problem_redditor
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I do think it is the oddest culture war in that such an antagonistic relationship between the sexes is historically speaking quite new and seems to have originated in the West (though it is increasingly spreading to other countries now due to the fact that a huge amount of countries are culturally influenced by and want to emulate the West, and additionally feminist ideology has been intentionally promulgated by the West in countries they deem as being insufficiently progressive).
As to your list of possibilities, I think I am most sympathetic to 3, 4 and 8. I am not sympathetic to 2 at all.
The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative. The only major pushback is from people who think that feminism goes too far in their demonisation of men (a defence of men rather than a condemnation of women). Outside of a few isolated and much-maligned circles which people really love to draw attention to due to their deviance from mainstream thought, there's no real reverse equivalent where men express animosity towards women on any large scale and identify them as the source of society's major social ills.
I do think there's an element here of Western society being extremely fractured. When people's lives are atomised and disconnected, it's very easy to forget about people as being, well, people. Especially by the people most disconnected from the trials and tribulations that "normies" face. It's easy to forget about the countless men who work the dirty dangerous jobs to hold our society together when you spend your whole life far removed from that, and to see men as a group as being privileged oppressors. It's notable that feminism is predominantly a movement of upper-middle class women, and has always been such from its very inception. They are so distanced from these conditions that they have the ability to ignore the sacrifices of the men who keep society afloat, and can regard male behaviour and masculinity as a virtual pathology in need of reform. These are the women with the most social clout and influence, and who have the most ability to propagate narratives into the mainstream.
Even in the West, the further away you get from the urban sprawl and the less atomised people are, the less of a gender "war"-type dynamic there is. In the smaller and more rural towns, everyone knows each other, the conditions are far tougher, and it's probably more difficult to start arguing that the men going out and doing all kinds of dirty, thankless labour each day to bring back money for their families are nefarious oppressors of women whose behaviours exemplify toxic masculinity. It's harder to conceptualise of an imaginary spectre of "patriarchy" looming over everything when the society is cohesive and you have personally formed bonds with everyone in your small village.
Then there's the inherent unnatural-ness of the current environment we exist in which has shaped our gender roles in a very weird manner. Our advancement rendered the female role obsolete - a domain which women's psychology is suited to - and pushed them into the male sphere. While technology didn't render human labour in the public sphere obsolete (it would probably take the development of AGI to do that), it unintentionally ended up destroying the private/domestic sphere. The development of all sorts of domestic conveniences to make women's lives easier - created in the men's public sphere, might I add - ended up leading to women's discontentment, as all sorts of chores they would often do communally and share with other women essentially became a set and forget activity. The female role lost the status that it once had (which it should be noted was considerable), and so they flooded the male sphere. Who wouldn't?
The issue here is that the public sphere is characterised mostly by hierarchical, stratified relationships where people are valued for their productivity and are generally held at arms length. This contrasts with the kind of more communal relationships that women prefer, and additionally women are less likely to value climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder than men are. In line with these preferences, since women have entered the workplace and public life more broadly you can see social changes to the nature of the workplace which have made it fall better in line with women's preferences. There's increased emphasis on niceties, stepping on other people's toes is discouraged, making people feel uncomfortable is the worst thing you can do, strict hierarchies are increasingly seen as a negative and the environment has slowly started to look more and more like the personal network-type relationships women tend to be predisposed to.
But no matter how friendly to women's psychology the workplace has become, there's only so much that can be done. These cooperative super-organisms which make up the public sphere can't exist without hierarchy, and can't exist while prioritising the comfort and preferences and sensibilities of every individual at all levels. In other words, it will always suit male psychology far more than it does female, and women will always feel somewhat alienated in such an environment. So you get all these knee-jerk narratives which I think resonate with a lot of women on some level about how the public sphere and its institutions are unfriendly to women. However, they get the cause wrong.
All these things that accompanied industrialisation and modernity massively contributed to the rise of feminism. The feminist preoccupation with women's representation itself could be an ill-conceived attempt at replacing the social status and elevated moral standing that used to accrue to women for performing their roles in the private sphere with formal authority in the public sphere, and it might be ultimately why they attempt to engineer equal outcomes for women in the public sphere in the face of all evidence pointing to the fact that it is simply unworkable. Though of course they won't frame it that way, they'll point to "workplace gender bias against women" (the widespread existence of which, for the most part, I think is questionable and contested at best) in order to justify their attempts at social engineering in order to force parity in public life.
Once feminism and feminist ideas about the "patriarchy" and man-as-enemy became entrenched, the whole thing ended up feeding itself. While it claimed to be a radical, revolutionary ideology, its success was precisely because it capitalised on and reinforced very old perceptions of men as agents with a responsibility to channel their agency towards protecting and providing for women, and women as non-agentic victims who are the appropriate recipients of this protection and provision. Fundamentally, feminism is nothing new, and the main difference I see that exists is its extremely antagonistic attitude towards men and its portrayal of gender relations as being a conflict (well, and its insistence that women occupy the same sphere as men). Many generations have at this point grown up being invested in feminism, and there are plenty of feminist academics and activists who have made the entire thing their livelihoods.
As to the reason why I am not sympathetic to 2, it's because I think any claims about any historical female lack of power (and by extension, female lack of power in other similarly traditional third world societies) are incorrect and simply appeal to perceptions of potentially dangerous, agentic men and non-agentic women. Analogising it to class is a false equivalence because women have never been viewed by men like the underclass was viewed by the nobility. For an upper-class person, their entire social milieu and family are likely upper-class as well, whereas men have wives, sisters and daughters and have incentives to want them to do well. There's also all sorts of evidence pointing towards the idea that people generally (yes, including men) have a preference for protecting women and view them more positively than men which is simply not the case when it comes to other social distinctions like class or race, and there's lots and lots of evidence of traditional social norms and practices that clearly contradict the "male oppression of women" hypothesis. And that perspective is incoherent too - how is it that feminism is such a dominant ideology now if under traditionalism men were so tyrannical and women were so powerless? Men just thought "you know, we should stop doing this 'oppression of women' thing we've done for centuries on end now in virtually every society and never once questioned before?"
