popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
1mo ago
“Cleaning the dryer lint after you dry your clothes is the socially responsible thing to do.”
Yes, but kinda no. Some morality stems from pure social equilibrium. Not tipping your waiter is bad purely because society expects tips and has built that assumption into their wages, unlike for mailmen or call center employees. Not cleaning lint is likewise bad, but purely because others expect you to, and if you don't, you're free-riding on the people who do post-clean. A hypothetical society where the equilibrium is that everyone cleans the lint before use has an equal amount of work for everyone and no free-rider problem.
This is why it's good to fight bad equilibria while they're in the process of forming. I always just take the free coffee when someone starts a stupid "Pay It Forward" chain. If it ever does entrench as a social norm, though, I will have to submit.
The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)
The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.
Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
popocatepetl
2mo ago
My favorite model of politics is that, at least in the west, our primary axis of political division splits people who benefit status-wise from transnational managerialism (AKA the Globalist American Empire, GAE) and those who don't. That supporter class, which we can call the 'blue coalition', consists of people with cushy bureacratic jobs they got due to credentialism (blue tribe proper), unemployables who could never be respectable in any system, and migrants who would be in a favela without transnational open borders. The opposer class, which we can call the 'red coalition', consists of everyone else.
So blue-tribe-hates-red-tribe and red-tribe-hates-blue tribe is a cipher for class antagonism, much like the guelphs and ghibellines, the optimates and populares, the federalists and anti-federalists, and a million other disputes that seem impenentrable to the modern eye because the contours of their society's class landscape didn't come down to us in detail.
A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is
Shoplifting laws are definitely anti-thief laws. (andthatsagoodthing.jpeg) Lawmakers do not want people to act as thieves in the context of the shop; in Texas, lawmakers do not want men acting as female ('being trans') in the context of sports.
The reason that anti-trans laws are controversial is that the "underlying principle" you speak of is not agreed upon in society. Two sides cannot agree on whether a biological male entering a female space is a 'thief' taking what he is not due, or a female taking what belongs to her.
I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!
I think it's fair to say laws against stuffing iphones in your pants are, in fact, denigrating the values of people who would do that if it were legal. Likewise, I understand that, to a MtF, I really am pissing on their sacred values when I block the door to the women's restroom. That the shoplifter and the MtF are in the wrong is an entirely separate question from whether I am opposing them; I am opposing them. I am making an anti-thief/anti-trans action.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.
Smart saruman would guilt trip the hobbits for colonizing traditional elf lands and tell them that not accepting their uruk-hai migrants into the shire would not be very nice.
popocatepetl
29d ago
The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?
This is the big change. When I go back to 2020 /r/themotte threads, I revel in all the glorious paragraphs and long good-faith back-and-forths.
Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.
This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.
I often think of the economic ramifications when I see memes about single men's apartments. You can see the outlines of the pod, but the pod seems to be arriving quicker than AI will fill in the role of the mediocre men with their tedious infrastructure-maintaining jobs. If a third of young Gen Z men will never marry, and another third will end up divorcees with their wages garnished, and they're happy with a $499 gaming console and a $249 TV, what happens to the economy?
I guess the answer is the state will have to find some way to expropriate a larger portion of these men's wages to ensure they can only afford the pod if they provide a lot more surplus value than they used to, ensuring that incel pod guy must still seek technical certifications and work 40 hours at his lame construction job. Will they be able to squeeze blood from that rock is a salient unanswered question.
There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm. But in the 21st century, the wild men are slovenly gamers and the women are preaching harpies.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
On the contrary, social status is zero sum. In recent decades social status has been docked from some and redistributed to others — the blues say this is a good thing and that, in fact, reds still have a cache of unearned social status that should be stripped. This goes beyond racial justice ideology, to be clear; you will often hear school teachers or even PhD's complaining bitterly that plumbers make more than them, as if the plumber's salary is somehow decreasing theirs. Or decrying that liberal arts degrees don't secure a "good job". By this they mean "social inferiors have prominence that should be reallocated to me".
Blue and red class interests are fundamentally opposed.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. [...]
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
To maybe point out the obvious, a TFR below 2 doesn't hit uniformly across a population. If Lebanon, Israel, or the US for that matter are magically reconfigured into ethnostates and their borders sealed tomorrow, those countries will not have the same genotype in a hundred years with half the population. The type of person who succeeds and breeds in the modern environment is of an unusual temperament, and their characteristics will sweep the board and change the character of the country.
popocatepetl
26d ago
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
One of my handful of 10/10s. Absolute aesthetic perfection. Kundera's other pretty-good book is Immortality, which also explores the self as an experience versus the self as others project values onto. But this is the novel he lived his life to write, so the rest of his work ends up disappointing.
