vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
That's why people complain so much about progressives. They're not just ostensible rightists, they're rightists.
I wouldn't be so sure. There are definitely some right-wing people on the Motte, but I've always had the feeling that the Motte is more "anti-woke" than it is truly "right-wing."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think lesbian-separatism and "gold star" lesbianism is too strong of a force to let this happen. Lesbians and gay men may be in the same political coalition, but that doesn't mean they usually run in the same social circles. Plus, a significant portion of LGBT+ people aren't interested in having kids or starting a family in the first place.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
In a more serious country (perhaps, in fact, in the kind of country the rioters might dream of creating), even the perpetrators of such a pathetic attempt at insurrection would have been shot.
I wonder about this.
Isn't it possible that the American powers-that-be is just so firmly rooted and secure that it doesn't actually perceive the January 6th rioters as a real threat?
I've wondered about this in the context of the United States having some of the most robust free speech protections in the world. Maybe, they're okay with us saying all of these things not because of some high ideal from the 1700's, but because the current batch of ruling elites feels like they've locked down control so well that the speech of the little guy poses no serious threat to them?
China, Turkey and Russia cracking down on free speech is a sign of weakness, not strength or "seriousness."
It's notable that in times the American powers-that-be are afraid of ideologies, you get things like COINTELPRO happening. Maybe we'll find out about the contemporary version of that program in a few decades when the documents become declassified, or maybe there's no need for COINTELPRO 2.0 because no ideology yet poses a serious risk to the regime.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I hadn't even heard of "Bros" - I suspect lack of knowledge on the part of the public is more likely to be the reason for its failure than anything else.
You might be right that on the margins, people subconsciously thought of incest instead of "gay romcom" when they saw the marketing, but they had to see the marketing first. My guess is the lack of star power led to the studios marketing it less, and less people being super excited to see it ahead of time.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I especially won't do it if someone's trying to use it as a gotcha in an Internet political debate.
I think this is an unfair reading of Obsidian. The example they bring up is basically the central point pro-euthanasia people are advocating for. Any person who is opposed to offering advice or opinions here, essentially doesn't have a position worth listening to at all on this matter.
I could at least respect someone saying something like, "Look, this is obviously a tough thing for any family to go through, but I've already included that in my moral reasoning. I believe that humans are made in God's image, that human life should be treated with dignity and respect, and that every effort should be made to keep her alive." I don't agree with it, but I can respect it. If instead, when faced with a real world example, one were to fold and say, "I don't give advice over the internet, and I don't answer gotcha questions" - it seems like that person is not really prepared to engage with the realities of this problem as they exist on the ground, and that their castles in the sky might as well blow away in the wind.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I've read it, and enjoyed it immensely. I'm a sucker for art that couldn't be replicated in other mediums, and a House of Leaves that tried to be told in another format like video games or movies would have to change so much to keep the feel of the various levels of the narrative going that it would be unrecognizable.
The tone is very different, but the Thursday Next series is another one that plays with formatting and the fourth wall in order to tell its story.
On a side note, this is also tying into my experience of becoming quietly convinced that the inability of society to 'reign in' female sexuality in a healthy way contributes to almost every form of social dysfunction we observe.
Depending on the specific object-level claims being made, I might agree with parts of this, but I'm going to push back slightly here.
I think there are a lot of ways that the sexual revolution screwed over both men and women.
Whatever other issues the paternalistic approach to women had in the past, it almost certainly limited the number of vectors of attack from men. If all coed college parties have chaperones, then the risk of a woman being raped on a college campus is almost certainly lower than the modern anarchy of college party culture. This is not to suggest that chaperoning was always successful at protecting the people involved, but my intuition is that when society put more of the burden on men to protect women from other men, women were safer in a number of contexts than they are now. Now, we give women all of the legal freedom of men, but they still take on most of the risks of sex and are thus more vulnerable than they were before.
There are no solutions, only trade offs.