I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.
There's so much more to say (I can explain and source my arguments more rigorously than I have here) but I don't want this comment to branch into a two-parter.
Yes, but as Aristotle reminds us, unequal treatment of unequal things can be called for. Women stand to lose much more from sex than men and are hence much choosier. Being chosen for sex by a woman translates to "you are so attractive that the risk of carrying your offspring is a price I am either willing to pay or actively seek". Being chosen for sex by a man just means you are above a certain fuckability threshold.
This differential means that women have always been able to garner favours in exchange for sex.
And this dynamic of women being able to garner favours in exchange for sex is what leads to the generalised condemnation of promiscuity in women. Contrary to basically all established belief, it is women and not men who stand to gain from the repression of female sexuality. The fact is that restricting women's willingness to provide men with premarital or extramarital sex through several methods serves women's interests in an important way. It restricts men's ability to access sex, and since the supply has been restricted this means women can push the price of sex up to incredible levels (demanding long-term commitment through marriage, transfers of wealth and resources, and so on). The more they restrict their sexuality, the more they can relitigate sex relations in their favour. Even when she is already in a partnership the widespread suppression of female sexuality can benefit her by indirectly restricting her mate's sexuality - it prevents her partner from simply going out and finding another woman (an especially salient risk once she is old and her mate value has declined). So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women. It is a female sex cartel, a union enforced for the interests of the group as a whole. Here is a blog post containing plenty of evidence in favour of this view.
As a case study that allows us a glimpse into a very extreme version of this dynamic, we can look at the phenomenon of FGM, responsibility for which often erroneously gets shifted onto men. The fact is, the practice is most zealously supported by women, and the female peer group teases girls who have not had the operation. There are studies of men in these countries which do not indicate that they prefer women with the operation (so this can't be argued to be a reflection of their preferences), rather, they actually prize women without the operation because they enjoy sex more. Link. Fieldwork in villages that at the time were newly beginning to adopt FGM as a practice shows that the impetus for the practice comes from the girls themselves. The girls were going out to other villages and getting excisors to cut them regardless of the fact that their parents and the tribal chiefs hated the practice and strongly condemned them for doing so, and over time it became culturally entrenched. Link 2.
All this seems congenial to the theory that the cause of female genital cutting and its subsequent spread likely comes from females themselves, with male acceptance and support for the practice (and their consequent attitudes surrounding it) merely being secondary to and following from widespread female uptake of and support for the practice. Really it's very clear to me that the feminist viewpoint of "patriarchal oppression" is just utterly misleading, and I'm a bit dismayed (though not surprised) that people still give it the time of day.
Okay, I thought this was so obvious it didn't require explanation, but clearly it does. You are coming at this from a specific moral standpoint and presupposing that the liberal position on abortion should be treated as an assumed default, but I see no reason why it should be treated as such. Conservatives would tell you that abortion is not a right at all, since actions that infringe on other people's rights do not qualify, and that abortion itself is in and of itself an unjust and costly imposition of one's will on another that they want to prevent since it allows someone to strip the developing human of life and limb when they are helpless to do anything about it. Legalising abortion is as offensive to the conservative moral sensibility as banning it is to the liberal's, the two views are irreconcilable and it's likely that you will not get a consensus on it because of the complexity of the issue.
Yet, it is interesting that we have a situation where liberals have on very shaky grounds tried to circumvent the state-by-state process of lawmaking to push their preferred policies through, whereas you have as of yet not provided such an example of conservatives doing the same on the topic of abortion (despite conservatives being able to similarly rationalise their policy preferences with "well, it's a defence against people's attempts to impose their will on another"). As such, I think it makes sense to characterise the "attack" as having originated from the left.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
Yes. It is relevant, however, in the context of demanding reparations and other forms of coercive political action as remedy. Without proving that colonisation is the reason for the poor state of any given population of people it's about as pertinent to anyone's present plight as the Norman Conquest.
So this definitely fits into the category of "dumb question I'm embarrassed to ask" (which may fit better in Wellness, honestly, but seems to fit here too). How do you get over/handle social deficits?
For me, there are two aspects to the problem. The first issue is that almost all my knowledge is on extremely deep and specialised things that in practice hardly ever come up in actual conversation, whereas my general knowledge is seriously lacking in some areas. I was shown a photo of a postbox recently, and had no clue what you do with it. I also realised somewhat recently that I simply did not know where exactly the Statue of Liberty was in the US (it's in New York Harbour).
It could be that I'm a very extreme case of depth over breadth, but I also think this might be because it's incredibly easy for stuff (that I just don't care about and that's not immediately relevant to me) to slip out of my head. Though this might be related to the former phenomenon too in that the more I learn about topics of interest, the more of other things inevitably get pushed out. It's entirely possible that my tendency to deeply focus on certain things to the exclusion of others contributes to this pretty heavily, and ends up creating a very uneven skew in my acquisition and retention of knowledge.
The second issue is that even when the conversation drifts into topics that are in my bailiwick (which are often fairly complex), I often end up tripping over myself because my ability to find the appropriate words that allow me to properly detail what I'm thinking in the moment is seriously lacking. I come off as being much more eloquent in text than I am in real life. There isn't really a solution here which can be reduced down to "talk to people more", since I have done so quite frequently (at least, over the past year I have) and still this problem rears its head when in real time conversation.
Ideas and thoughts exist in my head as a cacophony of fuzzy, abstract, non-verbal concepts that constantly compete for space, and translating them into words is not my strong suit - especially when I'm trying to convey something that's not straightforward. Every single time I come off as eloquent in any way it's because I put quite a bit of effort into my wording and presentation that I simply can't do when placed on the spot, and this is a very non-linear process where I start by putting down a base thought (no matter how broken or incomprehensible it might be) and then proceed to iterate on it until it best resembles the idea I'm trying to convey. Without already having something out there that I can build upon, I'm quite atrocious at conveying detailed ideas from scratch, and unfortunately the method of doing things that I'm accustomed to can't be translated into real-time conversation well.
