vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.
I think there's a good chance that Classical Liberalism is dead in America. I had a little hope that the right might try to revive it, but Trump 2 has clearly not brought anything like a bedrock of Classical Liberalism back to our politics. If we're going to have to suffer under the rule of identity politics from the Right or the Left anyways, might as well start quietly building the foundations for a better society like Kolmogorov, and not worry about what we can't control.
Of course, this is all acting with some assumption that something like a normal human society exists in a few decades, and I don't rule out the possibility that AI may prove to be a total game changer in numerous hard to predict directions.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle.
I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.
I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.
Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture
I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.
The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.
It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.
Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".
I don't believe that right-wingers are just mentally deficient.
My belief is closer to "agonistic pluralism" or the idea that within society there's a tendency for the struggle between various personality phenotypes to result in better outcomes overall. You need a certain amount of openness in society, but too much can lead to bad outcomes. You need a certain amount of fear of the Other, but too much can lead to bad outcomes.
I think there are plenty of historical examples to learn from. Look at Rome conquering Greece militarily, and then being "conquered" by Greek philosophical thought. Would Cato the Elder, who famously spoke out against Greek philosophy as un-Roman, have been happy to learn that his grandson, Cato the Younger, was the poster boy for Stoic martyrdom two generations later? I think for us non-Romans looking back, we can see that it was a mixed bag. The Greeks had a lot of good ideas, and Rome importing them probably helped them transition from a Republic to an Empire, and maintain their new system for hundreds of years, but it did come at the cost of being "less Roman" than the generation of Cato the Elder in some sense.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that we'll always get the perfect balance of struggle at all times. In fact, I'm worried that various trends of modernity might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs for us.
For example, I suspect that men and women in heterosexual relationships had a tendency to "balance each other out" personality-wise in the past, and the increasing number of single men and women and the nightmare of the modern dating scene is leading to this balancing not happening. So we get women flying off into extremes of Progressivism and Leftism, and men flying off into extremes of Rightism. And honestly, I don't like either tendency. I was against Wokeism, and I'm against Trumpist identity politics as well.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along. See also Leo Strauss, and his idea that great thinkers of the past were often esoteric and hid their actual ideas for only the smartest to find and deal with.
I think our relatively free and open era has spoiled a lot of us. We chafe against any limits on our abilities to say whatever we want and not have the people around us react with social opprobrium. And yet, Plato, writing one generation after Socrates was executed for his open practice of philosophy, is supposed to have said in his seventh letter, 'I have never written down my true beliefs.'
I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.
Don't get me wrong, there's value in being a Socrates or a Helvidius Priscus, and being willing to die for your beliefs, while speaking truth to power. But there is also value in being a Plato or (as Strauss sees them) a Maimonides or a Machiavelli, and hiding your true views from all except a vanishingly small number of highly discerning readers. Luckily, the internet is still anonymous enough that I think we get a great compromise: able to be open about our beliefs in places like the Motte, and able to be Straussians/take the Kolmogorov option everywhere else in our lives.
In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.
I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.
My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience. I think this also explains a lot of the increasing urban-rural divide in American politics, with people often self-sorting based on their genetic predisposition to cosmopolitanism and tribalism.
Unfortunately for the tribalists, there are a lot of benefits to city living due to networking effects, and so, generally speaking, city folk enjoy a higher standard of living than rural folk in the modern day. Since rural folk will have a higher genetic predisposition towards tribalism, this leads to growing resentment at their "unfair" status compared to urban elites, in a cycle that just gets worse and worse as the genetic ability to be cosmopolitan leaves rural breeding stock with each generation, leaving those who are left behind less and less able to cut it in the city.
It's not that rural people are genetically inferior. They're well suited to a small, close-knit tribal environment that was the human norm for 2 million years, but in the last 10,000 years the equation has flipped and cosmopolitanism generally outcompetes tribalism over the long term, and so humans keep building cities, and rural folk keep losing out and being xenophobic about the cosmopolitan urban areas.
I actually think H.P. Lovecraft is a great example of this phenotype. He was undoubtedly a genius, but with many of his aliens I find myself wondering if there isn't some way we could team up with them in a vast, galactic civilization? For example, the starfish-headed elder things and the mi-go seem like species we could eventually reach some sort of understanding with. Similarly, the underground K'n-yan seem like people we could get along with, under the right circumstances. And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)
But Lovecraft's horror was so effective because he understood the danger the Other posed. One of his most racist stories, "The Horror at Red Hook", which is partially inspired by his time living in New York city, is all about the effect that immigrant populations have on a native-born population. And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
We already crossed this rubicon. Yes they can and did in 2020-2024.
They did. I wasn’t allowed to work or travel to weddings during Covid. They won the election. They enforced their will.