I am sure there were trade offs we made when we decided that society should have the shape that it does today. Porn is freely made and shared online, porn-adjacent professions like Twitch pool streamers exist in "kid-friendly" spaces, and even though fewer people are having sex, the general attitude is a permissive one. All of these things come with trade offs for men and women. Men slowly learn the lesson to never give money to begging women - basically, reality slowly burns the simp out of them, but there are new foolish young men born every minute. Women learn that they have value in society and on the dating market, but that the value is of a very limited and proscribed sort.
However, I don't necessarily think that the trade offs we have made are more bad than good. Society certainly looks different than it did in the more paternalistic, puritan past. Rich people are more shielded from the consequences of sexual license and hedonism than the poor - as it has always been. But I think we should seriously consider whether making people more miserable in exchange for freedom is worth it. Certainly, a strict utilitarian might say "we crunched the numbers and traditionalism is the better overall system", but not everyone is a strict utilitarian and if we value human flourishing more than simple pleasure it might be the case that our system empowers more people to flourish, even as it factually causes more suffering than other ways of arranging society that make different trade-offs on the freedom-risk spectrum.
I want to talk about some of the failures of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
First, let me say that I thought they handled the death of their main actor about as respectfully and deftly as any blockbuster movie made by Disney could be expected to. The emotional through line of grief and dealing with the death of a loved one rang true, and I found myself tearing up a bit towards the end.
However, I feel like this movie is very messy and a lot of it comes from their unwillingness to be as daring politically or aesthetically as the original Black Panther.
My biggest complaints circle around Talokan and Namor.
Whatever else one might say about the concept of Wakanda, the idea of asking what Africa would look like without colonization, and the imagination behind its Afro-futurism is interesting and compelling. On top of that, the political questions at the core of the first movie, while not Citizen Cane, are fundamentally interesting: What responsibility do the powerful have to those weaker than them? Is a gradualist or revolutionary approach to change better? Isolation or conquest? Isolation or outreach?
It is also helped along by the fact that Killmonger managed to be a villain with a point - as a descendant of royalty and African slaves, a Wakandan who has seen the plight of African Americans and come away with a more revolutionary Black nationalist mindset as a result. He manages to be grounded up until the point they decide to make him just enough of an asshole to justify stopping him for trying to change things the wrong way.
But all of this falls apart with Namor. He is old enough to have personally been oppressed by Spanish colonists 400 years ago, and he even attacked a Spanish hacienda while burying his mother. He says he will "never forget what he saw." And yet... he just sort of let the rest of Spanish colonization and Mesoamerican history play or more or less the way it did in our world after that? He saw the rise and fall of Fascism and Communism in the 20th century, and he didn't lift a finger, but as soon as the surface world is on the brink of discovering Talokan, it suddenly becomes imperative to preemptively conquer the surface, since the system of White European dominance that American hegemony is the latest instance of would be all too happy to use neo-colonial policies against these two new superpowers.
However, the passage of 400 years really makes Namor feel way less justified in his crusade. Killmonger personally experienced life as a poor black kid in contemporary America, and learned the broader context of his suffering and the oppression of his people. Meanwhile, Talokan has been isolationist for the last 400 years and clearly hasn't bothered to stop oppression anywhere else. (He says his enemies call him "Namor", but who are his enemies? Aside from burning one Spanish plantation to the ground 400 years ago, what did he do for the Mayan people since then?) The passage of time has also made things more complicated. Namor would be most justified if his crusade was against the Spanish - but of course they haven't been a world power for a long time, so instead the movie uses America and, strangely, France as its two examples of White European colonizers in the modern world. (I suspect they wanted to do more with the Haiti-France connection in the original script, but it got cut for being too spicy.)
But in Namor's conversations with Shuri, he talks about how "you know how they treat people like us", and I have to ask whether the movie actually manages to say anything about race relations or the history of colonialism at all, rather than lazily referencing it. Like, sure small pox and Spanish conquista was horrible for many of the natives, and it sucks that Namor's tribe had to go through that, but none of that would really justify attacking the countries today, the people alive today. The time to act would have been 400 years ago, and it seems like the Talokanian people had the power and ability to fight back against the Spanish, and they did nothing really substantive to do so. They gave up after one plantation.