Combined, all of this makes for painfully awkward social interaction with other people, and makes it so that I say a lot of mortifyingly stupid shit that in hindsight is incredibly embarrassing. Perhaps it's my own personal bias towards regarding my own social mistakes as worse than those of others, but I think there really is something quite strange about the way I come off.
I have a partner who likes cities. He has always seen himself living in one, and has a certain affinity to the culture and outlook of many city-dwellers. I am having trouble understanding or sympathising with his viewpoint, and vice versa.
This might seem tangential, but bear with me:
I went to the Blue Mountains over Easter - for the unacquainted, it is a large wilderness area outside of Sydney and a World Heritage site. It’s probably one of my most frequented excursion spots due to its proximity to the city, yet it’s a completely different world out there.
The first thing I noticed, as is the case virtually every time I leave a major urban area, is that the silence and solitude is palpable. You can leave the window open and not be assaulted with a storm of noise (which occurs in the city even on the 13th floor of a building, I can attest to that). Leaving for the great outdoors is quite a good way to clear away the mental clutter that accumulates when you are overstimulated for a long period of time. I’ve done this whenever I get the chance, and it never fails to reset my brain. I listen to music a lot in my normal day-to-day life, but here it just felt wrong to do so.
Another thing that stuck out to me is that you can actually see the stars come out at night. The older I get, the more I appreciate this feature of being outdoors. The ability to look up into the heavens on a quiet night and see the universe above you is something that just doesn’t get old.
The natural environment is breathtaking, too. There are dry sclerophyll forests heavy with the aroma of eucalyptus and dotted with the golden blooms of wattles, rainforest-lined valleys and canyons that plunge to depths of 500 metres, beautiful little waterfalls and mossy creeks that swell after rain, and so on. One night when I was there, I did a night hike to a cascade named Cataract Falls, armed with only a headlamp, and when I turned off the light there were glow worms all over the place. The waterfall was like a natural amphitheatre covered in these shining little blue lights, and it was hard to tell where they ended and where the stars began.
I think this, along with many other experiences, has led me to an inevitable conclusion: I really detest city life.
They’re overwhelming, impersonal, noise-filled, cluttered environments, where you’re virtually forced to rub shoulders (in the literal sense) with people if you want to leave your house, and which are incredibly aesthetically alienating, especially ever since the utilitarian commodification of architecture got started, the trend that Bauhaus and other such design schools put into motion.
Keep in mind, Australian cities are probably less “vibrant” and less dense than, say, North American ones. I routinely hear Australians complain that they have no real cities, that everything closes early and that the nightlife is nonexistent, they consider Australia a country you go to for the outdoors and not the city life. Sydney itself is a reasonably well-maintained city, there are no seedy strip malls and it’s fairly walkable - but I still find it to be far too crowded and too noisy for my tastes, and find that the culture and views of the cosmopolitan urban-dwellers range from insipid to downright irritating.
The conveniences that cities offer are nice. But I am frankly struggling to think of any significant conveniences that are offered in a city which aren’t also offered in a small to medium size town that offers far greater recreation opportunities. If you can get a reasonable range of food and lodging, and some medical care, I find that sufficient. If the goal is thriving nightlife, constant activities, cosmopolitan feel and being able to go places at any time of the day then sure, cities are The Place To Be. But I place zero value on any of these things.
Cities are places I live in solely for work-related reasons. I have lived in many, and they are places I would never live in given the choice, and it makes it really difficult for me to even put myself in a frame of mind where I see it as the optimal way to live. Ask him about any of the things I mentioned, and he’ll reveal that none of it actually matters hugely to him. He finds these less urbanised places dead and depressing, a viewpoint which I could never understand - after you’ve lived in a city for any amount of time, it feels interminable - like an endless randomly generated series of the very same hedonistic pleasures expressed in slightly different ways.
Perhaps it really is just tribal affiliation - he identifies more with the outlook of those in the city and less with those in more rural areas. For me, it’s the very opposite.
I’m not sure what the point of writing this post is, I suppose I’m sourcing hot takes. It’s a difference that we’re both somewhat adamant about, and that may cause issues down the road - so maybe I’m asking to understand, or maybe I’m asking if anyone else here feels the same as I do.
Review: Echopraxia, by Peter Watts
So I recently read Peter Watts' Echopraxia, a follow-up to his acclaimed book Blindsight, which is one of my favourite science fiction books I've read to date. And my opinions on this are... mixed, to say the least. In order to explain my thoughts on the book, first I will have to give a detailed synopsis of the plot-points. This is going to be long, since the book is very crammed with details, and if you miss even one, it's very difficult to understand anything that's going on. Spoilers abound, of course. Minimise if you don't want to see them.
Plot
The book starts in the aftermath of the events of Blindsight, where the ship Theseus was sent out to investigate a potential alien lifeform in the Oort Cloud. As far as the characters in Echopraxia know, Theseus simply stopped broadcasting all of a sudden and went quiet.
Echopraxia starts with parasitologist Daniel Brüks being herded into a war in the Oregon desert between the super-intelligent hive-minded Bicameral Order and an also-super-intelligent vampire called Valerie, who the Bicams end up brokering a deal with. Brüks gets caught up in the middle of their plans, and eventually ends up in the Bicams' monastery.
Only a short while later most of the Bicams are killed off by a bio-engineered virus made by baselines (normal humans) afraid of their abilities. They've seen what the Bicamerals are capable of when they were waging war against Valerie, and that scared the military enough to try and kill them off. The remnants of the Bicams barely escape Earth on a spaceship called the Crown of Thorns, alongside Brüks, Valerie, soldier Jim Moore, translator Lianna Ludderodt (who acts as a translator for the Bicamerals) and pilot Rakshi Sengupta. Brüks follows along because he's seen more than he should of the Bicamerals' operation, and realises that if he returns to society now they'll imprison and interrogate him because of the potential information they could extract.
