It's because feminists have framed the question of rape as something "men" as a group do to "women". Not a highly contemptible subset men, but men in general.
If you could have a societal debate about how to stop bike theft WITH bike thieves and their solution was "lock your bike better", you would rightly answer them "no, if we're all on the same page about stopping bike theft here, then the solution is that you JUST STOP STEALING BIKES!". But of course, bike thieves are not interested in these societal debates, they don't show up to them. So it's okay to assume they will keep stealing and it's appropriate to suggest solutions that work around that.
But as I've mentionned feminists have framed the question of rape as being something "men" perpetrate, so when men show up to societal debates and helpfully suggest mitigation strategies they get the same treatment as our hypothetical bike thief who shows up at a how to avoid bike theft debate. And the contemptible subset of men who commit those rapes are not interested in the debate and obviously don't show up.
*EDIT: And I think it's important to note here that feminists aren't necessarily completely wrong here. Think of the prevalence through history of armies "raping and pillaging" after conquest. Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives. There's a lot of men throughout history who we probably would think of as normal for their time, not a particular small subset of them, who would consider doing what you want with a conquered people's women or forcing a wife to "her duty" as normal behavior.
One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.
From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.
Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.
pigeonburger
18d ago
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
If you found yourself in the same, say, square kilometer as a bear, it is extremely unlikely to attack you. But you are also unlikely to see the bear; it will very much want to avoid you as much as he/she can. If the terrain is open maybe you'll see it at a distance, it's not likely to care unless you get close. But if you do find yourself face-to-face with the bear, the probabilities of attack are very different to the baseline. You might have wandered in proximity to its cubs. The bear might be habituated to human presence, associating them with food. The bear might be starving. These are all bad things.
A human is not gonna outrun a bear. Especially not in uneven terrain and in the forest. You can't climb a tree to evade it. And it has excellent sense of smell so you're unlikely to be able to hide from it.
pigeonburger
27d ago
In a sense, but homelessness has two crucial distinctions, it can be a temporary state for people who are very much "polite society material" but have hit a rough patch, and it also interacts a bit too much with said polite society, being a nuisance to its members and that chafing is encouraging them to be tougher on it. It's harder to feel compassionate towards the homeless if you have to endure their litteral excrement everywhere in your city.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
That was not his only outburst though, his first big moment in the spotlight (outside of his niche) in pop culture was the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" incident, something he probably believed outside of mental illness paranoia (it was commonly believed in liberal circles), but it was just indelicate to say in a charity marathon.
Or the "imma let you finish" incident, which had nothing to do with politics or paranoia but everything to do with misunderstanding what's appropriate.
Up until he touched the third rail his outbursts were just that of someone telling his mind the way you're not supposed to, doubly so when you have a public persona to maintain. I'm not convinced if his touching the third rail is meaningfully different except in the severity of the pushback he got.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
They'll Let the CBC and every Canadian broadcaster die, such that it will just be Rebel News and American Media.
This is not going to happen. Guaranteed.
The media, even when entirely ideologically captured, has enough of a self-preservation instinct to half-heartedly lick the boot after a regime change. And any Conservatives, even and especially those who aren't knowingly playing the role of controlled opposition, are so starved for flattering media coverage that they'll let them flatter them and will forget any plan or promise to deal with the media, until it's too late, it's election season and the knife is buried so far in their back they can't pull it out anymore.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
He simply asked Lance a couple of questions to tease out his position, and Lance admirably admitted something a lot on his side probably believe: "bodily autonomy" is the strongest legal argument for abortion but the point of abortion is to avoid this issue. If tomorrow a 5 week-old baby was viable that basic, pressing issue of work that helps the pro-choice movement would remain.
I mean it is the most clearly announced motte & bailey argument I've seen, and it frustrates me to no end when people refuse to admit it. The main organisation championing it in the US, Planned Parenthood, is named after the bailey. But if you come with arguments that if women are given the choice of parenthood men should be given a choice too (to legally and financially renounce fatherhood) then woah bro! We're just talking about a medical procedure and bodily autonomy!
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Outside of the obvious problems with it (Harrison Ford's age and following up on a train wreck of a movie that bifurcated the lore in a detrimental direction), Indiana Jones can't be remade or followed up on succesfully because Indiana Jones is a throwback to pulp adventure stories/comic books almost no one remembers now. I think the last thing to succesfully tap into nostagia for that that was The Mummy in... 1999. Now, Indiana Jones IS the reference. There's only so much you can achieve by referencing two/three beloved movies (opinions are mixed on #2).