As an aside, I think it is simple realpolitik that America and every other halfway competent nation would be trying to get their hands on vibranium in the MCU. I don't actually think the hints of neocolonial critique really get off the ground here. MCU America doesn't want vibranium because Wakanda is a black nation, and wouldn't want it because Talokan is a Mayan nation. They want it because there are aliens and demons and gods in the MCU, and vibranium is one of the better tools for fighting back against them. As well as being responsible for miraculous advancements in medical and other technologies.
Overall, this just seems like another instance of Marvel not doing a great job with Hispanic countries and cultures, even as I tend to be fairly impressed with how they handle the African American experience. For a good example of the former, look at the Eternals. What exactly makes Druig stop his mind control scheme to bring peace between the Indians and the Spanish at a single city? Why didn't he do that to all the Spanish? For an example of the latter, see The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Shuri feels bad for not being able to cure an incurable disease... not, say, refusing to be at her brother's side as a man on his deathbed, denying him a final request.
To be fair here, I felt like Shuri not being at T'Challa's death bed had more to do with Marvel not wanting to use CGI to bring him back just to give him a death scene, and I think that was the right choice for the film. It would be a bit strange to fault Shuri for it, since I imagine if the character had died but the actor hadn't, Shuri absolutely would have been by her brother's side at the end.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
- The University girl wannabe iron man.
I actually have a Grand Unifying Theory of Modern Mary Sues, which comes down to two principles: 1) audiences don't want to be taken on the exact same journey twice, and 2) modern film executives are more likely to make a new entry with a female protagonist.
It is absolutely true that if you compare, say, the time it takes for Rey in Star Wars to reach certain milestones, she does better than either Luke or Anakin with far less training. However, I also think it is true that if the sequel trilogies had instead been a brand new franchise, the fast speed at which Rey learned force techniques wouldn't actually be much of an issue. So her first confirmation of the Jedi being real and not just stories happened today, and she mastered the Jedi Mind Trick in like an afternoon while chained up? That's not much of an issue if the sequels are all that exists. Maybe being a space wizard is really easy or something? And she beats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber fight with essentially no training? Well, he wanted to capture her not kill her, and he was heavily injured, yadda yadda.
I think Ironheart in this movie, as well as characters like Rey in Star Wars or Korra and Avatar, often have the real world background that audiences have already seen how high power scaling can go in the universe, and are eager to get back up there again. It happens with male protagonists as well. I believe Boruto has advanced faster in some regards than his dad Naruto, and Gohan reaches Super Saiyan as a child while his dad had to train his whole life to do it. It just happens in long-running franchises. Audiences don't want to wait 200 episodes for Boruto to naturally reach the same point as his dad.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
My idea isn't exactly a refutation of the concept of a Mary Sue - more like an explanation of why I think it happens. I think it also comes with the insight that this isn't a problem unique to female characters in established franchises. (I'm not convinced simple power creep is enough to explain Boruto and Gohan.)
I also think there might be some connection to the "5 minute courtship" problem some people see with old Disney movies. Virtually none of the old princess movies actually end with the couple getting married after short courtship periods - usually, there's a scene where the prince saves the princess, followed immediately by a scene where the couple gets married, but some unspecified amount of time probably passed between the two events. That's just not how audiences remember it, because we don't get to see a montage of all the time that passed.
I think the original Star Wars trilogy is affected by the same "offscreen action" effect. We don't see all of the time Luke spends training on screen (though we do see some of it), and by the third movie he's a fully fledged Jedi. Modern filmmakers trying to mirror his story arc, might be using the "onscreen" training time as their frame of reference instead of thinking about the story from an in-universe perspective. Doesn't mean they're not guilty of bad writing - I think it is just one of the many issues that can happen when fans get old enough to work on the franchises they love.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
While I agree with you that blurring the lines to conflate all LGBT+ education efforts and the direct sexual abuse of minors is irresponsible, and likely to lead to violence if taken seriously by the wrong person, do we actually know that his motivation had anything to do with this?
