naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
I think the study of the paranormal would benefit by more smart people focusing on it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but smart people who focus on the study of the paranormal (and who are not actively grifting) tend to conclude that paranormal studies are only really valuable as a grift. The only way the study of the paranormal "benefits" is by having each phenomenon either debunked or explained; in the former case, most people didn't need it debunked because it was obviously a grift from the start, and in the latter case the explanation removes the phenomenon from the realm of the "paranormal" and into the realm of the "normal." In other words, either way, "success" in paranormal studies inevitably means the elimination of paranormal studies. So we can be much more efficient by just eliminating paranormal studies entirely, and when a plausibly interesting but unexplained phenomenon occurs, subjecting that phenomenon to normal studies.
Sometimes the conclusion will be "we still can't explain this phenomenon." That doesn't mean something "paranormal" has happened. It just means that we're limited beings who are often underequipped to grasp or explain some things. The universe is complex enough given what we do know; adding further complexity by building shrines to our own ignorance does not help us in any way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
The one clear CW aspect is the removal of distinct genders... But c'mon. Have you met the Pokemon go community?
I would add that the skin tone "randomized palette" seems like a pretty clear CW angle as well.
Gotta be honest this seems like a very mild culture war angle.
I mean--I did characterize it as a "small thing!" But when a (widely known as incompetent) video game company feels comfortable removing distinct genders from what is sometimes characterized as a "kids game," that doesn't seem like a completely empty data point, either.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Yeah, the comment was a bit longer (and from a fresh-rolled zero-karma account) but the quoted text is the gist of it.
A similar question was posed a couple months ago so I approved this comment because it wasn't obviously spam, but it did seem a little bait-y. That the user's apparent response was to delete the question strengthens my sense that something fishy was happening there.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
FYI, I have removed this post, it doesn't really meet the effort threshold for a top level post.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
14d ago
The writer of the movie is most likely a pajeet, just not a Hindu pajeet but a pajeet nonetheless since people of European origin do not care enough about the subcontinent to spend so much time and have a refined sense of racist humour.
This claim seems plausible to me, though @WestphalianPeace's claim also seems plausible (and overlapping) to me:
I suspect the creator is actually Canadian. Either Old Stock Anglo-Canadian or the 90's generation of Cantonese/Korean first gen Canadian. There's also a smaller but real possibility of earlier Indian immigrant family who moved to Toronto specifically to get out of India and now feels like the Old World is chasing after them.
Indians definitely fall into "fargroup" territory for me. I have known many professionally, and all were uniformly and unapologetically caste-ist (is there a better word for this?). Americans who grew up post-civil-rights are frequently stunned by the vitriol Europeans often seem comfortable spouting about Gypsies, and I think I feel something similar when I hear Indian physicians and lawyers and professors talk about lower castes. Because with respect to American politics, they are often quite woke, or at least willing to play the "race" card whenever it seems likely to benefit them. Listening to "brown" people complain about racism in one breath and then air disdain for the browner people of their homeland gives me culture war whiplash, I guess I'm saying.
I watched part of the video and it seems like pretty high grade troll bait, but like most of 4chan's projects I am skeptical that it gets anywhere interesting, ultimately. Perhaps I am underestimating the level of public fascination with AI-generated stuff, though.
The carrots are not working
The carrots are a big part of the problem.
I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.
The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.
so there should be sticks implemented
The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."
EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:
He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
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St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
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The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
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The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
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In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
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Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
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Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
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Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
As others have said--Honda Civic, assuming they're as readily available there as they are in the U.S. Remote start has been available since 2008 models, rear view cameras have been standard in the U.S. since the 2013, and the infotainment system is competent. Heated seats available on some models since 2020, which is probably newer than you can get in the price range you're talking--but they do exist. If you want to shave the price a little further, Toyota Corollas are similarly reliable and equipped. Given my own life experience, I doubt I'll ever buy a non-Japanese model again.
It has been decades since I heard anyone seriously praise a BMW, and in the price range you're talking, I can't imagine you'll see many comfortable BMWs unless the UK has a very different used car market than the US right now.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
It feels rather Singerian to me, in a sense?
I would say it's in approximately the sense that he wrote a book called The Darwinian Left.
