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
1mo ago
This is too bad, but I understand the decision.
I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied. In his advocacy for colorblindness and a sort of common-sense anti-wokeness (rather than a more complex philosophical anti-wokeness) he represented the mainstream strain of conservatism that retains a great deal of power within the West and especially in the US. Of all the posters here, he's the one whose words sounded the most like the conservatives I know in person. In an (admittedly distant) second place is hydroacetylene. Probably FarNearEverywhere is in there somewhere, despite not even being from the same country as me. On the other side of the aisle is resident liberal netstack.
Heck, even his bugbears about all his enemies being the same people sounds a lot like the conservatives I know in person, who would probably be keen to make claims about Democrats being secret HBD-pushing racists. So there's a weird way that, even in his failures, he represented a constituency in our political sphere.
I'll miss his crotchety conservatism. I think the elder realism of posters like him is necessary at times to counteract the philosophical idealism and youthful exuberance that permeate this space. We need more dad energy. And Hlynka had it in spades.
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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.
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urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women
The thing that made me a conservative as a young man wasn’t gamergate, it was this. I distinctly remember the day a friend said, “hey come look at this,” and he was showing me tumblrinaction. The intense “KILL ALL MEN ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS EVERY ADVANCEMENT TOWARDS ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTION GETS US CLOSER TO ELIMINATING MEN” stuff that was du jour on tumblr back during this time shocked the shit out of me. And the racial and trans (and it’s almost forgotten now, but otherkin) stuff too.
Then I started to see women I knew in real life saying those things explicitly. And then I saw people in institutions saying it. And then it seemed to take over. At each stage, of course, the rough edges were sanded off. The radfems who truly hated men were very quickly marginalized. But the animating spirit remained the same.
So I remember when it wasn’t “crazy kids on college campuses.” I remember when it was crazy girls on tumblr. And I saw the crazy tumblr girls’ ideas take over the world.
That certainly does for making one a conservative.
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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."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
14d 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.
This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:
Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of Liberal people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their ghetto hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my comrades in any meaningful sense.
Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.
It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in academia right-wing internet forums about the systemic racism against Black people White people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."
@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.
Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.
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We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.
Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.
Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3mo ago
Since this is the place for encouragement, I want to encourage everyone involved in last week's discussion of relationship insecurities started by @Sheepclothes.
As someone who has my own insecurities about dating and relationships that I've been struggling with lately (not about my partner's past but about her future -- could she do better than me?), this whole comment thread was helpful in crystalizing my thoughts and was heartening to read. I especially want to highlight @2rafa's comment as insightful about insecurity as a challenging, but real, sign of concern for another person and @justmotteingaround's comment giving solid advice that insecurities are something inside you, not them; it's your own perceptions and not the reality, the map and not the territory.
If it were possible to nominate an entire thread as an AAQC, I would do it for this thread. Sometimes the dating/relationships threads on themotte (and the internet in general) can get incredibly heated, but this whole discussion was full of sensitivity, honesty, compassion, and forthrightness. Everyone optimized for light, and I think it's because they chose to share their own experiences and commit to being vulnerable, rather than thinking about the discussion as a place to argue for a position or score points. Instead of a motte and bailey, there was a garden party.
I'm in a weirdly calm mood today (I think I'm just sleep deprived), so I wanted to share that I found this helpful and encourage everyone to bring that energy to more discussions.
Really, really great job guys. I mean it.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
I believe I did the same. Crazy to think he was the most insightful anti-SJ voice at the time. But he was.
When people wonder why there are so many non-rationalist types here, the origin story is Scott writing about feminism in 2014.
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urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3mo ago
It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
The default state of everything is "I will love my friends and hate my enemies." It's a wonder of values that anyone ever decided to do anything else.
If you understand the current-day progressives as simply falling into the same human foibles that every other ideology has faced -- rather than taking their claims of enlightenment at face value -- then you truly begin to understand them. They aren't special, they aren't chosen, they aren't annointed, they aren't on "the right side of history," they aren't all-powerful, they aren't all good: they're humans, just like you and me. If they can tear down statues, I can tear down the idol of themselves they've built in their own heart, an idol of self-righteousness and pride. I even see in myself -- especially in the past, when I was younger, when I was drawn to progressive politics -- those features, that self-doubt that made me want to take the great figures of the past and spit on them, the deep and overwhelming desire to be right and just and dutiful, the desire to be better than others. But these are human follies, not progressive ones, they are sins of the flesh, not sins of the woke.
And so it goes, on and on, the spinning wheel of time, rhyming as it goes.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
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The current paradigm is "women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains." That's not an explicit viewpoint or something that anyone intends directly, it's the outcome of the slow process of commoditizing human beings and molding them into good little workers and subjects who are obedient, pliant, and don't rock the boat. Anything that stops them from doing this is a flaw which the powers that be seek to destroy -- signal-boosting any ideology that seems likely to accomplish it. Once again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's a prospiracy, a side effect of powerful institutions doing what powerful institutions do, and of humans in powerful positions doing what humans do: endorsing ideologies that subconsciously go along with their pre-existing goals. This is the origin of "woke capital."
Women are more likely to uphold institutions and, as girls, to sit still for long periods of time (like you say), and are less likely to shout loudly about the emperor having no clothes. Men are less likely to do things that remove them from the workplace for a period of time (especially bear children), and more likely to slave away at work for hours on end while abandoning their families at home.
Institutions, especially corporations, want their employees to be male in the ways that benefit them and female in the ways that benefit them. They don't want people, they want androgynous commoditized worker bees. They want cattle and not pets, human docker containers cloned and scaled at will from the amorphous "cloud" of the "workforce." The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings. You will own nothing and you will be happy, and your storage will be separated from your compute and kept in trust by Amazon.
My girlfriend has gotten explicit advice that she should never get pregnant, it will "hurt her career." She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition. This system sees bearing and raising the next generation of human beings, the most fundamental purpose of society, as a distraction from the more worthy goal of creating wealth for Wall Street. It asks this of men too, but because of the unchangable realities of being a sexually-dimorphic mammalian species, this requirement hurts women more than men. The entrance of women into the workforce on the same terms as men is the true systemic oppression of women. The left used to know this, like when Elizabeth Warren wrote The Two Income Trap. But it has forgotten it as its funding has shifted to corporations "woke" to their own interests, who are more likely to fund the striking of a child in the womb than to pay for the care of that which is born. And the abortionist feminists celebrate them for their avarice like good little girls.
The goal isn't to turn men into women or women into men. That's an ideological side effect, like "Communism" in Stalinist Russia. The goal of Stalin was to empower himself. And so it is with woke capitalism. (Perhaps real woke has never been tried?)
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