As far as I know, the police haven't made public any information about his motive, so all we can do is speculate over the exact origin of his hate. Remember that the claimed motivation for the Pulse nightclub shooting was supposedly in retaliation for US airstrikes against Iraq and Syria, but the shooter, Omar Mateen, had supposedly contracted AIDs from a Latino man and frequented gay bars himself. It's not clear to me that the Pulse night club shooting can be read as a straightforward act of hate against LGBT people, versus a very messy personal drama spilling out into the rest of society. How likely is it that Aldrich's motives in the recent Colorado shooting won't be a straightforward hate crime either?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
What, in your mind, separates modern fears about the trans community indoctrinating children, and the old fears in the 1950's that gay men were hoping to turn your child gay?
I feel like human psychology is easily manipulated when it comes to children - see the Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger, and a dozen other hysterias that were wildly out of proportion to what was actually happening on the ground.
While a surprisingly high number of kids are putting "they/them" in their profiles, and saying they're non-binary, the number who are seeking surgery or other medical interventions is fairly low still. See, for example, this article which says that "[i]n the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis." That's around 258 a year, in a country of 330 million people. Even if you accept the "irreversible damage" line of thought, and think that a good portion of those girls will go on to regret it, that is a really tiny number of cases to use as the basis for fearing for the fate of your own children, or those in your community.
It just seems like people are myopically focused on a fairly unlikely outcome, and using that to justify clamping down on the freedoms of a lot more people as a result.
Don't get me wrong - I do think the medical establishment has a responsibility to take the well-being of patients into account, and so the moment the evidence is strongly in favor of discontinuing a particular practice, we should stop. The history of lobotomies is all one needs to believe that doctors can sometimes be horribly wrong - so we have to humbly consider that with any intervention we're doing. All the same, even if you consider every mastectomy of a female-bodied adolescent to be a terrible tragedy, the tragedy is much more bounded than lobotomies were back in the day.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Can you define what you consider the defining characteristics of modern leftist grooming?
How malleable do you think sexual orientation and feelings of social and bodily dysphoria around sex roles are in children? If we lived in a society where the concepts of gay people were generally unknown, and the idea of being trans wasn't common knowledge - about what percent of grown adults do you think would naturally and spontaneously be gay or trans?
Do you think the Left doesn't honestly believe their "closeted" model of the situation? (That is, that some percentage of the population will irreparably be gay or trans no matter what shape society takes, and any rise in numbers results from closeted members feeling more comfortable coming out, and not an increase in number due to malleable youth mistakenly identifying as one of these things?) Or do you just believe that it doesn't matter if they honestly belief in the "closeted" model, because they are wrong as a matter of fact, and their belief is just a useful myth that keeps them recruiting for their in-group?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The gay claims about Mateen seem thoroughly disproven.
Thank you for this. I'm happy to be corrected.
My overall point that OP didn't have any reason to believe that this more recent shooting in Colorado was motivated by any particular anti-gay animus still stands, though.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Is it possible you're not accounting for the fact that men might be less likely to act creepy when there are other men around? If the moment every other man is off of a train, the last man starts acting creepy, it might seem to every other man that women never get stalked, harassed or ogled on the train.
It could also be the case that sexual harassment is rare, but the women who "win the lottery" and experience it after only a few train rides are more like to stop riding as a result. Sort of the opposite of the observation that most people who get addicted to gambling had beginners luck the first time they stepped into a casino. If you didn't have that pivotal first experience, you might continue riding the train as a woman.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
About what we saw until the 2010's?
That's fascinating to me.
On one hand, I definitely think that things like prison sexuality, bacha bazi and ancient Greece prove the idea that sexual behavior is partially a product of societal conditioning and material conditions. But I don't know how much that implies actual differences in people's underlying dispositions towards sex. If the story society tells is one where homosexuality is a moral failing, does this make a bunch of closeted gay guys, does it cause would-be bisexuals to bury their feeling so deep that they never act on them? Or can it actually affect a person's sexuality at the margins?