This is a broader problem with remake/sequel culture, succesful pop culture franchises were built by drawing heavily from preceding pop culture but in a new way; a remix. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back built a franchise through heavy inspiration from pulp sci-fi and samurai(/western) movies; mix them together, you get Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and more strongly the sequel trilogy's inspiration is... Star Wars. No significant additional inspiration was added to it, they just remixed a remix. Nothing new is created, they're just diluting the original signal. Of course, the fans would probably be disappointed if they did anything else; the prequel trilogy was mostly rejected because it was different. (Rejecting it because it wasn't very good is fine; rejecting it because it doesn't feel like Star Wars is a case of "careful what you wish for" that we can all appreciate in hindsight with the sequel trilogy).
So anyway, sorry for the meandering post to come to the shocking conclusion that remake and belated sequels are creatively bankrupt, but I just had to take the opportunity reflecting on the new Indiana Jones movie to work through why it is creatively bankrupt.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
While I could be mistaken and it could just be a trick played on me by my filter bubble, I believe this:
The author also believes that younger generations have been trained to expect diversity in entertainment and recoil when it is not present.
is an illusion cast on us to make it seem as if it is fait accompli, so we do not resist it. My impession is that young generations, save a loud activist minority, do not care about this and would rather consume entertainment that prioritise quality over "activism" when both are on offer, which is why it seems like an imperative for people pushing this illusion that all remnants of past quality entertainment must be "remade" and tainted with activism, as its mere presence next to its modern counterparts shade it entirely. This is where I believe we differ, they must destroy the past not because they've won, but because they fear its presence will break the spell they've put on us.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
A lot of the knife answers seem to assume maximum stupidity from the bat fighter and maximum cunning from the knife fighter. That the only strike someone could do with a baseball bat is a big homerun swing. I'm pretty sure most people would figure out that's not all they can do with a bat within seconds of thinking of it as a weapon, and of how to avoid ending up being knifed. Most importantly, a quick overhead bonk (think kendo strikes) leaves you a lot less vulnerable if you miss than a swing, and if the opponent tries to catch it or to block it they will open up the entirety of their body to kicks. While that is not going to kill or even knock out in one shot, just one overhead bonk connecting is likely more than enough to end the fight; the amount of force in it would be enough to have the opponent reeling for long enough to line up another one, and another one, ect... And as for knife fighters, winning with one requires knowing something that is not really commonly known: you will not incapacitate someone with a knife. The targets that can incapacitate are small and an untrained person is not going to hit them on a resisting target. An expert probably wouldn't even bother either. The way to win with a knife is that you tie them down another way (say, by tackling them to the ground), and THEN you do damage with the knife, repeatedly. But the knife is essentially useless to win if you are not able to tie down the other guy, and with no distractions he has a big heavy piece of wood he's highly interested in keeping between you and him.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
True, but more than ever we're at an inflection point nowadays where the ability to process this information and abuse it meets a distrust of its handlers. It's barely been one year where the public has seen the ability for computers to read and seemingly really "understand" human speech and its intents. All that collected data that we thought was too much to be processed, it could now be fed to NLP algos and to LLMs to read through and flag, on all sorts of criteria. Take a small fast LLM like Phi-2, tell it to read all personal conversations on Facebook Messenger or whatnot, flag all those that seem to indicate political extremism (as defined by politicians the public distrusts), forward them to a smarter LLM (GPT-4) to review, if it agrees, forward to a human for further review.
pigeonburger
4d ago
Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
pigeonburger
24d ago
I don't think Metal Gear Solid would have been nearly as iconic if it didn't successfully replicate the look, sound and feel of an action movie. Sure, by today's standards it's not "hyper realism", but by the standards of the day it was.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
Leftists and young democrats voters have to be thrown a bone because they're threatening not to show up to vote for Biden over Israel. It's just that.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
The main argument is that Section 230 as-is allows big tech to have their cake and eat it too. They can claim to be not liable for user content on the basis that they cannot control what is posted on them, then turn around and heavily "curate" content on political grounds. The idea would be to repeal Section 230 and replace it with an alternative that forces a consistent position; either you curate content and are liable for the content you allow, or you aren't liable but have to tolerate wrongthink on your platform.
I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.
Have you checked the PDF link on the page linked? https://delcomplex.com/vonGoom
This is not real.
An Alternate Reality Corporation accelerating human potential through AI, neural prosthetics, clean energy, fundamental scientific research
https://www.delcomplex.com/blue-sea-frontier
Highlights:
Over 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs per platform providing unparalleled compute and industry leading performance.
Not just a compute cluster, each BSFCC is a sovereign nation state for innovation and acceleration.
Kinetic risk mitigation with dedicated security forces.
