porfavormister
8mo ago
Curious: are there any serious studies/papers/books/etc. on what constitutes beauty and physical attractiveness, particularly for women? (Would also be fine w/ a personal write-up). I'm interested in something relatively layman, but not boring party line platitudes like "beauty is subjective" and such (or, OTOH, incel-adjacent dorks sperging on about "canthial tilt" and such crap.[1])
For a while now... I've been feeling disoriented about my inability to verbalize when I find a specific person physically attractive, beyond broad, almost-meaningless (and shallow—makes me feel vaguely uncultured) descriptors like "thin", "good face" or "young". It's like I'm lacking control, unable to even articulate what I feel; it's a very torturous feeling.
[1] perhaps I'm being uncharitable here. But I'll admit I do feel an almost-atavistic sense of disgust toward them, for reasons I cannot really fully articulate why (but is perhaps related to their being incel = low social value, ergo disgusting, or something crude like that...yeah, I know. Irrational me 😿)
porfavormister
9mo ago
Ah, thanks for clarifying. Personally, I do think it's probably something vaguely related to state censorship, although admittedly that's just surface-level intuition which doesn't elucidate much... still, probably closer to reality than something something Chinese culture irrevocably soulless and defective.
I would assume you've at least read the Three-Body Problem? What do you think of it? (Not that I'm necessarily saying it specifically is good, it's just the one example of a modern Chinese cultural product that comes to mind other than Genshin Impact—and that one probably isn't anyone's definition of art, although it can be fun—so I thought it might be pertinent. Of course, I sit in the dreaded "genre fiction can be art" camp, but hey...)
Just out of curiosity, though, in your own words, what cultures would you say still exist today, in a "living sense"? (I guess in terms of regularly producing great art). Curious to get some feelers for your aesthetic preferences, tastes about nations, etc., if I can ask.
(Admittedly, this might cross into the realm of vaguely unsavoury cultural generalizations, but surely if we can talk in terms of dead cultures there must also exist relatively living ones on the other end of the scale from which they can be contrasted with: that is the nature of making any normative claim based in relativity, after all)
porfavormister
9mo ago
as bad as racists say China is
Er, sorry to necro, but...
Didn't you say this about China as well?
That evaluation doesn't seem to reveal a living civilization, either.
I'm not accusing you of being a racist; this is a genuine question. I've been reading your post history for a while[1] and am curious about the disconnect here (excusing my occasionally faulty reading comprehension skillz aside), since it seems to contradict your earlier comment, unless you've changed your views, or instead mean to say something like "Germany and China's ills as a civilization are just specifically different" or "my particular conception of China's societal malaise substantially differs from the popular racist ones": though in which case I'd be interested in knowing the specifics (e.g. what you view is the difference between, I dunno, Germany and China's problems).
Of course, this is quite old, and I'm merely nitpicking a minor strand here, etc., so no need to reply, necessarily, if you haven't the time or desire...
[1] No weird motivations of the online-stalker variety here: I just find your posts consistently insightful, so I read a lot of it and am now interested. (Don't take this badly, ploz :( )
porfavormister
9mo ago
Many other mottizens have made great contributions to commentary on the sexual revolution and sexual liberalism since the 1960s
Do you have any specific links to share? (I have tried searching with a few of the keywords here, but would be interested in specifics)
porfavormister
9mo ago
...And it conquered most of its land from native American tribes, had race-based slavery for a large chunk of its existence, briefly dabbled in global colonialism on explicitly paternalistic motives (White Man's Burden and all that). Not more than any other state in the same circumstance, maybe, but peaceful it was not, and what I'm objecting to here is you calling the imputation that a white nationalist state could ever be aggressive or racist a stretch... I never said it was the only possibility, but it's not all that unlikely either.
I mean, don't get me wrong: I hope that if a white nationalist state does come about, your assumption is the correct one, not mine. But I'm not that optimistic.
porfavormister
9mo ago
Some, maybe, certainly not all. It's telling that the one historical example of a white nationalist state quite literally started the deadliest war in history and multiple genocides. I'm not saying it's impossible, and maybe the less aggressive wings of white nationalism might, indeed, win out (if perhaps more due to necessity of circumstance than any actual sympathy for non-whites), in a spirit of isolationist "ethnostates for everyone! wholesome national fascism" but on the other hand, there's frankly enough nasty (to the point of exterminationism) rhetoric running about I wouldn't call it a 'stretch', either. You really think an out-and-out white nationalist state is going to be buddy-buddy with everyone else? That they're not going to fan the flames about Rhodesia or South Africa (or any other "former white homeland"), or go to war with Israel or China? By necessity, unless they've somehow unified all of the West (or don't care much for the struggles of whites outside of its borders, which I doubt counts it as a white nationalist state anymore), they'll be drawn into conflicts involving the "protection" of white people in other nations—a fascist White Internationale, so to speak, aggressively providing support to comrades everywhere, to the point of military interventions perhaps... which will naturally involve a degree of civilian casualties—and it's not like they're going to be kind with differientiating military and civilian targets, even in the event they don't want to kill all non-whites to "get the problem over", so to speak.