If there's been an increase of self-identified LGB people over the last 40 years, I think it's probably best explained by increasing societal acceptance, and perhaps some malingering from people claiming to be "bi" for social credit. However, I admit I don't know what to think of the T side of things. I suspect that the existence of HRT and other medical interventions does make the options look more attractive, but it's hard to say what that means in practice. More people in the modern world also get boob jobs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people wouldn't have been getting boob jobs through out all of human history if they had been available. They just happened to not be medically possible, so people used different methods like corsets and weird dresses to artificially create more feminine figures.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
But back then so was "homosexual" and some of the latter were also the former or just them saw them as fellows-in-oppression.
Sure, but it's not that surprising is it?
If society tells you being a gay man is the most horrible, disgusting moral failing a person can have, and then you happen to be gay and you become conscious of the fact that it's not actually all that strange or uncommon, I think one is going to be more likely to also question the rest of society's opinions on sexual matters.
I still think it was probably the case that the vast majority of gay men were not trying to "turn children gay", though a lifetime of repression might lead to a desperate man to sexually abuse minors at the margins. That seems to be at least some of what is happening with priest scandals in the Catholic church (the other elements of course being the position of respect occupied by a priest, and the church's desire to sweep things under the rug, rather than expose them to the light of the sun.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I don't think Gays Against Groomers should be banned, but I suspect they're roughly equivalent to the Log Cabin Republicans or many other "we're tribe X, but we hold unconventional views for members of tribe X" groups. Usually, you can model them as being run by leaders who are secretly tribe Y, and who wish to undermine the efforts of tribe X.
Gays Against Groomers should get a fair hearing in society if they're arguing in good faith, and individuals should punish them with inattention and apathy if they're not arguing in good faith.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
As another example, consider the case of Loudon County covering up a rape because it was done by a transwoman
This one isn't really a good example for the anti-trans side, is it?
The two students involved were fuck buddies and had met for liaisons several times in the school bathroom. At the time of the incident, they were meeting up, but the girl was intending to cut things off. This doesn't seem like the typical example people think of, when they think of the dangers of transwomen in women's bathrooms. Like, are women seriously scared that they'll arrange a meeting with a long-time, trans sexual partner in the bathroom, and that partner will react badly to them ending things and assault them in the bathroom? No, the fear is always that a stranger will assault them, and there's still very little evidence that this happens often enough to warrant the fear people have of it.
I thought there was also confusion as to whether the attacker was actually trans, or merely a GNC boy. Regardless of that, at the time didn't the school not have policies in place allowing trans students to use their preferred bathrooms? So, if lack of such policies is supposed to protect women, this case would tend to be a bad argument in favor of it.
Obviously, the school shouldn't have tried to cover the incident up. But that is sort of separate to whether it actually supports the anti-trans side.
I don't think it is "grooming."
You could call it "brainwashing" or something, based on one's ideological bent. But I think the prototypical case of grooming is an adult acting as mentor to a child in order to personally have a sexual relationship with that particular child.
To use an imaginary straight example, if a sex-positive progressive woman was trying to tell boys that their attraction to girls was fine, and that they should ignore Christian morality and pursue sexual relations with whatever girls will have them, we might consider that to be a bad sort of moral education, but that's not the same as her trying to butter those boys up for a sexual relationship with her (i.e. grooming.) She might just honestly believe that sexual liberation is a good thing for everyone, and not intend to ever personally benefit from the sexually loose boys she creates.
We should name harms correctly, and I've never heard a convincing, good faith argument that the conflation of traditional "grooming" and "grooming"-as-sexual-brainwashing was a good idea. It's like saying, "isn't it terrible the way that modern educators murder children?" and then I ask in surprise about what you're talking about, and you reply that many teachers teach kids pro-drug messages, which could result in their death, which is literally the same thing as murder. It might be a bad thing they're teaching the kids, but conflating two bad things is rarely a good faith argument tactic.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Kids also aren't supposed to be fucking in the school bathroom in the first place. An example of a boy lying about being trans to gain sexual access to women-only areas is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
It has been a while since I've looked at the case in depth, but I don't believe that the boy was lying about anything of the sort, and certainly not just to get into the bathroom for consensual sexual encounters. He was just gender non-conforming and wearing a skirt. The skirt did not grant him access to the bathroom, since the school did not have policies allowing children to use their preferred toilet at the time. It was just two stupid kids engaging in risky behavior, until one of them took a rejection particularly badly.
