sun
9mo ago
The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.
For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.
The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.
Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)
Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.
The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.
As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.
sun
1yr ago
Aging is merely the ability of the body to repair itself breaking down. Who says we mustn't repair that one, too? (Rhetorical question, Christians!)
sun
9mo ago
Maybe the reason why I keep getting baffled by all those "actually this elite progressive is a pro-paedo" is that on the ground level, I see pretty much no increase in tolerance towards paedos. In fact the age gap taboo keeps expanding to cover age gaps between adults. If all those elites are pushing LGBT for the nefarious purpose of adding P, they don't seem to be doing a good job at all. Their successes, if any, of 50-100 years ago are completely negated.
sun
5mo ago
This can read as "when you have power, immediately destroy everything your opponents value or they'll start arguing for some arbitrary statute of limitations".
sun
1yr ago
I think it's pretty myopic to accuse those who defend/ignore the "drag kids" thing of being conflict theorists, while ignoring how the entire "groomer" label is a conflict theory superweapon being deployed by the conflict-theory part of the right. Were I an American leftist who'd never took a step inside a drag club, or even a Pride parade, my thought process would be something like "I will only disavow this when you stop painting me with the same brush. Otherwise, if you're going to keep implying I'm part of it, well, then I'm part of it. If the penalty for surrendering is death, and the penalty for losing the battle is death..."
sun
6mo ago
Well since you asked, I think it's retarded. I also said that in more words the last 5 times you asked.
sun
9mo ago
You respect people more for admitting mistakes. Others decide people who make mistakes are unreliable and respect people who don't appear to make mistakes.
sun
1yr ago
I think sacrificing lives to defend a country's sovereignity against an invader is generally more excusable than sacrificing lives to a technical accident by not accepting aid. I'm sure the same Ukrainians that are the sacrifices in the former case would generally be more eager to sacrifice themselves in the former case than in the latter.
Indeed, I've heard quite a few opinions to the effect of "I will sacrifice my life if I have to, to defend my country/my family/my culture/kill those fuckers". I've heard "I will sacrifice my life if it means my country doesn't have to show weakness" far less often.
What counts as deliberate agenda pushing? If I happen to Notice that white people seem to need less help going to college and setting up their life absent intervention than Hispanic people, and so I decide to set up the dynamic in the movie according to how I see it - the white guy helping the Hispanic guys because it'd look weird the other way around, is that "deliberate agenda pushing"?
Speaking of inverted examples... aren't "The Black Guy Dies First" and "Vasquez Must Die" tropes for a reason? Genuine question, I haven't been tracking death/saviourhood ratios by race.
(D&D Honour Among Thieves did have the Hispanic barbarian woman as the only casualty of the finale. White guy protagonist then spends the one-use resurrection tablet on her instead of his white wife as he was planning, because he realized she's practically the real mother to his white daughter now and he cares about her as a platonic friend more than his wife).
sun
9mo ago
Straight man molests girl, permanently damaging her trust and comfort with men. She then becomes either asexual or lesbian in practice.
This is what some lesbians (usually of second wave feminism flavor) say, at least, and I do believe it's plausible that something like that could bump some Kinsey 4s up to 6s.
We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.
...And so the AGI worked, endlessly tiling the universe over with genotronium - the most compact and durable representation of the AI engineer's genome possible. For the engineer did not care about continuity, and he did not care about the medium, and he did not care about the memes (for memes were, by his reasoning, wholly downstream from genes). As long as the essence was there, he reasoned, it was good enough.
It is all nice and well to care about creating new lives. "Us but better", "us but better off" and all that. The visceral hormonal joy of parenting and the spiritual enjoyment of legacy. What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought. As for settling for "us but worse off", I cannot find epithets strong enough to describe that.
Death is a necessary part of one particular configuration of an ecosystem, and appealing to nature is pointless. Everything is natural.
edit: not even that. Like darkness is an absence of life, death is an absence of longevity. It is not "a part" of life, it is that longevity is not a (necessary) part of life based on sexual reproduction. "You have outlived your usefulness", says the gene once it is duplicated and recombinated into a fresh host. I'm sorry, but who asked?
sun
8mo ago
The sandbox game in this scenario is all I have, pretty good, and I don't remember ever not playing it. Why wouldn't I act as if it's the only thing that matters?
sun
1yr ago
You're proposing a nonexistent dichotomy in the first place.
There is no law that forbids toppling statues of founders once they are no longer aligned with the current ideology/national myth/what have you. You're not owed your legacy forever and ever, deal with it.
sun
1yr ago
If your descendants married out of your ethnicity for 32 generations and so there is about 1/(2^32) of "your" genes in them, have you really been all that genetically successful?
sun
8mo ago
Women object to dick pics because they find most of them unsexy, not because they find them too sexy to function.
sun
6mo ago
Funny enough, the most valuable MTG cards are never played with, to the extent where it's legal to use fakes (proxies). Unless I've misunderstood it and you have to own a Black Lotus to enter a tournament with a proxy of one.
The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.
I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in in the way human society and human establishment does? Being -phobic is the bread-and-butter of the old Practitioner families. Don't confuse sticking to tradition and sticking to symbolism.
What I dislike about Pale is that the way Wildbow explicitly minds the audience diminishes 2/3 of the protagonists' personal struggles in my eyes. Verona's pet issue is her detachment and lack of trust between her and adulthood. Lucy's is being a racial minority. Avery's is being a sexual orientation minority. All of those are hammered over the reader's head quite a bit.
But while Verona's issues are repeatedly and blatantly justified, Lucy and Avery mostly have to resort to wondering and imagining if their issues are even real. The worst Avery actually got about her being a lesbian is her Finder family ally (briefly) flipping out on her because she kinda sorta led them to believe they have a chance of arranged marriage. I don't recall Lucy actually encountering an explicit racism moment. I'm quite confident that given Wildbow's current main audience, and perhaps his own shifts in political opinion, he will not choose to write the word "nigger" again even inside the head of the most racist character in the novel.
I do not have to see the word nigger in a novel to like it. But I do wish Wildbow was writing for a wider audience than people who "don't want the story to be about that" (referring to explicit examples of minority struggles and -isms as opposed to vague Institutional -Isms).
sun
1yr ago
What? No. Sovereignity is specifically about the control you have over the territory. Pride is more about keeping face.
sun
1yr ago
Unless the 'message' and 'meaning' of the work are tied up in the knowledge that it was a particular artist who made it, or the exact materials that were used, then making a new one in the exact same configuration should be precisely as meaningful to the viewer as the original.
You... don't accept the premise of "the original" in the first place, do you?
sun
8mo ago
I'm not stopping you from retiring to your cabin in the woods where you can bask in the absence of civilization all you want, while you don't seem to be satisfied unless everyone is plunged there along with you. I find your way far more imposing on freedom.
Unfortunately if you did practice what you preach you wouldn't be able to prove it because you wouldn't have network.
I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?
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