open, honest, charitable discussion of these nuances is a far, far cry from us engaging in "manipulation attempts." When you ask a question and get an answer, then pop up months later writing as though you never read or understood that answer, like... I don't know what more I can possibly say to you about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
...what?
I was nodding along as I read, until I got to this bit:
but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons
To the extent that there was rioting on January 6th, that was bad. At least as bad, however, was the way that rioting was prosecuted. I'm 100% on board with criticizing Trump when it is warranted, but that doesn't actually appear to be Yglesias' argument; his real argument appears to be "do not allow Trump to pardon anyone convicted of offenses committed during this very specific event." And while I am not an expert on these cases, I've seen a lot of concerning videos that suggest to me that this is probably a good use of the presidential pardon power: putting January 6th to bed.
Yglesias seems to be reasonably consistent on the question of pardons being bad, so I can appreciate the article to that extent. But he's ultimately just... wrong. As long as so-called "prosecutorial discretion" exists, the pardon power is pretty important, and should if anything probably be used more liberally.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation. As you've been reminded somewhat recently.
Yes, even Californians. Yes, even your outgroup. While your comment is not entirely devoid of substance, it brings far, far more heat than light. Let's see, last time I wrote:
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
Two weeks this time, I guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet is a neat trick of civilisation, like cut and packaged meat without fur or claws or eyes, but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.
Yes, it's a metaphor, metaphors are like that. But it seems pretty clear to me that the closer the asymptote of consumption efficiency approaches the hard limits of entropy, the better off we are.
Likewise: it's easy to notice (or Notice) that there are a host of fairly serious problems that civilized discourse has (at least so far) failed to solve. It's harder to notice the ones it has solved, as they are by definition solved and, so, rarely even enter into our consciousness. "Burn it to the ground" is not a solution; at best, it may result in a different set of problems. At worst, well, it potentially only makes things worse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Oh come on. I post 10x milder takes from the other side and get banned for 90 days instead.
Indeed. And should Kulak post such hot takes as frequently and fervently as you, the bans will escalate in similar fashion. However, given his history and the content of this post, I do not expect him to come right back with another.
We'll see!
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. Banned for 3 days. The rest is details.
Yes, this is explicitly a token banning. For all your complaining, you do mostly stick to our discussion norms, minus some name calling and weak manning. At least one moderator prefers to not moderate people when they are clearly asking for it. At least one moderator is sympathetic to the point and points out that we do allow the argument to be made that argument is useless. I've had this conversation with other users in the past: sometimes it seems like conflict theory is actually right, and that's something we have to consider if we claim to be open to considering all arguments.
I have a different approach: moderation is driven by user sentiment, you've accumulated many reports, and I try to give people (including you) what they want. As this is a mod message, I set aside the substance of your post without comment, except those portions in which you directly criticize this space:
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
This raises a question: why are you commenting on this forum now? You have a history of doing it well, and then doing it poorly, and then mostly stopping. Why are you back? Welcome back! Would you be willing to post some good stuff again?
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
You're mistaken, though it is an easy mistake to make. Let me ask you something silly--do you dance? Specifically, are you a classically trained ballerina, or do you know any? If you spend much time around ballet studios, you will see an interesting phenomenon where little girls (and, occasionally, boys) show up with a dream. They love to dance, because they saw a ballerina do something amazing and beautiful. But real, recognizable ballet is pretty tough, on par with very high level gymnastics, and most people aren't really cut out for it. From ten classes of fifty toddlers in tutus a school might hope to produce one girl capable of dancing corps in a national production. And so along the way each aspiring ballerina reaches a point where she realizes that no matter how much she might enjoy dancing, this is not the dancing for her. This is hard on the ego, so a very common way of stopping ballet is to join a different dance club--pop dance, modern dance, stuff people will say they "prefer" when really what they prefer is not needing 40+ hours per week of effort to excel in their particular sphere.
Suppose one of these girls switches to a "contemporary dance" studio. She generates an argument--"ballet is so hidebound and pedigree-obsessed! It's stupid. In contemporary dance I can express myself without all these hurdles, all these rules and traditions and obstacles."
"Okay," replies the ballet world. "That was always allowed."
But then the girl shows up at a production of the Nutcracker and demands equal time on stage with the ballerinas. She will not be dancing ballet, but she is tired of all the attention ballerinas get for this stupid annual tradition of dancing to a nonsensical Christmas plot.
What should the ballet company say to her?