I agree that ideally, schools should not be turning a blind eye to students having sex in the school bathroom, but I think this probably happens more often then most people expect, and in the vast majority it involves a boy and a girl with no pretense on either one's part of being GNC or trans. They're just blatantly breaking the rules.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The amount of justification going on to protect the fuckwits on the school board is amazing. Victim-blaming the girl, blaming everyone except the activist group that exerted pressure on the school board to introduce such policies.
Don't project opinions onto me. I already said that the school acted in an irresponsible way. I agree that schools with better policies would not have had a second or third victim after this.
I don't really blame the girl for what happened. Obviously, the moment she ended their relationship, the assailant should have accepted it with grace and left her alone. However, I also don't think it is advisable for teenage girls to have sex with guys in school bathrooms, and while "he might take it badly when you end things" isn't the first item on my list of reasons why, it could certainly serve as one pragmatic reason why.
Hey, it was Trans Day of Remembrance recently when the list of "look at all the trans people who got murdered!" is regularly produced. By your logic, it was all their own fault for being murdered, yes? I mean, if a lot of them were sex workers or had fuck buddies, yeah? "Arranging meetings with long-term sexual partners" is their own fault!
Again, you assume too much of me. I don't victim blame, but I do accept pragmatically (not morally) that trans sex workers being at higher risk of being murdered is not the same thing as trans people in general being at higher risk of being murdered. I would prefer no one get murdered, period. But if people in risky professions get murdered, it is probably a sign that we should arrange society in such a way that either people don't feel compelled to go into those risky professions, or we limit the harm as far as possible of people entering those risky professions.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think the cover ups are a more general phenomenon. There's a reason why LGBT-friendly school districts and the Catholic church react in similar ways to a sex scandal - and a lot of it comes down to power and prestige, and the desire to maintain it. I agree this is a bad thing - all crimes should be aired and given sunlight, but there will always be incentives for institutions, especially highly respected ones in our society, to cover something up.
Our media environment is hardly ideal, but I do appreciate that thanks to tribalism, something like Fox News can occasionally report true negative things about one side of the political aisle. They did report on the story of Loudon, and I think that is a good thing, especially with the father being covered up and spoken over. The only issue is that because of that same tribalism, many people will never read a Fox News article about a bathroom scare and think about the implications of it, and those that do will come to entirely the wrong conclusions.
Perhaps Loudon county schools should have made that case instead of using violence (perpetrated by police) against the father of a crime victim.
I agree. I in no way condone Loudon county schools for their actions. I wish they hadn't done the cover up, and I wish they had policies that would have prevented the boy from going on to assault a second victim.
I also don't think the story, as covered up, is actually a good match for the fears people have of transwomen in bathrooms. If people want to use the Loudon case to speak against censorship, then they go with my blessing. If they want to use it as a case for why tranwomen shouldn't use their preferred bathrooms, then it is a huge reach, in my opinion.
Obviously, anecdotes against anecdotes is hardly good statistical thinking, but this hasn't been my experience, depending on how broadly one interprets "trans."
Within my friend-group, one female-bodied they/them person is hands down the most attractive person there - flat athletic tummy, great curves, etc. They're also a very autistic person who has trouble reading people, and I suspect that's the reason for them identifying the way they do. But they're polyamorous, and it seems like every unattached person in the group likes the idea of getting with them.
Though I suppose I'm being a little unfair, because a few of the trans people in my life have definitely reported something along these lines. One trans man talked about getting really into expensive gothic lolita fashion before admitting that wasn't working for him, and coming out as trans. And a trans woman I'm acquainted with reported a similar thing about trying to lean hard into male stereotypes before realizing it just wasn't working out for her.
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