The notion is recurrent--sufficiently recurrent that the most basic response was penned no later than 1788:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Biorealism is usually invoked to explain why certain people would be better off with more government rather than less. Rarely do the people invoking it apply that biorealism to the people doing the governing. This was a key insight of the founders of the United States, and we (well, the governing elite) have substantially discarded it. When you give some people power over other people, however so benevolent, people in power will in short order set about fucking (literally or figuratively) the people who lack power, because that, too, is biorealism.
This can apparently be mitigated, somewhat, through checks and balances and rights-protecting arrangements of various kinds, but of course that is why people so often chafe at checks and balances and rights-protecting arrangements. "But think of all the good we could do!"
Yes, indeed. And all the deliciously enjoyable rewards we could reap along the way--after all, surely those who make the world a better place deserve some credit for that? What could be more natural?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender.
I mean, you're not obligated to agree with me, but I did provide a fair bit of evidence you don't appear to have actually gone over.
There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.
Female role models, yes. Feminine role models, no, at least not qua feminine role models.
I included the links I did quite deliberately; the Louise Antony interview concludes with her commentary that she supports the transsexual movement to the extent that it undermines the gender binary. To add to that, Sally Haslanger has written that "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." Any time you see the phrase "eliminate gender inequality" you are looking at words that mean "eliminate gender differences" which is functionally equivalent to "eliminate gender"--because if all genders are identical, then there is only one gender, and since gender exists to distinguish different things, collapsing gender into socially identical constructs collapses gender entirely.
I also found this blog which agrees that
Gender, or some forms thereof, is seen by the vast majority of feminists as undesirable in many ways
The article goes on to note that some feminists think that gender can't be abolished in every possible way, but even this is marked as "unfortunate":
One can wish to abolish gender roles and gender stereotypes, but preserve gender identity and gender norms as unfortunately inevitable in some way.
Feminism, as I said, has been broadly gender eliminativist for more than a century, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. It's not a selling point! It's not something you're likely to hear from a Democrat politician any time soon--any more than you will hear them say "abolish the family." But it is one of the core values of the whole movement, something that informs every other action, even actions by people (most people!) who have no idea that the point and purpose of their activism was written long ago. As Keynes observed:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
It’s a boring semantic debate.
To some extent I'm sorry I mentioned it, because I don't seem to have communicated what I was thinking with sufficient clarity. It is kind of like the debates about homophobia not being about fear, insofar as both words often misdiagnose the problem at hand, sometimes in ways that result in exactly the kind of fumbling non-solutions under discussion. What you and Mandalay are describing really is more like "gynephobia," particularly with some of the gay men I've known over the years. And what makes that more than a "boring semantic debate" is that you don't see gay men going on misogynistic murder sprees, so using the same word to describe the disdainful gay man and the seething incel looks like more than a merely semantic mistake.
This is where I probably should have said more: I don't object to the word "misogyny" in the sense that I don't think many of these men do hate women, such that the word is semantically appropriate. I was only trying to note that it is the kind of hate that is born of desire, not the kind of hate that is born of disdain--because once you notice that, you realize that you can't stop incel-style misogyny by teaching them to like women more. That's not the problem! The problem is that they do like women! If they didn't like women, they wouldn't hate women.
The contempt you describe is, I think, mostly separate from either the gynephobia of certain gay men or the misogyny of the isolated and unloved. Such men seem to follow the old Aristotelian style of viewing women and children as simply less than human (I can't think of a single example of the kind of man you describe who was contemptuous of women but not children--YMMV!). I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a species of sexism, but neither do I think it is merely a "boring semantic debate" to suggest that misogyny doesn't capture the phenomenon as well.
But, maybe it is just a boring semantic debate, and attempting to use different words to describe the different kinds of problems individual men have with women generally is a distraction. Certainly it was not the substance of my point; what I was mostly interested in pointing out is that gender eliminativists aren't in a position to provide "masculine" role models to anyone.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans.
For whatever its worth, my suggestion for Hlynka's ban was "a year and a day," which was what we temporarily replaced permabans with back on the subreddit.
But I didn't argue strongly for it, because after we'd been doing 366 day bans for a little over a year, people started coming back... and they weren't any better than they'd been before. One theory had been that sometimes people get too caught up in whatever the $CURRENT_THING is, and we want to allow people to grow, and... to the best of my recollection, it has not ever worked out that way in the history of this community. People who did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans came back and... immediately did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans.