In transit, the Crown of Thorns gets attacked by baselines again, and in response the Bicams snap the ship in half, detaching the living quarters from the engine and blowing up the engine in order to make their pursuers believe that they've been destroyed. As this is all happening Brüks finds out that the Bicams in fact had a preexisting plan to use the Crown of Thorns to investigate the Icarus Array, which is essentially an energy generator that orbits the sun. Some unauthorised information was sent from the Theseus mission back down to the Icarus Array (presumably by the aliens that Theseus was sent to investigate), and the Bicams believe they will find something they call "The Angels Of The Asteroids" there. Once at Icarus they plan to start re-fabricating a new engine to cover the rest of their trip.
Other character motivations are also revealed in this portion. Moore is with the Bicams because his son Siri Keeton left on the Theseus mission, and the Bicams possess information about Theseus that he wants access to. Sengupta is there in order to pay for the life support of her wife called Celu Macdonald, whose condition was very indirectly caused by an oversight of Brüks and his colleagues. She does not know this yet, though.
The Crown of Thorns docks with the Icarus Array, and the crew finds out that a portion of Icarus has been infected by a time-sharing slime mold (Portia). Presumably what was being sent down from Theseus coded for the in situ construction of this lifeform. While the crew studies Portia the book launches into discussion about the nature of reality, exploring ideas about digital physics, and how physics is something akin to the OS of the universe. Brüks learns about the Bicamerals' conception of "God" as a virus that breaks said OS, and learns that they think Portia is the Face Of God (because the way Portia was sent to Icarus shouldn't strictly be possible, and is a demonstration of anomalous behaviours in the laws of physics). Their goal is to "perhaps worship, or disinfect”.
The crew eventually start managing to communicate with Portia, which goes wrong once they realise what it's capable of. It has in fact managed to infect the entirety of Icarus without anyone knowing, is capable of reallocating its own mass throughout its structure to create walls and appendages where they didn't previously exist, and can also harden itself like armour. Portia traps the Bicams, Ludderodt and Moore in Icarus, attempting to conduct a sampling transect, and Brüks tries to rescue them. In the chaos Valerie takes the opportunity to slaughter the remaining Bicams, and Brüks flees back into the Crown of Thorns. Valerie pursues him and somehow manages to trigger a seizure in Brüks that completely incapacitates him, but Moore intervenes at the last second. He locks Valerie outside the ship and jettisons Icarus into the sun, seemingly killing Portia.
On the trip back, the characters find out that Valerie isn't really gone, she's just tied herself onto the outside of the spaceship and has used her vampire hibernation powers to lay dormant on the journey home. They also discover that Valerie has been priming Brüks the whole trip to Icarus, subtly rewiring his brain in order to be able to trigger seizures on command with a single codeword. It also becomes clear that Valerie orchestrated the viral attack on the Bicams early on. She knew that the war she started with them would scare the baselines into releasing a biological virus into their monastery, enough to keep the Bicams out of the way for the trip to Icarus but not enough to derail the trip happening.
The characters also unveil a good amount of Valerie's backstory. Valerie was actually a test subject and, along with other vampires, staged a synchronised, coordinated escape from a research facility despite vampires not being able to even tolerate each other's presence in the same room (they habitually kill each other on sight). Brüks suspects that the inability of vampires to tolerate each other was not a naturally evolved aspect of vampire psychology, rather he believes that humans added it in when they brought vampires back to life as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy.
Furthermore, you find out that Jim Moore has been receiving messages from his son who left on the Theseus mission, but Sengupta and Brüks actually think that these messages are being sent by something that is simply pretending to be his son for the purpose of hacking his brain from a distance. The implication here is that the entirety of Blindsight (which is comprised of messages recorded by Siri Keeton) might be a complete fabrication by the aliens.
The Crown of Thorns arrives at Earth. In order to kill Valerie, they escape from Crown of Thorns to a landing satellite and direct Crown of Thorns to burn up in the atmosphere. At some point Valerie gets onto the lander and sneaks in unnoticed. Once they land, Sengupta picks a fight with Brüks when she discovers he's "responsible" for her wife's death, and learns how to trigger the seizure-response Valerie implanted in Brüks. Moore steps in and shoots Sengupta, then Valerie steps in and paralyses Moore by whispering in his ear (presumably she has been rewiring his brain to respond to certain stimuli too).
Valerie then takes Brüks back to the Oregon desert, and we slowly learn that Portia has somehow hitched a ride on Brüks. It is in fact incubating in him, improving his cognition (it is implied that this is done by deconstructing his conscious processes). Infecting Brüks seems to have been the goal of the Bicameral Order. Though it is not stated outright, the Bicamerals likely infected Brüks once they found out that Portia was capable of infecting humans and acting as an interface between humans, making humanity as a whole into one big hive-mind capable of intelligence on a level not seen before. Not so great for the individual humans who lose their identity, though.
Valerie's goal, too, becomes apparent when she injects a patch into Brüks towards the end of the book, meant to hack Portia to include a cure for vampire weaknesses (namely their inability to cooperate and tolerate each other). It seems that she wanted the Bicamerals pacified in order to place her plan on top of theirs without any resistance from them. Portia seems to take Valerie's "hack" as an act of aggression, and since it's at this point piloting Brüks' body to a certain extent, it kills Valerie.
Brüks, realising that Portia is in him, jumps off a cliff in an attempt to end Portia. But Portia does not die, and it continues piloting Brüks' body, walking out into civilisation to infect others.
Continued in below comment
Well that's because the state by state lawmaking is also a branch on this tree. The default for nations is that it isn't sub-division by sub-division for major laws, so that the Constitution and federalization itself is the "attack" against the normal way of operating where major laws are decided centrally.
Whether federalism is an attack or not is really only tangentially related to the whole topic of abortion at best, that's more to do with a larger meta-discussion that centres around what system of government to adopt.
All politics have to build on a system of deeper underlying rules that guides how things are done. You can discuss what these rules should be, but once they're in place you have to abide by them when you're trying to make policy changes, and in the case of the U.S. the system in place happens to be a federal one. If we allowed for the political decision-making systems that undergird everything to be questioned as an attack in that manner, the second anyone doesn't like the processes involved because it prevents them from achieving their goal they can just call it an attack on some basis (an attack on the prior natural state of tribal anarchy, perhaps?) and use this as justification to circumvent it.
