vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)
While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.
It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)
Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.
This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.
The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.
Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."
Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.
I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.
I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."
EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:
Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.
“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”
In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.
As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.
I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.
On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)
This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.
I was honestly speechless when I read that.
This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:
Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.
They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.
There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.
In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.
If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.
Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.
[...]
Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.
My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.
To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.
I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.
A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.
Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
I think it was around the time Lukas did his ‘why you should steal a woman’s photo to impersonate one online’ thread.
Could you please link to this thread? Sounds interesting.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
This is a fascinating tempest in a teapot.
My senior capstone in undergrad was making a scheduling application for a big yearly conference that the school held each year. They told me that it took a group of people about two weeks to work out a schedule by hand. They gave my group a list of constraints and the panelist data, and we made something that could make a schedule in a few seconds, which I believe is still in use to this day.
While LLMs are different from a bespoke application, I think that anything that makes the lives of con organizers easier is a good thing, and it saddens me that the new generative AI luddites are rejecting useful tools based off of vibes and almost superstitious taboos. That said, I do understand the concerns about false positives and negatives, and think that some sort of appeals process, or perhaps even a way to request the AI's output would be a nice courtesy to provide to applicants.
vorpa-glavo
18d ago
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I'm strongly anti-safetyist. The optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero. The government could obviously reduce tornado deaths to zero if this outcome was prioritized at all costs. We acknowledge that there are diminishing returns and don't invest the resources to drive tornado deaths to zero. It seems extremely unlikely to me that the current resource distribution is optimal, though plausibly it's in a local minimum and moving out of it will cause some amount of pain.
I'm in agreement with you here. That's why I brought up the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL) calculations that the government uses. They're not beyond debate - I could certainly see arguments for raising or lowering the value from the $7.5 million it is set at, or using different statistics like Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) that might come to different results. But they are a reasonable starting point for cost-benefit trade-off discussions, and they set a limit to how much money we're willing to throw at saving a life through government policies around things like disaster preparedness and response, healthcare, road safety, etc.
Even if the optimal number of yearly tornado deaths is not zero - if we were successfully reducing tornado deaths with advanced warnings at a reasonable cost tradeoff, and we just stopped doing that earlier this year, then I think there is a fair case to make for us going back to the way things were on this particular front. I recognize that I have not yet conclusively made the case for this, and I'm trying to take a step back and do a more thorough investigation of the trends and causes in tornado deaths to get a better handle on what is going on here.
Your point about my pronouncements being somewhat premature is well taken. I certainly agree that an enduring spike in tornado deaths through to 2027 would be better evidence of the position I have staked out. Though I think setting up the "natural experiment" in a way that we can be sure it is due to staffing cuts and not something else is kind of tricky. Probably, you would look at all tornado prone areas of the United States, see which ones had staffing cuts and which ones did not over a relevant time period and then look at the long run trends going back well before and well after the DOGE cuts. Once the data was in, you could make suggestive correlational arguments that wouldn't be the end of the discussion, but might be enough to convince someone that it was indeed a mistake.
I couldn't find any information on whether an emergency alert was sent out in Kentucky (though I didn't look very hard) but if one wanted to make a case for these cut positions being important (rather than just accepting a statement from the Weather Service union) you'd want to dig up some data regarding how many tornados are "typically" caught -- and how quickly -- pre and post cuts to quantify the effectiveness of these local overnight forecaster positions.
All good points, and I have started to do some digging into the data.
I'm sure more information will emerge on this particular disaster, and I'm certainly willing to eat crow if more information emerges and I jumped the gun too early here.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
In my own case, I'm mostly a lurker here who likes to see a light-over-heat discussion between smart generalists across the political spectrum and extending to well outside the Overton window. I learn so much here, and get a ton of ideas for new books to read or topics to look into.
But I mostly don't comment, because I usually feel out of my depth. I'm a huge believer in the project of the Motte, but it is only in cases where I feel like there is a vacuum of a particular thought that I feel the need to throw my hat into the ring.
I think part of it is that the more heterodox people of the Motte have views forged in fire, and have been forced by necessity to become the best read, most expert exponents of their own ideas due to their having a position that is rare in the rest of society.
You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.
To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.
EDIT: Removed formatting point.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Large, diverse empires often produce "multiple choice" origin stories. In Rome, depending on your tastes, you could tell the story of the Trojan Aeneas carving out a part of his ancestral homeland on Italy, or the story of Romulus and Remus creating a cultural melting pot first through offering safe haven to foreign criminals then through the kidnapping of women of the Sabine people, or the story of the last king of Rome, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, whose overthrow marked the start of the Roman Republic. Each story emphasized different aspects of Romanitas, and each could be used to argue for Rome being more culturally open or closed, or more willing to embrace foreigners as fellow Roman citizens or to reject them.
While the United States isn't a central example of an old-fashioned empire (China and Russia are far closer to this model), it is big enough and diverse enough that it has started to develop a "multiple choice" origin story of its own. There are several possible "foundation myths" for America. There's the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, the "second founding" after the Civil War (where the 13th-15th Amendments saw a massive increase in Federal power), or the "modern founding" of America as the global hegemon with the victory in WWII and the defeat of the Axis powers. There's the Mayflower and the Pilgrims vs. the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.
I'm not sure I'd buy the idea of "social justice politics" as a form of ethnogenesis. By and large, I do think the assimilated "white Americans" have largely displaced "anglo Americans" as a distinct cultural group, and that after two or three generations most white American immigrants are indistinguishable from any other white American. I suspect that most light-skinned Hispanics will probably be similarly absorbed into the white blob within a generation or two, thus strengthening the "white" coalition. At the same time, groups that are more visually distinct occupy a weird space. Asians kind of get treated as "honorary whites" or "model minorities", but I recently spoke to an Asian American man who felt threatened enough in the community he was living in (trucks of Trump supporters were driving through Asian ghettos and harassing the residents) that he went out and bought a gun. And of course, the hardest square to circle is the African American community, especially the ADOS subgroup which has never held power (note that Barrack Obama was not of ADOS descent.)
I think that social justice politics is just an attempt to form a non-"white men" coalition. College educated white women were xenophilic enough that they were happy to throw in with a variety of visible minorities in order to argue for shared interests in the spoils system of jobs, prestige and power. But with the election of Donald Trump there's been a vibe shift, and I'm not sure if the non-"white men" coalition can hold into the future. Heck, Kamala lost, but the coalition she tried to throw together was certainly some odd bedfellows, like Liz and Dick Cheney. I think we're about due for a political realignment, and I'm not sure where every group will end up in the new arrangement.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.
The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."
While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.
Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.
Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.
An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test.
(Emphasis mine.)
Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.
Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.
And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.
Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.
But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.
I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.
To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
EDIT: Typos.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.
But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.
As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
My instinct is that MFSP is just a form of the chinese robber fallacy. There are enough male feminists who also happen to be sex pests, that when presented one after the other and subject to the availability heuristic on recall, people erroneously conclude that it was because there's something up with male feminists.
This is similar to your "salience" bullet point, but I would consider it part of a more general phenomenon of "Good Guy Sex Pests." How many interviews are there with the next door neighbors of malefactors who say things like, "He always seemed like the nicest guy"? I don't think "male feminists" are particularly special, except insofar as it is one of many ways to earn some people's automatic trust. But I think there are many categories of "good guy" that this applies to: pastors, police officers, a wholesome actor, etc. Different communities have different roles that confer automatic trust, and so every community is going to have problems with malefactors who take advantage of such trust in some way.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.
I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.
I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.
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