Permabans are not great, especially when we're actively looking for ways to grow the community (productively) rather than shrink it. But allowing long-time community members to actively degrade the discourse is, unfortunately, worse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."
Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
I don't understand the point about Irulan.
Irulan is described thusly:
Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Coming from a new user account with no posting history, this post is too smug by half.
However, rather than consign it to the spam bin, I'll go ahead and approve it: this place can't be a place to test shady thinking if we simply ban shady thinking.
Substantively, I will simply point out that your point seems to be just what Aristotle was writing about in the Analytica Posteriora:
Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Dissident right loooves hbd but not when believing in it would stop you from feeling good about yourself.
If I've understood your comment correctly, you seem to be making a permissible and even potentially interesting point. But your approach brings a bit too much heat and not enough effort. Less of this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
That's how I tend to feel whenever people make a political argument from... well, biorealism, race realism, HBD, whatever you want to call it. Even if we grant that Group X are on average 10% or 20% dumber than Group Y, it does not follow that Group X will be better off being governed by Group Y.
Those are two very different arguments, though. One is about how people are. The other is about what we should do about it. (A similar problem is often seen with climate change debates--agreement on facts about climate is not the same as agreement about political responses, and rejecting proposals regarding the latter should not be assumed to constitute substantive disagreement on the former.)
My own take on HBD has long been very straightforward: we need to stop trying to "uplift" people. It is my view that the correct conclusion from HBD is not "X should rule Y," it's "government actors should stop giving special treatment to any X or Y by virtue of their X- or Y-ness: it doesn't do what you seem to think it will do."
naraburns
nihil supernum
24d ago
Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.
That is certainly true. But porn, at least, is also directly related to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, which was in turn substantially a product of feminism. In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America. Feminism and race relations and homosexuality and other left-of-center issues really became politically salient around that time, without significant historical precedent. America itself wasn't even particularly "multicultural" circa 1960, when the population was 85% white and 11% black.
I don't know where it ends, or how. I don't know how to resolve the problems we've inherited. If I look at history for guidance, problems don't appear to generally get solved so much as subsumed into whatever problems come next. Usually that seems to mean war, within or without. These days I suppose something approaching a technological singularity could also suffice. It's not clear to me that I want to still be alive when whatever happens next finally gets around to happening, except for the part where I'm curious to see how it plays out.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
@TitaniumButterfly's original comment:
In reality, it’s like being ‘free’ in a post-apocalyptic ‘The Road’ style wasteland versus an all-expenses-paid hotel stay where omnipotent gods protect and serve you for your whole life.
I'm broadly sympathetic to your overall point and would be on your side of such a debate 9/10 times but in this case I do want to push back a bit. I breed and hunt with birds of prey and have had a lot of time to consider this question.
Overall you're more than correct. People will see a falcon sitting on a perch in captivity and say things like "Oh that's so sad, it's tied down and it wants to be free." No, not really. Not at all, actually. Flying is hard work and if (actually when) they get to choose between flying around for a reward and simply sitting and being fed, they will choose the latter every time. And if they're pushed into the former it's not uncommon for them to try to weasel out of it by just sitting somewhere to see if they can outwait you into producing food to get them to return. This is a whole thing, most of them have to be trained out of that instinct, and more than once I've spent a night under a tree, refusing to produce a reward for a falcon until it's gotten back up in the sky and flown around a bit. Reward them for sitting once and they'll never want to fly again.
But there is an exception. Given the choice to sit and be fed, or go out and hunt some real game, they will about destroy themselves in their eagerness for the latter.
I will never forget the sight of my apprentice's hawk on his first live rabbit. He bound to it, we dispatched it, and then he spent roughly the next twenty minutes visibly trembling with emotion. His crest up, his eyes aflame, like every cell of his body was radiating golden light. It was clearly a transformative experience, and I don't think I'm prone to inappropriately romanticizing these creatures.
They live for this stuff. And I think other animals must feel the same way about a lot of things, including securing and defending territory, competing for mates, etc. Yeah, most of them are losers in such processes, but the winners get something I think they'd agree is worth having, and it is the impulse of life to shoot for the stars even if most must fall short.