Additionally, Roe v. Wade can't claim to be "defending against" the system of federalism as a whole - rather, it was simply carving out an exception for abortion using a very flimsy appeal to the already existing system to do so, and it can't really be argued to be part of that larger meta-discussion as a result. It wasn't trying to modify the existing system and make it into something else, it was falsely claiming the existing system protected something it did not.
Even if the U.S. wasn't a federal system, the argument can still be made that Roe is an attack. As mentioned many times before in this thread, they would still have to answer for the method through which they struck down abortion restrictions, and this problem remains regardless of whether the US is unitary or federalist.
The Supreme Court stepped outside of its ambit by performing mental gymnastics to pretend the Constitution protected something it did not, and used that as justification to restrict lawmaking. Whether the Supreme Court was preventing state governments or the federal/central government from putting in abortion bans is irrelevant to the fact it was judicial activism. That's enough to call it a "Pearl Harbour-like legal coup", I think, and enough to qualify it as an illegitimate attack.
EDIT: added more
Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.
The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.
Note that the universe doesn't expand at any fixed speed but at a speed per unit of distance, which we normally measure in kilometers per second per megaparsec (one megaparsec is about 3.26 million light years). If the expansion rate is 70 km/s/Mpc, that means, on average, an object that’s 10 Mpc away should expand away at 700 km/s; one that’s 200 Mpc away should recede at 14,000 km/s; and one that’s 5,000 Mpc away should appear to be moving away at 350,000 km/s.
An analogy that's often offered up to illustrate the expansion of the universe would be the balloon analogy, where coins are placed all over a balloon then the balloon is inflated to show that every coin will be moving away from all other coins at a rate proportional to how far away they are (note that you'll be ignoring the interior of the balloon here, this "balloon" universe is represented by the surface). The balloon analogy isn't a perfect one, since the balloon is a 2D universe and is curved whereas our universe obviously isn't 2D and also is flat, but it helps illustrate the concept. What this means is that there's some distant event horizon of sorts beyond which everything will be receding from us at a rate that means we won't ever be able to reach it.
This basically ensures that only a finite portion of the matter and energy that exists in the universe will be available to us, and eventually we'll be reaching some kind of limit assuming no Great Filter scenarios rear their head before then. Improvements in technology can only really take us so far, because eventually there'll be no more increments of efficiency to squeeze out of what we have (it seems reasonable that there will eventually be some sort of sheer physical limit we'll bump up against).
Ultimately, this pushes the problem very far down the line, but doesn't at all eradicate it.
A fact which often has good Bayesian foundations!
Given epistemic learned helplessness and the ability of the internet to invent narratives and fabricate 'evidence', considering the motives of the source when you hear a surprising piece of information meant to motivate you towards some action is often a good idea.
Frankly, reflexively defending someone with the rest of your in-group simply because your out-group attacked them does not have good foundations of any sort. "Considering the motives of a source" is generally a good principle, I agree. That just as much applies to your in-group as it does to your out-group, and defending someone from critique without knowing whether that critique has basis or not is not epistemically justifiable. The motives of those making a claim are ultimately irrelevant to the truth of a claim. "Being skeptical" does not entail "knee-jerk rejection", especially in situations when the evidence is already there for you to look at.
Regarding your other comment on this, I have no doubt that at least some of the people here were ignorant in some way or other (though some, such as Galvez and Ryulong, were almost certainly being dishonest). I tend to believe, however, that this lack of knowledge was because they actively decided not to look at or consider any of the evidence although, again, it was readily available to them at the time, then formed their own opinions based almost solely on preconception. It was wilful ignorance borne out of tribal partisanship that caused them to defend this, and that definitely deserves scorn.
The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).
One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.
The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.
This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.
Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.
I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.
Thoughts
Okay, with that general synopsis down, I want to talk about the story, the things I liked and didn't like.
Firstly, I want to talk about the pacing. The whole first portion of the plot, up to and including Portia's attack on the crew and the ejection of Icarus into the sun, is incredibly gripping and packed full of interesting ideas (Portia's time-sharing, as well as the concept of God as a virus, are very interesting, and the epistemological discussions contrasting Brüks' empiricism and Ludderodt's faith are very well done). When they discover Portia it feels like the plot is building to some climax - but that climax happens very quickly at the book's midpoint, and on the journey back to Earth and onwards, the plot slows significantly. In the second half there's a lot of downtime which is almost entirely used to contextualise prior events in the story. The characters feel very passive in this part of the book, and it just seems like they're for the most part discovering and clarifying what happened in the earlier portions without really doing much of anything themselves. I am aware that this type of book isn't necessarily about the action, but the story arc does need to feel satisfying somehow.
The book's structure really does feel like Watts used Freytag's pyramid (in a strange way). Introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion. If you were to interpret that very literally with modern definitions of "climax", you would get the general structure of Echopraxia where the book's energetic peak is straight in the middle, and that means you have a lot of book to sit through and not too much tension to sustain you after Portia attacks and is (seemingly) ejected into the sun. Plot points are clarified and some of the development from then on is certainly very interesting, but it definitely doesn't feel like a particularly eventful second half of the book. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
I want to re-iterate that I think Portia was incredible. Watts' aliens are always very well done, and Portia's ability to emulate a larger, more complex brain by modelling one part, then saving the results to feed into another part, was a very neat idea. The way Portia communicated with the crew was great, too, and very suspenseful. I feel like devoting more time to exploring Icarus and Portia would've definitely strengthened the book, because the main interaction with the alien is confined only to one of the five main chapters (and that chapter is by far the best section of the book). There's less focus on the dynamics of first contact per se here than there is in Blindsight, and I think this weakens it quite a bit. The curiosity that comes with exploration is a great driver.
