urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
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User ID: 226
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
26d ago
After reading this a couple times last night, sleeping, and then reading it again today, I finally realized what the quotation means and why people are reacting the way they are: the message is addressed to people who were trying to use the bridge and were impeded by the protesters, not the protesters themselves.
I thought the message was addressed to the protesters, who the DA was claiming were falsely imprisoned by the police. There are probably lots of reasons for my misinterpretation -- "imprisonment" being more closely connected to jail (and booking) than to being impeded by a protest, "detained" being a word associated with the police, and of course my schema of the world in which San Francisco prosecutors are more concerned about police misconduct than public disorder. I am fascinated by my misinterpretation.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
28d ago
Ukraine is an especially poorly partitioned country where you have entire regions that are mostly Russian speaking, then others that are Ukrainian speaking, and still more that are heavily Hungarian.
This sounds like a "Comrade Stalin threw a dart on a map and put the border where it landed" problem. And I agree it causes tremendous issues of national identity and integrity post-breakup. For the Bolskeviks, obviously that was the point: divide the minority ethnicities, put them in SSRs with people they hate, destroy nationalist ambitions, profit collectively owned return on collective investment.
And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
Who wore it better: UK or USSR?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
29d ago
I guess my problem with these examples would be, I never looked at any of these as paragons of game writing, even in their heyday. In my youth, Halo was a multiplayer game, people didn't care about the campaign. I've never heard Destiny praised particularly for its writing, I associate it with multiplayer as well. Call of Duty is the Marvel movie of videogames, they've had stories but I've also mostly associated them with multiplayer rather than their campaigns. I don't do horror in any medium, so I can't speak to Dead Space.
But overall, your list leaves me wondering whether you're just looking for good stories in all the wrong places.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
29d ago
ME1 is my favorite game of all time, but I agree with the criticisms of the trilogy as a whole. I feel it went immediately and, ahem, massively downhill from there.
The reason I like ME1 isn't even because of the power fantasy, which I don't care about very much, I desperately want games where the main character isn't all that powerful. I'm actually annoyed we don't see more of those. Let me be a damn shopkeeper with a girlfriend, damn it.
What I liked about ME1 was the character work and the worldbuilding, which I think was pretty good. People praise ME2's character work, but my problem is I think they stretched themselves out too much, and had too many characters to focus on the important ones. I also agree the characters of Miranda and Jack were bad. The only acceptable female romance options in Mass Effect are Liara, Tali -- and I'll go to bat for this one -- Ashley "religious tomboy" Williams. I hear the chicks really dig Garrus. And I mean really dig Garrus.
There is insufficient storytelling about male characters having compelling romantic relationships with women in all mediums. I dare everyone to try to find actually-sensitive storytelling about male-female relationships, from a male perspective, that isn't 1. pornography 2. completely hamfisted or 3. downplayed. Apparently there's "not a market for it" and "why do you love women that much, that's gay" but, uh, this is my thing, my question with each and every story I engage with is "how high quality is the love interest subplot."
The stuff I get is generally not great, but I have to take the crumbs I can get from the master's table. The best stuff might literally be fanfiction. Somehow teenagers on the internet are doing a better job with a whole genre than the entire media apparatus.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
What I was taught in school (in the 2000s) was that the original plan did include resettlement, which became extermination when the Nazis couldn't find anywhere to put them. This ship was discussed. The article (from the US Holocaust Museum, the source for the "official story" if ever there was one) says:
[T]he German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration. The German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry also hoped to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish goals and policies both domestically in Germany and in the world at large.
Obviously this has undertones of "they were just doing this to justify their eventual murder" but it doesn't seem excluded from their view that the "anti-Jewish goals and policies" at the time were something other than raw genocide.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I would also want proportion to the amount of non-violent usefulness for the item, and the amount of necessity for the item in society. No one needs a firearm to get along in society. Yes, it may have usefulness in a law-abiding way, but even the closest thing to a necessity for firearms in society in self-defense -- which involves, inherently, violence. It may be justified violence, but it is violence. Someone who shoots a carjacker is doing the same thing an armed carjacker-gone-wrong does -- using a firearm against a person. And there is no necessity in the 21st century to hunt for food, and certainly no necessity to hunt or shoot for sport.