I'm leaning towards ARG, but could also just be creative writing experiment or some kid LARPing.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
I think he forgot to write the part where he argues that despite all these good reasons not to go into these fields, and despite them not holding any prestige for that power, they hold real power, being an increasingly self-aware part of the chain that every executive decision has to go through to get actually executed.
pigeonburger
28d ago
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Following posting this comment ( https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193633?context=8#context ) regarding a law that I believe should only apply to those who would want to impose it on the population, I have been playing in my head with the idea of a "Higher Standards" bill for politicians. The idea would be that all laws apply maximally to elected officials; in situations where prosecutors or judges find themselves with any discretion in their ability to prosecute or punish crime committed by an elected official, even in their personal life, they should forced to start their process from the point of the harshest possible position. They would be forced to prosecute jaywalking, the slightest driving infraction, etc... and start the mental accounting for sentencing / fining with the longest sentences or highest fines before any mitigating circumstances can apply. Details as to whether it would apply to actions before the enactment of the bill, or to accession to public office could be negociated either way. A grace period could be left open to allow rewriting laws before it applied.
I see a lot of positives coming out of such a bill. The main one is to urge restraint in writing laws. Legislators pass laws knowing that it is unlikely that they would ever be used against them and care very little that these laws are held over the population like the sword of Damocles that could at any moment be applied by a prosecutor looking to make an example or please a private sponsor. If you want to vote for a law criminalizing piracy, you should yourself be able to account for every single piece of digital content you have. If you want to curtail "hate speech" you better be damn certain that whatever comments you make today on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict will not be considered "hate speech" by the standards of tomorrow, etc... While I don't believe it would stop all of it, I think it would force legislators to reconsider some laws that achieve little but make technical criminals of very average people for widespread actions.
Other benefits I see is that it would encourage legislators to pay attention to the technical minutia of the laws they're passing, outside of the pork they're able to fit in it and how it will play with interest groups. It would also discourage criminals from running for office.
I struggle to see negatives; technically it could discourage effective would-be politicians from running for office if they believe that this is going to be weaponized against them. And I guess it would be a struggle to pass as politicians obviously would hate it, but without any arguments to bring forward I think they would find it hard to convince their constituents that voting against it is anything but voting against their interest. And it would take only a few fairly clean politicians to make some noise in favor of such a bill, willing to trade the benefits of future criminality in exchange for the large boost such a clear pro-plebeian move would give them.
I guess it could also be argued it's a very legalistic, low-trust society move, which I would concede, but that's the point I believe we are at in much of the west. That when the system is seen as benevolent it is fine to leave cops with the discretion to decide, for instance, when it's in the public's interest to disperse disruptive people for vague reasons like "loitering" or to punish antisocial speech as "hate speech", but when I do not trust the system, until that trust is restored I would rather know exactly what the rules of the game are, and so I want lawmakers to be highly interested in making sure that rules are crystal clear too.
So are there any negatives I'm not seeing? Has any similar law been enacted elsewhere and what has it led to? I see lots of references in the anglosphere to proposed bills claiming to hold elected officials to a higher standard, but for the most part it seems like it's either object-level transparency laws (which of course, we need too, but won't encourage restraint in lawmaking), too vague or obviously meant to be solely weaponized against the proposer's rival (laws against "lying", or against "contesting election results" or whatever else of that kind).
pigeonburger
3mo ago
It's not exactly the same, but I think it shares components with the "DARVO" tactic. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
While I disagree on the object level towards ACAB, I have some sympathy towards people who dismiss all cops as being bastards as I have a similar attitude towards all mainstream journalists. The rationale for that attitude is that even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, as a group my observation is that they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession, and when outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. I can easily imagine someone making a similar argument against the police, that they are unwilling to truly clean up their profession in the eyes of the public, that there is a culture of silence and an anti-snitch mentality within the profession. As with journalists, they are performing a duty to society that is sacred and requires the population's absolute confidence so they cannot afford in-group loyalty when it clashes with their duty.
I guess one distinction could be that one could argue that cops are not always aware of specific actionable, denounceable action by bad apples in their group. I don't think journalists can use that argument.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Gonna try to steelman the X rebranding here.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
Moving to X could be a very powerful move because specifically of it's weak branding. At this point in time, I think most americans and people who are deep into the american sphere either currently hate or have at some point hated Twitter. Right-wingers because it's been banning them hard under the previous management, mainstream progressivesbecause it stopped banning right wingers under current management. Nazis because it doesn't let them post aggressive slurs at people. Communists because it's a corporation owned by a billionaire. Libertarians because they respond to government requests. Greens because I don't know, computers use electricity. Centrists because everyone is yelling politically charged polarizing content at them on it.
Not only sunsetting the brand, but making the branding less salient can be a smart move. Seeing X branding when clicking on a link to a post somewhere doesn't remind me immediately "oh yeah, its twitter, fuck twitter!" like it used to. And in time, X being so generic might avoid having such strong emotions associated with it; it's more likely to be a liability for the company.
I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
More options
Context Copy link