And I suppose this is something that irks me, because there's some really neat ideas contained in here, but they never quite pay off in the way you'd think. Instead of the focus being on an adversarial dynamic between the alien and the humans (or post-humans) we get only a small sliver of that. Rather, the main conflict is a much more convoluted conflict involving super-intelligences trying to repeatedly outwit and one-up other super-intelligences in the service of their own goals. Seeing the characters be moved around and manipulated by intelligences greater than themselves with their own inscrutable agenda you can only hope to guess at is quite interesting for sure, however this conflict has less of a sense of unity and purpose for the reader, something I think is important if you want people to be invested. Sure, there’s a risk of making it too much like Blindsight, but at the same time I think there’s no need to change something that works.
Additionally, these post-human plans, when you manage to figure them out, don't always click in an extremely satisfying fashion either. For all her cunning, Valerie's plan is convoluted beyond belief. Her plan is to confront an alien organism whose biology and function she has absolutely no clue about, get a human infected with it (how do you know it can even "infect" until you've encountered it), and somehow... hack said alien in order to relieve vampires of their inability to tolerate each other.
I doubt Valerie could have predicted the chain of events here, so how could Valerie have known that what was on Icarus would aid her in the goal of freeing vampires? Even super-intelligent minds like Valerie's would be limited by information constraints. And why in the world would you do this anyway? If you wanted to free vampires from the cognitive shackles of "divide and conquer" and you had the ability to reprogram a completely novel alien organism, it seems easier and more straightforward to stay on Earth and manufacture some airborne biotechnology or something similar with the aim of reprogramming vampire cognition. There's no real need here to piggyback off the plans of the Bicamerals. Either I'm missing something, or Valerie's plan doesn't make a single bit of sense.
The Bicamerals' plan is less questionable. The Bicams themselves clearly didn't know exactly what was on Icarus up until they confronted it and understood the nature of what they had encountered. Then when they realised what they were dealing with, they infected Brüks with it. They were playing by ear, and found something that they could use. Okay. What I am struggling with, however, is understanding the game plan of the aliens - specifically why on Earth the alien Theseus went up against would intentionally seed the Icarus Array with a lifeform capable of turning the entirety of humanity into a super-intelligent hive-mind. That is an utterly suicidal move.
On that note, I want to talk about just how ridiculously omnipotent the vampires are. Valerie is essentially nothing short of a superhuman character, capable of subtly rewiring human brains on the fly, and she is also capable of rewiring her own brain to make her impervious to the Crucifix Glitch. She coordinated with other vampires in a rebellion in spite of "divide and conquer", and throughout the book Valerie is capable of manipulating and eventually murdering a super-intelligent posthuman hive-mind. Sure, vampires are supposed to be capable of achieving things that we couldn't (though if a reader's suspension of disbelief has already been stretched too far at this point I would understand).
What really breaks it for me is that the reader is also supposed to believe that despite these incredible cognitive advantages, vampires somehow went extinct when humans built architecture due to lack of access to their prey. Making this worse is that it is also implied that vampires were more able to collaborate with each other in the past and that their inability to tolerate each other was something humans put into their head. But if it is the case that vampires can out-manoeuvre humans even with these types of cognitive handicaps and despite the fact that right-angles are far more prevalent in the modern world than it would've been in human prehistory, there would be no standing a chance against them in the past. They would simply not have gone extinct in the first place.
I realise I sound as if I dislike this book, but I don’t. I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact. It’s more that the parts that are done well are done really well, and the parts that are done poorly are a bit of a shame and really stick out as a result.
I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.
I'm in the very same boat. Before this whole Twitter fiasco I thought he was a bit of a kook, and now he's a kook I find myself actively cheering on.
What ultimately matters to me is that Twitter ceases to be a propaganda tool for progressives. The worst case scenario here is that Twitter neither changes nor collapses and continues down the very same path it was on before Musk's takeover.
It's like Vice news says something and all the hipsters get into lockstep.
The sheer power of media to influence public sentiment will never not be unsettling to me. And the fact that the public discourse is still in large part guided by a handful of entities that often seem to operate in lockstep is even more unsettling considering that the proliferation of social media should theoretically result in less narrative-control, yet media reporting in practice still informs most of the discussion, and with the help of censors social media has essentially become another one of their mouthpieces.
The underlying motivations on all sides aren't hard to figure out at all. The reason why the media absolutely hates the idea of freedom and neutrality on social media is because wrongthink on there takes some of their control away from them (so Musk is a threatening figure due to his stated free speech bent). Leftists go along with the censorship because the narrative being promoted by elites is theirs, and right-wingers oppose it because it's not theirs. And then there's the "moderate" majority, who, confronted with a skewed informational environment, largely take an anti-Musk and anti-free-speech slant on this topic due to lack of examination.
Unfortunately, this control that media currently has does mean they might potentially be able to shift sentiment enough to make Twitter haemorrhage blood if Musk steps out of line.
But most people, even those rejected for their whiteness, accept this sort of thing as their due; the propaganda is just that good.
There's probably a truckload of adaptive self-deception going on here. If you've been screwed over by the dominant ideology, there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from opposing said ideology - all you'll do is dig your hole even deeper. The best way forward is to take the loss and still continue to espouse these dominant beliefs, which helps you gain status among your peer group and in society at large (and the best way to do so is to actually, sincerely believe it regardless of what happened). Indignation is only productive if you can change something or if people are willing to listen to you, and in this case, neither are true.
I genuinely think political dissidents inherently need to be disagreeable in their personality and at least a little bit suicidal. The incentives for compliance are unbelievably strong.
I've been waiting for the Fun Thread to post this, since it is manifestly not CW. I had a conversation about physics, namely about the expansion of space and the feasibility of intergalactic travel, in the CW thread a few days back. I came back to it, and some things I wrote have been bugging me enough that I want to issue a clarification.
Here's the relevant thread.
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/15941?context=8#context
Basically I said that the expansion of the universe renders galaxies that are beyond a certain distance unreachable absent some form of FTL travel, since the universe's expansion isn't set at any constant rate of speed - any two points in space recede at a rate proportional to their distance from each other, and that distance is increasing, therefore the rate of recession of the two points is increasing. This means there will be some galaxies far enough away from us that they recede faster than the speed of light.