What are great graphic novels I should read? I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it
Berserk. Koe no Katachi if you feel like a good cry.
There's a bit of a motte and bailey with algorithms. People grandstanding against social media conflate algorithms intentionally tweaked to manipulate users with algorithms that simply give users what they want. TikTok, as far as I can tell, largely does the second. Google Search, on the other hand, extensively does the first. However, the sort of people who complain about 'algorithms' tend to approve of Google's goals in information curating.
To be clear, both types of 'algorithm' might be bad, in the same way cocaine might be bad whether a user snorts it on their own or an unsavory corporation slips it into their carbonated beverages. But banning the former is a harder sell given the moral justification for our current civilization is still technically supposed to be liberalism.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
The proper way is to use a lash no thicker than your thumb on parts of her body that aren't seen in public. Non-consensually, aftercare optional.
I'm unable to tell whether your meaning is literal, ironic, pretend-ironic, or pretend-pretend-ironic to express distain for people saying those things pretend-ironically.
Do you think (a) regular birchings are part of healthy monogamy, (b) such disciplinings were regularly practiced in the west before feminism?
(EDIT: PDF version from ToaKraka for people with bad internet.)
Which of the following would you rather have? CYOA - In general, people pick Comfort or Power. But the Motte is built different (laughs). As a fun exercise, pick your option and predict what the Motte will choose.
Me:
YOUR CHOICE. The motte: Pleasure 20%, Adventure 20%, Comfort 20%, Good Works 20%, Power 20%
Wrap this part in || to spoiler, please. (And try to pick your honest choice rather than the socially desirable one if at all possible)
So, what are you reading?
Re-reading my CS Lewis: Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, plus some of his other apologetics for the first time. (Last month's subthread on christianity and theodicies put me in mind of him.) I must say, as an atheist, they are the best steelman of christian faith you will encounter. They present a version denuded of all things the sort of person who hangs out on the Motte dislikes. The mystical elements reduce to two foundational miracles: that God was made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, and that your conscience is communication of God rather than a consequence of brain chemistry.
Better, Lewis presents a heady, masculine version of the faith which is largely absent in the therapeutic sop of modern nondenominational churches. He stresses that Christianity calls for radical striving and self-abnegation, for walking through the "narrow gate" ; that accepting Christ means, not nuzzling into the unjudgmental embrace of mother, but asking for father to break your will and reforge you with soul of a saint.
It's unfortunate. The mind-body dualism introduced in the first chapters of Mere Christianity, on which everything else builds, doesn't stand to reason. He spends a good deal of time arguing against the idea the conscience coming from "herd instinct", as he calls it, but his objections have easy answers. Human brains have an id and superego which are represented by different neural pathways; they make "bids" in the parliament of our ego, and the stronger case decides our action. You can see a primitive version of this in the warring segments of lamprey brains trying to decide whether to swim out to seek mates or hide in the rocks.
While Lewis's christianity may be pro-social and psychologically appealing, believing what your reason rejects for emotional relief is cowardly and base. If I am a seeker, I must remain one.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
@bfslndr @curious_straight_ca Guys I figured it out, it's the old reddit link conversion. Just copy+paste 'reddit.com/r/196/s/Qimfce7wOf' into your URL bar.
As for the link, one of my favorite genres of internet content is "Smart autists derive social rules even social butterflies don't know except on an instinctual level". Yes, friend groups are status alliances, and you endanger your own position by trying to bring a low value add into the mix. Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid though, can't say whether the character descriptions are accurate.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace. This is a chink in the armor of the theodicy, because Christians' omnipotent benevolent God did not lift a finger to give 100s AD Malaysians even a shot at accepting grace — they could not have heard Christ's ministry. Nor, indeed, does God give us moderns the benefit he was willing to extend to 20s AD Near Easterners, who saw tangible miracles to guide them to God's kingdom.
This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. [...] But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
Examples? I've written and seen written posts that treat Christian beliefs with the same rough treatment as "I think [X] are just delusional, and [Y] are just confused and mentally ill", and none of them ran afoul of the mods. This thread has some examples of posters (including me) saying in passing that 'yup, the factual claims of the bible are unsupported and faintly ridiculous on their face, and I think bible-thumpers are just [insert euphemism for confused simpleton'].