Animals don't have any kind of abstract notion of freedom or self-determination. But they are wired to appreciate certain things, and I think that the zoo (or household pet) experience is rather like pod life. A lot of men, for example, would be 'happy' with something like state-issued ai robot waifus, plentiful netflix and video games, and enough industrially-produced food to satisfy them, but those who have felt what it is to be chosen by a beautiful mate, to have achieved mastery in their craft, to have lived in real, functional human community, would look at that and be horrified.
No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it.
To quote Doctor Alan Grant, the T-rex doesn't want to be fed. It wants to hunt. And huskies want to range hundreds of miles, and collies want to herd.
Here is the origin of quokka discourse.
The origins are not complimentary. But the quokka pictured in "The Motte Needs You!" is a deliberate inversion of the origin: we want quokkas here, because that is the world we'd like to build.
You might also add that "tradfem" is kind of a play on "radfem," or "radical feminist"--the other side of the "libfem" coin. Liberal feminists tend to be more gender-eliminativist (they are big on equality) while radfems see at minimum a place for special consideration of the female role in reproduction and how that impacts their intersectional identity. This is also why the term (or, perhaps, slur) "TERF" (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) exists; libfems tend to be blandly supportive of trans-women (while criticizing, at times, their gender essentialism), while radfems are much more skeptical of trans-women invading female spaces. In my experience, ironically, trans-women tend to speak more like radfems in their opinions of e.g. revolution against "the patriarchy," which if anything seems to make the radfems more upset, in a "but you are the patriarchy!" sort of way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?
Lynch, I suppose. It's pretty campy but I agree that its commitment to the foreignness of the Duniverse is appreciated.
I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.
I don't think it's fair to call him a villain, and I don't think Herbert ever did so (though I could be wrong about that!). I seem to remember Herbert suggesting that Paul is an anti-hero, and that Dune Messiah was intended to bring that out a bit more clearly. Paul is solving some very big problems, but he's doing it by throwing a lot of bodies into the meat grinder of war. Far, far better to be ruled by Paul than by the Harkonnens! And yet. The brutality of nature is one of the biggest themes of the texts, along with the threat of predation. It's a deeply Darwinian story, and these days people are nervous about thinking too hard about Darwinism as it continues to apply to human evolution.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Paul is not a failed Messiah, he's a failed Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense. There's an important distinction and I do think Huber was influenced by Nietzsche.
I don't know. If anything, Paul succeeds at being the Übermensch, insofar as he eventually decides to act in accordance with his own desires, rather than in accordance with his visions. He refuses to become a slave to the survival of humanity. His apparent ability to see the Golden Path means that he knows someone has to become God Emperor. He decides to not do that. Leto II steps up to the task; to dedicate one's own vast superhuman lifespan to the good of mankind is Messianic, not Übermenschian.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
There are of course a million angles on this, but the one that just got me was the "Republicans pounce" headline from NBC:
Forget the sense of defilement (in the old "despoil their temples" sense of defilement), the sense of entitlement on display (both in the video's creation and in the staffer's "I dindu nuffin" and "I play the gay card" and "I'm gonna sue" responses), how this impacts stereotypes of gay men as oversexed wantons, comparisons to the consequences of the January 6 2021 "riots," jokes about whose chair that was and what she's going to do about it...
Forget all that. Somehow, the headline is Republicans pounce. I don't know how something can be so simultaneously brazen and banal, but there it is. Totally unapologetic partisan propaganda from a major news network, just the most painfully obvious and insanely unprofessional bullshit approach to burying the lede, and I know they do this all the time but come on. We've got full-on video of gay sex in a Senate hearing room and these so-called "journalists" can't see it as anything but an opportunity to run interference for the Democrats?
I'm a big fan of the Free Press, in the old "fourth estate" sense. But I'm not sure there are any legacy media outlets left that aren't simply Democratic political action committees that murdered the First Amendment and now prance about wearing its desiccated skin, cultural wolves in political sheep's clothing.
Like many people, in the summer of 2016 I signed up for "Pokemon Go." I'd previously spent a couple of months playing Niantic's "Ingess" and though it got me out walking a bit, I lost interest in less than a year. I hoped Pokemon Go might help me re-gamify my preferred approach to light cardio. However, the game servers were apparently potatoes so after the first day, I never played again.