Kulak, the point of the Motte is not to change the world, or to change politics, or even to change anyone's mind. It's performance art: we're here to dance ballet. If you do not wish to dance ballet, then you may dance other dances in other places. The dance of this space is not, and has never been, truth; it is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Truth is an interesting and important part of that, but so are norms of politeness and, yes, inclusion. Our most vocal critics insist that we are already where you want us to be--that we are a hive of scum and wrongthink, several zillion witches in sheep's clothing. You seem to think the opposite, that we are are a hive of... priss and wrongthink, I guess?
But we deserve neither such praise nor such censure (as Jane Austen once put it).
It is my hope that the world be more like the Motte: more open to the truth, and more able to discuss ideas openly, however so much people may disagree. I cannot force people to be better, smarter, or less evil. I usually cannot even persuade them to be so. Barely am I able to even change the minds of my own children, now that they are adults.
But I know the rules to this particular dance, and I can still dance it.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not. What we do here is performative art, but art is an act of hope, and hope can, sometimes, change the world. Slowly, as they say--then all at once. The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be.
I am sympathetic to your conflict-theory takes. I worry that what we do here will not--maybe cannot--be enough. But it is all I can actually do. I am neither soldier nor politician nor billionaire nor celebrity. The people who come here to do what we do, come here because it is what we want to do. It is the dance we wish to dance, however so hidebound it may be. We who maintain this space--this studio--this garden--are doing what we can do.
Go thou and do likewise.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent
I'm less interested in the incorrectness per se, than in the directionality of it, and what that tells us about the people involved in supposedly reporting "facts." Time can lend clarity to matters like this, but it also gives people opportunities to seize the narrative, sanitize it, build consensus, etc. I don't see any clear way to get the benefits of immediate versus eventual reporting both, without also taking on some of the drawbacks of both.
New Year, Same Old Culture War
At least 10 killed in New Orleans after driver ‘intentionally’ rams into crowd on Bourbon Street (CNN)
Apparently, "FBI Special Agent Aletha Duncan said the Bourbon Street attack is 'not a terrorist attack' in comments delivered after the mayor spoke." But then, later:
New Orleans mayor declares 'terrorist attack' on Bourbon Street, FBI confirms investigation (Fox)
Coulter's Law appears to be in force. As a reminder:
The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.
And indeed, this was a shooter, who died in a gunfight with cops... but so far it appears the ten deaths and dozens of injuries were vehicular, not firearm-related. Over on 8chankun (warning: images of death) it's claimed that "FBI Director Kash Patel states killer was 'Middle Eastern Descent'" but I don't see a link to direct evidence of that. I will be interested to learn whether it is a disinformation thing, or whether 8chankun is just better at reporting news than multiple multi-million dollar corporate news media outlets. Can a failed shooting preceded by successful vehicular homicide be used as ammunition (hah) in Second Amendment debates? Probably! Apparently at least one "explosive device" was also found?
There is something to be said for "wait and see," and indeed I expect to hear much more about this attack in the near future (unless, of course, we simply don't). Though clearly Special Agent Aletha Duncan did not seem to think there was any reason to "wait and see" when declaring, contra the mayor, that this was not a terrorist attack.
In unrelated news, Stocks just did something they haven’t done in nearly three decades--and in case you are unimpressed with CNN's clickbait headline,
back-to-back gains of over 20% is the best performance for the benchmark index since 1997 and 1998
Everything old is new again.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
And to you. My thoughts on the matter have not especially changed, except that I would add that very few people in AI discussion circles seem to appreciate (or care?) that copyright law questions are at the heart of future control over artificial intelligence. The political outcome, after all the judges and legislators have had their crack at it, of cases like NYT v. OpenAI should tell us a lot about who is going to have the power to siphon value from whom. This could potentially have been solved 25 years ago--alas.
Nitter link for those who don't use Twitter.
makes him seem like a centrist techlib
He seems to lean left on the environment and animal rights, and of course there's that whole anti-capitalism thing. Psychedelics also code "left" to me, but that probably just means I am old enough to remember the 20th century.
But yeah, this could have been written by a tradcon:
Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.
The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.
Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:
- ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
- replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
- replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
- heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
- revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)
Yes--of course. There are many different legal traditions that parse things out differently. A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife. However, one could still do morally atrocious things which were against the law--so for example, adultery was illegal, even though under the doctrine of coverture adultery was not strictly an offense against one's spouse. Rather, it was an offense against God and the State (which approved the marriage).
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