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
To be honest, I took the question as rhetorical garnish to the meat of dunking on groups of people and ideas you disapprove of.
The run-of-the-mill progressive does not consider striving and can-do attitudes an important part of success, but an ex post facto justification of privilege, so they wouldn't see your concerns as a problem. 'We don't need to convince Blacks to try hard, Blacks are already trying just as hard as anyone; we just need to dismantle the systems of oppression to unleash their human capital' would be their framing.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
The statement isn't about the staffer not understanding why he's getting criticized. This is a classic case of a person in the midst of a scandal putting up the bat signal for their in-group, screaming that the out-group is attacking them just for being a member of the in-group. (See: Zoe Quinn in GamerGate). People do it all the time because it works.
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy?
Morally, Napoleon strikes me as what Spengler characterized as a Caesar: no strong ideology, ambitious, a pragmatically minded autocrat who sweeps into command of an exhausted society. Men like that do not fight for a cause; viewing them in "good" or "evil" terms is a mistake. Had Napoleon not foolishly killed the Duke of Enghien and invited another coalition against France, the right would view him with the vague favorability they do with Salazar or Franco, because he set a house in order after a decade of chaos. His concordat with the pope, rehabilitation of the emigres, and rationalized law code were just what the doctor ordered for France.
Politically, Napoleon is fascinating to me. He successfully defrocked something that looks suspiciously what the online right calls the Cathedral. People who see only the vague outline of history sometimes say that Napoleon tamed the French revolution after its Jacobin excesses. This is incorrect. After the Thermidorian Reaction, France endured a relatively bloodless period under an oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which historians call the French Directory. The Directors held to the ideological center of the French revolution, using press censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and election fixing to ward off their strong left and right flanks. Napoleon staged a coup with the help of a few Directorate insiders who thought him their pawn. After Napoleon got rid of those 'friends', no one stood up for them.
Provoking another war with Europe afterwards was a dreadful mistake. If not for that, he'd get good marks in my book, but he did do it.
Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k.
Happiness is a function of relative status, not absolute economic utility.
For the billions around the world, $16/hour in an unglamorous job would increase their status relative to their neighbors. For an American, $16/hour in an unglamorous job feels perilously low status compared to one's (fictional, learned from advertisements and social media) neighbors. You criticize them harshly as wanting special privileges, but in their mind they are mainly seeking to clear to a respectability threshold.
The problem underlying a great many problems in society — education, purchasing decisions, family formation — is the dangerous gap between the popular perception of average and the reality of average.
If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.
Males typically enjoy competition provided they have some chance of winning. I've never met a male who continues to enjoy a competitive activity in which they consistently lose. (For footraces this means near last-place finishes.)
To find meaning it's important to find a competition within an arm's length of your competency. See: eudaimonia, or flow state.
An internal locus of control gives you better outcomes, regardless of how valid a particular complaint is. Even if it is insanity, it's a useful insanity.
How positive can we be about the correlation/causation here? For reasons described elsewhere in this thread, people who succeed attribute it to their own agency, while people who fail blame circumstances. The cross-sectional cohort studies I see with a quick search don't impress me with their rigor in dismissing that explanation of LoC/outcome correlations. They seem to assume that if a 4th grader has internal LoC and experiences better outcomes later, then internal LoC was the cause; as opposed to that 4th grader having developed an internal LoC by age 10 due to having more friends, a likeable personality, having demonstrated demonstrated competency in the past, etc. The studies might include a line about controlling for IQ, but that's about it.
I dislike psychology as a field and this always sounded like one of those "just so" stories, to my biased ears.
I agree with everyone saying you shouldn't do that, so please add my bullying to the campaign against you succumbing to bullying.
As for internally visible comment scores, I agree with @Primaprimaprima that the current system virtually guarantees I visit the motte the day after I make a comment. That's good slot machine design. However, when I make a comment on reddit, I still typically check back several times to see how the score plays out, so I'm not sure that benefit justifies the current approach.
The best argument against making self-scores visible is that it would change the behavior of posters themselves in a hot conversation. When underwater scorewise, one tends to adopt the embattled, passive-aggressive stance of a martyr being inquisitored. The people you're talking to respond in kind. I don't like that dynamic on reddit and wouldn't like it here.
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