I got this question in response: "Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet."
And this was my reply: "The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur. Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance."
The issue here is that there are additional real-life complexities absent in the model I was outlining which I neglected to address when I wrote this (note: do not write when you're tired unless you want to omit things you should've mentioned). Now, I don't have too much of a problem with what I wrote here - I stand behind my point that ceteris paribus, anything in a superluminally receding region of space in which expansion is driving the objects away from you faster than light would simply be completely unreachable, and you wouldn't be able to magically "close the distance" and catch up. The area where things are receding from us slower than light is called our Hubble volume, and is a sphere approx 14 billion light years in radius (everything outside of it is moving away faster than light). However, I want to clear something up: We can sometimes receive light from galaxies outside our Hubble sphere at the time the light was emitted, meaning light-speed information in a region of space which is receding from us faster than light can in fact travel to us. So how can this be possible?
The reason is because the Hubble constant (the unit that describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from a particular point in space) is decreasing, causing our Hubble volume to expand. This means that photons emitted by galaxies in a superluminal region can eventually enter inside of our Hubble volume and be able to reach us, and this is not because light is magically "catching up" - it is receding, but its recession doesn't outpace the growth of our Hubble volume. Similarly, the recession speed between light we emit and an object farther than the Hubble distance is initially positive, but can become negative as the Hubble distance increases. Here's a Veritasium video with a visual representation of how this can happen.
Of course, there's a limit to this too - there's a point beyond which light emitted from objects are receding from us so fast that they will never fall inside of our Hubble volume, and this boundary is delineated by the "cosmological event horizon" which is currently about 16 billion light years in radius.
There is another bigger issue that I want to correct here, and that's my statement that we might not make it outside our Local Group (and that this has something to do with expansion). I knew previously that our reachable universe was much larger than that, but of course practically speaking that's very optimistic and assumes we leave now and at the speed of light. What I was thinking was that 1: if relativistic speeds are hard to accomplish, our closest galaxies might be expanding away from us faster than we can travel, and 2: even if relativistic speeds are possible expansion might set a limit on how much we can progress before our closest galaxies are eventually isolated from us. Again, I wrote this bit while not thinking too deeply about it, and have since reasoned myself out of this position.
With regards to the first point, one of our closest galaxy clusters (the M81 Group) is currently 11.4 million light years away from us, and the Hubble constant (according to some estimates) is 68 km/s/Mpc. 11.4 million light years is equivalent to 3.5 megaparsecs, and that means the M81 Group is expanding away from us at 238 km/s. That is a very small fraction of the speed of light, and probably isn't impossible for us to exceed given that the Parker Solar Probe has already been able to reach speeds of 163 km/s. The rate of recession only becomes prohibitive for objects much further from us.
Note, this doesn't mean that I think travel to another galaxy cluster is actually that feasible, it just means expansion wouldn't pose too large an obstacle for us. The reason why it would be difficult in a practical sense is not just because of the difficulty of finding a reasonable propulsion method, it's also because of the time involved to travel the entire distance. Even in a colony ship travelling at 99% of the speed of light, the trip to the M81 Group would take an unrealistically long time, even accounting for relativistic effects from the perspective of the traveller. As viewed from the spaceship, an 11.4 million light-year trip would be 1,624,412 years long, which is far longer than the entirety of human history (here's a neat website that helps you calculate these things, for the lazy). This is assuming that we travel constantly at 99% the speed of light the entire way, it's not taking into account acceleration and deceleration to the destination, so this is a minimum estimate. There's simply no way to design for missions of that length, nor will there be for a very long time, if indeed ever.
Accelerating to 99.99999999...% of the speed of light would create enough dilation to get us there in an acceptably short time, but there's something else stopping us from doing that (even assuming we manage to find a method of propulsion which will allow us to go that fast, which is a big assumption). And that's space dust. At 99% of the speed of light, hitting a 4 milligram grain of dust in space gets you 2,188,941 megajoules of kinetic energy (here's the calculator I used, I use them because I want to mess with the variables without having to do the calculation again and again). A ton of TNT contains 4,184 megajoules of energy, so that 4 milligram grain of dust at 0.99c is going to be equivalent to 523 tons of TNT exploding. Even hitting a dust grain of 0.1 mg at that speed is going to yield you 54,724 megajoules of kinetic energy, equivalent to 13 tons of TNT.
Get closer and closer to the speed of light so that the travel duration becomes more reasonable, and eventually these grains of dust are going to start looking more and more like Hiroshima.
So it's not that I think that travelling to another galaxy cluster is feasible, it's rather that at this point, expansion is a red herring. If we can't travel faster than 238 km/s in the first place, the travel time would be far too long for us to even think about starting a mission even assuming that the M81 Group isn't receding from us. Even non-lethal relativistic speeds won't take us there in any reasonable time. Travelling to other galaxy clusters is probably FTL or nothing (we're talking Alcubierre drives and wormholes here and not actual travel faster than light, because of the constraints relativity poses, and there are still many problems with those methods which means there is plenty of reason to suspect FTL is not possible).
As to the second point about the time limit expansion imposes, it turns out the timeframe we have before our closest neighbours have receded into superluminally receding regions of space which we will never be able to reach (without FTL, that is) is hundreds of billions of years, so this timeframe probably doesn't pose too much of an obstacle. Whether exiting our Local Group is actually feasible or not in the first place is almost certainly the main factor. And the reasons why it might not be feasible are huge.
FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.
In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
Are there any alternative systems to RNA/DNA that can pass on genetic information? I'm not talking about stuff that essentially just uses the central principle and structure of DNA with some of the specifics changed, like XNAs which just use a different sugar backbone, or Hachimoji DNA which just adds on extra base pairs, I'm talking about plausible hypothesised systems that are radically different to what we use now.