porfavormister
9mo ago
Of course, one can claim that the absence of indignity inherent to second-class citizenship is worth all that
Brings to mind an old quote from my own banana-state country: “I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.” - Manuel Quezon, President of the Republic
...but tellingly, the quote is followed by "But that is not an admission that a government run by Filipinos will be a government run like hell. Much less can it be an admission that a government run by Americans or by the people of any other foreign country, for that matter, can ever be a government run like heaven."
(A fairly popular sentiment among most formerly colonized peoples, I gather)
You say there isn't dignity in self-imposed squalor, and fine, but as you notice, there isn't one in colonial servitude either. And sometimes the yearning for freedom—on the value of its own context, independent of any potential downstream QoL effects—is strong enough to override everything else.
But more generally, the South Africans had just enough leeway to intuitively place the majority of the blame on whitey, given the self-evidently oppressive nature of apartheid. It followed fairly intuitively then that racial emancipation would be synonymous with economic: if we can just kick whitey out, everything will be fine. That was wrong, but in hindsight, there wasn't any way for them to have thought otherwise! Any, however justifiable and actually-true, argument based on HBD would be (understandably) seen as colonialist apologia, coming from loftily high colonizers who deign to redirect blame to justify their dastardly wicked oppression. So freedom alone seemed a convincing enough antidote to all the social ills—now that it might not be, it's not like there's any coming back to colonialism or apartheid, even in the event most black south Africans would prefer it: you've burned all the bridges.
And in the same vein, modern day whining is mostly generalized xenophobic sentiment, but cloaked in enough anti-colonialist lingo to capitalize on Third Worldist and BLM-type "anti-racist" sympathies... and with similarly enough wiggle room to be intuitively understandable and not-wrong-on-its-face: apartheid was all-encompassing and fairly recent enough—and history does have consequences—to be the scapegoat for South Africa's failed-state-tendencies.
porfavormister
9mo ago
The Prisoner's Dilemma, pretty much. Of course, if you always co-operate, it's obvious what the action of your enemy is going to be.
More generally, this is why people advocate for ethnostates. Of course, states still compete with each other on a political level, so you're merely transmuting the stage of competition to a geopolitical one—unless you go all isolationist, of course, but that's pretty much akin to dropping out of the game entirely.
porfavormister
9mo ago
But you miss the point here: it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.
Also, insufferable? Maybe, but Americans often exhibit similarly chauvinistic behaviors too... bashing western Europeans over their cowardice and pacifism is a pretty popular trope, especially virulently in the 2000s hysteria over Iraq ('Freedom fries' and posters like "Now Iraq; Then France": there was a lot of butthurt back then)
And that's to say nothing of criticism of other, often poorer nations...
porfavormister
9mo ago
Well, with the Philippines you'd have to enfranchise some 110 (and rapidly growing) millions — a voting bloc an entire third of the entire US population. If you're opting for state-hood, and not some sort of Puerto Rico-tupe non-representative colonial rule, anyway.
Granted, it'll probably be lower in a counterfactual where the Philippines is annexed relatively early on, and receives the "benefits" of modernity (the demographic transition, etc.)—but not infinitesmally smaller; likely the population will still be in the high tens of millions.
I don't really see Americans accepting that: tens of millions of icky brown people with voting rights and significant sway over US politics inherent to their population size alone. I'll note the US has often been wary of directly annexing territories full of non-white people (densely populated, anyway): one of the main arguments against taking more of Mexico historically, besides just the Cession, was that other areas had too many Mexicans to drive off.
(That's not even asking whether Filipinos want US statehood to begin with. Actually, they might, especially if the US dumps a lot of money into investing in the place, and making it a model example of how Murica Gets Shit Done TM, but then you circle again to Americans, running into the same generalized xenophobic arguments over tax monies going to not-properly-non-melanated Americans.)
porfavormister
9mo ago
Aren't Russia, Iran, etc., and the rest mainly beneficiaries of the fact no one wants to immigrate to those countries in the first place? It's not like they have especially exclusionary migration policies... I'm not sure about Iran, but Russia is mired in demographic decline as well (probably accelerated a few years ahead by the R-U war: lots of dead young men there); why wouldn't they want immigrants?
This sounds like a good idea, perhaps it's just a lack of vocabulary. Do you have any specific suggestions? Not well-acquainted with poetry in general; older poetry even less so.
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