A car, however -- using a car to run someone over is incorrectly using a car. No one for a lawful or legitimate purpose runs over a person with a car. There is no sense in which a car is supposed to be used to run someone over. There are no sports in which people get run over by cars. There is no such thing as driving through a crash test barrier made of clay for sport. A car, used properly, is not a weapon, it's a means of transport. Firearms are weapons.
And you also kind of need a car to get along in society -- especially in places where public transportation does not exist or is woefully inadequate. It makes a lot more sense to give your depressed teen (with a drivers' license, of course!) access to the family car than to give them a gun. After all, if they can't use the car to go visit their friends, or go to their after-school job, what they'll be doing is moping around the house. And that just sounds like more depression.
Perhaps he could have used the gun at a firing range to let off some stress. But if I were the parents, and actually paid attention to the kid, I wouldn't let him do that without supervision. And I wouldn't even do that, personally. The parents made an active choice to put a weapon in the hands of their depressed, angry son, unsupervised. That's not bad parenting, that's ludicriously harmful parenting. I would even say negligent.
All that being said, it's interesting to me that owning a firearm is a right, but driving a car is a privilege -- yet the former is optional and the latter, for many people, a necessity.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
This is the most hilarious legal clause ever. If you're guilty of treason you shall suffer death... or be subject to prison for five years and fined $10,000. What a spread of possible sentences!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I was able to see shadow bands on the ground after the eclipse, but I didn't know they were called that until now. To me, they resembled low-quality video game lighting, like how Minecraft lightning used to work long ago. It was pretty cool.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I think your point is fair, but I would not describe either Kansas City or Tulsa as great havens for white identitarians. Both have longstanding racial strife. I’m actually not sure where such a person would want to go, if being around white people were the main concern.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
To me what’s frustrating is he always has to get in a parenthetical jib at people he doesn’t like, even as he’s defending them. And that always lines up with stuff the woke people are saying. It’s not unique. Like him calling James Damore an obnoxious sexist in the linked article.
I just find it annoying that he attacks people for using social opprobrium to attack people they don’t like, and having to mention their disagreement with a cancelled person even when voicing they liked something about them (like the podcasters with Woody Allen). And then he just does the same thing just at a lower level. The difference between “James Damore is an obnoxious sexist” and “James Damore should be cancelled” is one of degree, not kind. Especially in how he does it, with no reflectivity, just mirroring what he’s heard about the guy instead of actually evaluating what he did for himself.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.
This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
To mirror Scott's ACX survey: In the past 24 hours, have you thought about the Roman Empire? If so, what was the context of that thought?
I checked and there's a Mormon category as well. I would certainly be interested if Scott would drill down even more, I'd like to see stats on EO vs OO -- and does he have any Church of the East peeps in his readership? (probably not)
(also I want to cross-reference this with Scott's "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours" question)
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
The traditional strain of American Evangelicalism is definitely not a fan of Catholicism, but it competes with a more ecumenical strain that sees Catholics either as perfectly valid Christians who happen to be wrong about some things (as all sects of Christians consider the others to be), or at least good allies against things opposed to their shared fundamental beliefs -- precisely the sort of situation being talked about here.
The big issue is, with the rapid rise of non-denominational Protestantism in the US, there really isn't a term that you can use to describe all Protestants that they would actually identify with except "Christians." And even that gets pushback from the "I'm not a Christian, I'm a Christ-follower" people. By far, the largest Christian group in the US that seems to still identify with a particular Church first is Catholics, thus the clunky term "Catholics and Christians," which really just means "Catholics and undifferentiated Christians." The trend elsewhere, outside of the LDS church and confessional Protestantism, is towards rebranding churches as just "X Church," instead of "X Baptist Church" or "X Bible Church" or even "X Methodist Church." And it's important to note that, if anything, evangelical Protestantism is more friendly towards Catholics than confessional Protestantism, who have explicit and very long catechisms and creeds that speak firmly against Catholicism and come from a time of literal warfare between the two groups.
If Trump's team wanted to pander to Catholics (as it seems he wanted to do) while communicating more effectively, they might have said "Catholics and Christians of all kinds," or something like that. But as it is I don't think it was designed to exclude Catholics, but explicitly to include them. It just sounds very clunky.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.
Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Please write it. I've had an effortpost about gender polarization and unrealistic expectations for relationships bouncing around in my head also. I think it may be in the top three biggest world issues right now, it seems to be happening everywhere.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I went to a normal but good public high school like @BahRamYou (please don't ram me), and understood from the get-go that an elite college was out of reach. I thought it was incredibly silly that anyone even countenanced elite college from this background, though some did, and the wokest ones got in. I don't resent it, because I understood that the elite colleges are for the upper class and people the upper class has pity on. I'm middle class, have always been middle class, and I followed the middle class path.
A "good school" to my class is a state school, a "bad school" is a private school, because the only private schools any of my peers were likely to get into would just be tens of thousands more a semester for no extra signaling benefit. Nobody in my class had a stone's chance in hell of getting into any school the upper-middle class would consider "good" unless they were some kind of minority. Getting in-state tuition at a flagship state school was the goal.
My peers are, generally, doing okay. Lots of people working in IT, office jobs, computer programming, nursing, teaching, medical tech, even a couple doctors if I recall correctly. Lots of people having cute babies and building lives together. Some aren't doing well, but that's true for any population of people. Not going to an elite college didn't destroy everyone's ability to live a good and happy life. It destroyed their chance of becoming elite, but they didn't have that expectation anyway. I'm going to teach my children that there's no way on earth they're going to be President or have an elite role, but there's every chance in the world they're going to have a meaningful, fulfilling life if they focus on living according to their values and focusing on the content of their friends' and partners' character instead of their status.
I don't understand the obsession with it, either. Not everyone in society is going to be elite. Some people are going to be normies. The struggle is to identify areas of economic need and study those. Blue collar work is in demand, and we desperately need conscientious people with integrity in these roles that are undervalued for status reasons. White collar jobs still exist.
When people describe all these expectations, all these extracurriculars, all this stress about test scores and good schools and networking and "don't you dare make a mistake"... it sounds so unbelievably suffocating that it's yet another non-miracle to me that so many preppy professional people have concluded our society is deeply oppressive. Because for them, it is.
It is totally fascinating to me that the upper-middle class folks typically hold an ideology that talks a lot about human equality, and says people don't choose their life outcomes, and we need to be respectful of people's different lifestyles, and yada yada yada, but also thinks mediocrity is a terrible life outcome, and you better go to an elite school and have an elite job! The intense pressure I see some people describe is totally alien to me. Sometimes I have to do a double-take, because it sounds like people are describing China and not America.
And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great.
This has the same vibe as “all the people I know who seem most drawn to oncologists all seem like they’re sick.” Um… yeah?
I don’t think therapy works for everyone. It works for some, and not very well for others. I’m rooting for myself being in the first group. But I hear testimonials from people who it has definitely helped, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them.
There might well be people of your acquaintance who went through therapy, found it helpful, and then moved on. They don’t talk about it, because it’s not an identity for such people, and mental health is very personal. The people for whom it is and identity and doesn’t work well are definitely the ones who are going to talk about it more. I’m not sure you can make a good argument about its effectiveness from the people who talk the most loudly about it. I think you need studies for that.
But I agree, therapy culture is toxic. It’s the equivalent of WebMD making everyone think they have cancer. It takes something private and useful and turns it into a very public weapon. Most people don’t need the tools of therapy, and I think the idea that they do is silly. It’s a condescension to the needs of a select group of suffering people. It’s like chemotherapy — it saves lives, but you shouldn’t give it to someone without the need for it.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I find value in therapy, though not therapy culture. I think it works best when therapists work as teachers, helping their clients develop tools they can use to continue to grow after graduating. I think it works poorly when it's simply a way to relitigate problems and complain about them. CBT, after all, isn't actually about relitigating things -- it's about pointing towards the future and finding ways to live that aren't relitigating every anxious thought that comes your way. The way I've heard, rumination and relitigation are strategies you use to avoid actually doing therapy. The whole point is to stand up to the mental bully and move on. The people on the internet talking ceaselesslessly about their problems are by definition wallowing in it and avoiding the kind of clear-headed thinking and decisive action that the best therapists want their clients to do.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Anyway, if you go along with any of that, it's not hard to see how the Christian concepts of "faith" and a general "Let go, let God" orientation have a very specific role in easing the demons that beset anxious women who are prone to relitigating all the things that inflame their worst inner voices. One general read of the tradition might say, "There is an authority outside yourself, it can and must be infinitely trusted, it is the root of all reality, it is all benevolent and all knowing, you are a child of God and of infinite worth, you are not wise enough to stand in judgement of anyone or even yourself and humility and hope and forgiveness are thus commandments, despair and gossip are sins, trust God and do your best and turn to faith to come to internalize that all this suffering and anxiety and confusion and difficulty has meaning and has a point and will be bearable."