One of the most fascinating and out-there proposals I've come across is Graham Cairns-Smith's clay hypothesis, which posits that clay crystals were the first genetic material. The idea here is that crystal growth is a form of self-replication that "reproduces" its arrangement, and can even transmit defects. The pattern is then "passed along" when the crystal breaks (scission) and continues to grow independently from the original crystal. Eventually, a "genetic takeover" of sorts happens, where clay crystals that trap certain forms of molecules to their surface improve their replication and catalyse the formation of increasingly complex proto-organic molecules that eventually take over the original genetic substrate as the new genetic material.
Schulman, Yurke and Winfree in their paper "Robust self-replication of combinatorial information via crystal growth and scission" use the same principles to create a set of DNA "tiles" that replicate its sequence of tiles through crystal growth. Each tile has "sticky ends" that hybridise with each other, and under appropriate growth conditions, complementary sticky ends hybridise, while non-complementary sticky ends are unlikely to interact. The interaction of these sticky ends allows for accurate sequence replication during growth, and once crystal growth has propagated the sequence, these additional layers are then "cleaved" off through mechanical scission.
However, that's the only truly interesting and novel idea surrounding this I am aware of, and I'm not entirely sure if and how this system of replication could achieve a significant level of biological complexity (save for a "genetic takeover" that effectively replaces the original system). I can't help but feel there are probably more such systems that could be posited.
What were the long term effects of Western colonialism on the technological development and social stability of the societies they ruled over? Are there any sources discussing this in a non-ideological manner? Counterfactuals are generally pretty hard to discuss or explore, but my intuition is that the long term effects of colonisation would have been on the balance positive.
In many of the colonised areas the technological disparity seems obvious - the Aztec and Inca for example completely lacked beasts of burden and did not put the wheel to use in any significant way, they did not have knowledge of advanced metallurgy (the Aztec made limited use of copper and bronze, but never learned how to use iron), nor were there technologies like the printing press etc all of which the Spanish already had when they made contact at the time. In the case of the Inca they simply did not even have a written language to print - and quipu doesn't count as a writing system, the current consensus seems to be that it was simply an accounting system and not a written representation of Quechua. There was a translation of a quipu in the village of Collata that apparently represented information phonetically, but that quipu was made after the Spanish conquest and was likely influenced by contact with them.
An analogous situation is Mughal India, which as far as I know could be described as "proto-industrialised" at best and significantly fell behind Britain in the face of the massive manufacturing boom that the Industrial Revolution brought to Europe (additionally, the Mughal Empire had already begun to disintegrate pretty rapidly from the eighteenth century onwards). And British contribution is pretty visible today even to your average Indian, the Indian railway system being a big example. I'd wager it's pretty plausible that colonisation by a more technologically advanced society generally confers long run material benefits.
I suppose a potential counterargument that could be offered up would be to posit that perhaps their situation would've been better had Western powers not occupied them and traded with them instead, but that argument encounters the obvious issue of the natives perhaps not being able to access these resources - a huge amount of the resource extraction and manufacturing was after all organised and sponsored by Westerners. I highly doubt that, say, South American natives had the wherewithal to build massive gold and silver mines like the Spanish and Portuguese did - production on that scale was probably outside of the ability of even the societies that did do basic mining, like the Inca.
Radfems are wrong not only about men, they're also wrong about pretty much the entirety of gender relations and how it operates currently and historically. But I am used to seeing this kind of thing, at this point. It seems to be a general trend even among heterodox communities and the anti-woke that the ideological precepts of their opposition that they're most likely to accept (comparatively speaking) are the feminist ones, which is evident in the utterly bizarre conservative-TERF allyship that seems to be going on at the moment. There's also a similarity in the moral typecasting that feminists and conservatives (and many other people, too) engage in - to them, men are a by default "degenerate" group who need to be reined in and obligated to provide protection to the women around them, and women are a group deserving of special protections. They differ on many things, but on these fundamental perceptions I don't see any difference at all. Even the blank-slatist intersectionalists who believe that men engage in bad behaviour simply because of patriarchal norms still fundamentally engage in the same knee-jerk moral typecasting, they just attribute it to a different cause to make it fit with their blank-slatism.
It seems that if the community isn't an explicitly anti-feminist community (and sometimes even if it is), there's going to be an instinctual legitimacy assigned to feminist claims that doesn't get assigned to any other woke factions because they align with certain entrenched preconceptions and moral judgements that the other woke factions do not appeal to. Any group which is purportedly dedicated to "protecting women" tends to immediately align with most people's sensibilities. No matter how objectionable the rhetoric they churn out is, a base-level feeling of agreement with some of their precepts still seems to exist. There is something profoundly instinctual about the women-are-wonderful effect that makes it exist in most political factions, and it seems to me that any ideology that espouses these base talking points will always have some level of congruence with our knee-jerk beliefs that automatically confers upon it a huge advantage regardless of its validity.
Again though if you think the Constitution was illegitimate because it was never democratically created in the first place then that is irrelevant. We're not talking legal justifications but moral ones here remember. At that point judicial activism is a good thing because it is defending against the over reach of a small elite group of first movers who codified their beliefs into a consitutional document, that nobody today got a say on.
The Constitution wasn't just penned and made law, it was turned over to the states to be ratified. And it is definitely untrue that no one today gets a say on the Constitution, evidenced by the repeated amendments over the years. If something is in the Constitution, that is specifically because people elected via a democratic process have decided it should be there and/or have allowed it to remain. While constitutional amendments are hard to make happen, the Constitution is not a stagnant document that has remained unchanged since its inception.
Furthermore, the very fact that people abide by that system and still utilise it is prima facie evidence of implicit consent to it - nothing actually prevents people from throwing the Constitution away and drafting up a new agreement (like they did with the previous Articles of Confederation) if they generally believe the current method of doing things doesn't work well. So there are some pretty strong reasons to view the Constitution as legitimate.
It's an illegitimate attack to you because you think the Constitution is legitimate. If someone does not, then it is an entirely legitimate attack to them.
You can't resolve this with historical facts because it is not a factual discussion. It's a values one.
The legitimacy of the Constitution has absolutely nothing to do with whether that system it prescribes is in line with any individual person's values.
Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".
This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.
As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:
https://archive.is/W9YFk
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