When the COVID pandemic hit, I took up walking again, and decided to give Pokemon Go another try. I was far from alone; the game's revenue went from $650 million in 2019 to over $900 million in 2020, only to drop off just as steeply in 2022. It did tend to keep me out walking longer than I otherwise might; I've now been playing the game for 30-60 minutes daily for a couple of years, in conjunction with my exercise regimen.
The game itself is aggressively mid. I've only played through one mainline Pokemon game (Diamond, if you care)--because I felt like I ought to have played through at least one Pokemon game, given their popularity. But I gather that if you're a real Pokemon afficionado, Pokemon Go ("PoGo") is borderline offensive in its implementation. The Pokemon formula is catch-and-brawl, but while the "catch" portion of PoGo is basically adequate, the "brawl" portion is genuinely terrible.
The explanation is, essentially, "Niantic." Ingress, the game on which PoGo was built, seems to have existed primarily to gamify pedestrian data collection for Google Maps. Niantic spun off of Google in 2015, but has kept its "data collection" DNA; one thing PoGo players can do to advance in the game is scan locations with their phone cameras and submit the info to Niantic. Publicly, Niantic is always talking about finding ways to improve the "get outside and gather with others" aspects of the game. Some changes made during the pandemic allowed players to gather more virtually, and these were hugely popular; when Niantic rolled these changes back, the playerbase revolted and Niantic partially restored the functions (while making them more expensive to use).
Well, this is all pretty boring corporate stupidity, so far. Not many serious culture war angles; it's a game targeted at Millennials and their kids, and it's barely playable outside of fairly densely-populated cities, and beyond that the company behind it had more "big data" DNA than "makes fun games" DNA. PoGo is successful, truly, in spite of itself. None of Niantic's other offerings have ever really taken off as they'd like.
And then today, everyone got new avatars.
Previously, the game had two base avatars--a male and a female. These had slightly different, but mostly overlapping, clothing options. Beyond that you could set hair, skin, and eye colors. You could freely switch between male and female.
There are several things I noticed immediately about the new avatar system. First, there is no longer any distinction between sexes. Rather, the system offers a number of body "presets" as well as a custom body slider. All of the bodies are monstrous; 75% are noticeably obese. The sliders do nothing to address this. All settings are vaguely androgynous; a slender female waist or strong male chest are simply out of the question. Many new faces and hairstyles are available (albeit none with facial hair), and all are creepy and doll-like.
Skin and hair color options have also changed. Most of the options are weird and strictly inferior to past options (avatars can no longer have striking red hair; a dull auburn is as close as it now gets). "White" skin comes in "pasty" or "jaundiced" only. But especially weird--the selection palettes appear to just be randomized. They do not cluster dark skin with other dark shades, or light skin with other light shades--it's just a mess of brown tones, in no particular order.
The clothing--most of which players must purchase using premium in-game currency--hangs oddly; every pair of pants looks like someone is wearing an overloaded diaper. Every shirt hangs like drapes. Previously "sexy" clothing now just looks ill-fitting; muscular male outfits are now vaguely flabby, curvy female outfits are flat or distended.
Discussion has raised a variety of points about Niantic possibly recycling assets to cut costs, or relying on AI conversions, or seeking to tap the Fortnite crowd with more Fortnite-esque physiques. Memes are dropping. Complaints are dropping. Waistlines are dropping. And dropping. And dropping.
Theories, too.
I don't know what will happen next. It doesn't matter very much to me, except insofar as I have a distinct preference against the new avatar system. But the culture war angle just seems so glaring. Perhaps because of the target demographic, though, I don't see a lot of discussion of it. I kind of assume that Niantic is ready to deploy the "racists and transphobes hate the PoGo update" press releases, though I haven't seen one yet. But basically everyone hates the body updates, even if they are glad to have more hair options. I think my favorite comment on reddit was here:
It would also be interesting to know more about what's happening internally at Niantic--like if the work here was done by AI, or by diversity hires, or what. I've heard completely unverifiable rumors that Niantic management is outrageously out of touch with reality but also petrified to kill their golden goose, so it is hard for me to imagine them green-lighting these changes without culture war blinders on. But maybe they really are just terrible at their jobs?
Well, there's your tempest in today's teapot. Such a small thing! And yet so clearly intended to make the game less pleasant to the San Francisco outgroup. Perhaps I will rethink my position on the possible existence of microaggressions.
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