My god, you sound exactly like my evangelical mom when you say this.
Some of the most effective advice against mental demons actually comes from my mother -- she talks frequently using the exact language you've used here, about how we've got all these voices in our head that sound like one's voice but aren't. And in her mind, it's a choice to listen to them or to do something else that's important; focusing on them gives them more power.
What's funny is prayer also came up as a potential coping strategy (in a long list of coping strategies) that my definitely-not-religious therapist shared are helpful to some people when dealing with strong emotions. And I can share I do find it helpful at times.
If you allow me to be psychological instead of theological, I think it has the same effect as those mental excercises where people imagine their worry as physical object and then imagine getting rid of it. It unburdens the mind in a way it will accept. (And if you'll allow me to be theological instead of psychological, there was a thread not too long ago about why people believe in petitionary prayer, and this is it -- it's not about somehow bending the will of God towards something, but about releasing the concerns about which you can do nothing outside of yourself and putting it into the hands of God.)
I also get the sense, like ThisIsSin, that overall standards have gone up a lot too, while people's actual value has gone down, with greater obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and mental health challenges among both men and women.
But I also can't help feeling that people have just lost interest in romantic relationships in general. They don't believe in eros any more. They don't have faith in love being valuable. This especially seems pronounced among women, who, after all, are the biggest traditional market for such high valuation of love.
There just seems to be a cohort of women that's not interested in dating any man who comes their way. And I'm not saying they won't date any man who comes their way (that seems eminently reasonable), but that they won't date any of the many men who come their way (some of those men, I know, were generally very popular among women). I know, and have had, lots of female friends and acquantances who have never been in major relationships and show no interest in starting one. We talk about "men going their own way" -- but "women going their own way" seems to be an even bigger group, at least from my zoomer perspective. Love seems transactional, not interpersonal, to them; if I recall correctly, some back in school would joke about marrying a rich man for the money, but actually loving a man never seemed to occur to them.
I haven't noticed as much of a similar cohort of men, though there are some. And there are definitely men who 'desire' a relationship but aren't very active in looking for one.
Contrary to popular belief, this cohort actually seems just as pronounced among women of a conservative background, to my eyes because of the intense values against casual dating in that cohort. They are, just as much as any highly-selective women, waiting for Mr. Right to fall out of the sky. And it has to be Mr. Divinely-Ordained-Right, because the marriage is in three months and they will immediately have children.
My crackpot theory is also that this has something to do with women's relationships with their fathers (and men's relationships to their mothers); most of the women I've gotten on well with romantically have had at least decent relationships with their fathers. I have a weird suspicion that the rise in divorce and single parenthood has led to a lot of women who don't have major male influences in their lives, so they don't form the understanding and appreciation of men's personality traits that women who grow up around them do -- leading them either to idolize or reject something they don't really understand. Growing up with a caring father gives you a good example of the positive influence of men in your life, and a key example of the value men can provide to you and your children. Plus, it means you love at least one man, and that predisposes you to feel positively about them in general. My girlfriend groans at my dad jokes, but her own father's are even more groan-worthy, so she's had a lot of practice tolerating them (and I think secretly enjoys them, don't we all?).
I guess it just makes me sad, I'm a big believer in the value that an intimate relationship, above and beyond the sexual or transactional benefits, brings to people's lives, more than most men -- and I know this, because when I bring up my beliefs on the issue other men mostly don't seem to understand me and talk about it in confused ways, the same way my asexual friends IRL have talked about sexuality in ways that are incredulous and confused. I have this strong value, I've seen its profound impact on my life, and I see it profaned and cast off everywhere -- "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Moloch the loveless."
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