I understand that they did that. I'm asking you if you consider that legitimate within your own political beliefs?
Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?
As another set of examples, do you consider the American Revolutionary War or the American Civil War to be just wars? Is it ever correct to rebel against the current authorities? If so, what circumstances make it correct or legitimate?
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.
This sort of doesn't answer my question. I think everyone except for the most committed anarchists believe it is appropriate for police to kill to enforce the law in at least some circumstances.
What I am interested in is what the limits to your position are? For example, you mentioned voting in your original post as a possible source of law enforcement legitimacy. Given that there is a fair argument that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 elections if not for COVID, and thus it was the democratic will of the people to have harsher lockdowns, under what circumstances do you think it would have been appropriate for law enforcement to kill people who violated curfews or lockdowns in 2020-2022?
I guess I'm curious if you recognize any limiting principle on law enforcement's use of lethal force? Do you hold democratic will above constitutional limits? Do you bite the bullet when your political opponents are in power, and accept that they can pass and enforce laws that might make you a criminal under the right circumstances?
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
For what it is worth, I think your position and /u/The_Nybbler's are both fairly reasonable takes.
They don't seem to be what /u/Opt-out was saying, hence me asking the question the way I did. I don't believe anyone else in this thread has implied that they think law enforcement officers should kill people who merely obstruct them, and I was trying to clarify whether it was just a sloppily worded post or whether it represented their true opinion on the subject.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
My intention was to clarify /u/Opt-out's exact position. I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on potentially sloppy wording.
I don't know, based on the comment I'm responding to alone, whether they would make the sort of statement you're making here, or whether they would disagree and say that even attempting arrest would not have been necessary in this case, and going straight to trying to kill her would have been appropriate and (potentially) just. Hence my question.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job.
If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response? I doubt this would have become a viral story if that was all that ended up happening.
Most people who find the situation outrageous seem to think so because they believe the suspect was truly trying to flee and not hit any of the officers, and they therefore think that the use of deadly force was not appropriate. Separate from any of the facts of the case, is it your position that merely obstructing law officers or fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?
Because I can say that sounds like a cure that is worse than the disease to me.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant. The gayness is part of their expression of being counter to normal behavior. Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it. Deviant, abnormal sex is explicitly part of the appeal.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are a lot of straight men who would be deviant if they could get a woman down with it.
I've spoken with a middle aged straight man who admitted to me he was constantly fantasizing about some pretty out there fantasy fetish scenarios involving his wife, but who knew from the few times he had brought them up that she would never come around to trying any of them. Who knows how many people are in marriages or relationships where they quietly settle for never getting the deviancy they crave?
We often only know about historical fetishism due to (possibly libelous) accounts of rulers with fetishes. Who knows how old some popular internet fetishes were historically? Maybe gay guys are more likely to bring up their deviant desires, and thus more likely to find someone at least game to try them out.
I think the problem is that about 30 years earlier, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term "the gaze", and Laura Mulvey was understood to be developing an extension of the concept in her original essay about the "male gaze."
So it's not like you coining "black stealing" in isolation at all. It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.
EDIT: As the Nybbler said elsewhere in this thread, "male gaze" is generally taken to be something the camera is doing. A female director can give a film a "male gaze" if she films a female subject in a particular way, and a male director can give a film a "female gaze" if he films his subjects in a particular way. This is part of what I meant when I said that a "male gaze" is not equal to "gaze of males." Using it to refer to "looks/gazes of males" is a bit like talking about "charmed quarks" like they're under a literal magical spell. Sometimes jargon takes on a very specific meaning, slightly disconnected from the words that compose the jargon.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached
Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything[...]
(emphasis mine)
This is probably a lost battle at this point, but it's worth pointing out that "male gaze" as a term is not synonymous with "the gaze of males." The article where Laura Mulvey coined the term is full of Freudian academic bullshit, but it is pretty clear "male gaze" is related to film, and not just something men do:
To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create [a convincing] world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.
I don't blame you for this misuse. I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had. This has affected a lot of terms in wider folk feminist discussions. Another big one that comes to mind is "toxic masculinity", which is notably not the thesis that all masculinity is toxic.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.
I feel like some sort of equivocation is happening on the word "sexualizing (oneself)" here.
I don't think you need to be redpilled to believe that female celebrities in the social media era, love taking pictures that sexualize themselves and posting them online for the world to see. Who, male or female, doesn't like getting positive attention from people you're attracted to, or making your rivals for said attraction envious or respectful of you?
However, I think you're ignoring the idea of an intended audience and social context.
The pictures that surfaced during the Fappening were generally intended for intimate partners and no one else. Just as a Victorian era burglar who broke into a woman's house while she was wearing lingerie in anticipation of her husband's return would have very little grounds to claim that the woman was a loose hussy, a 21st century hacker who finds sexual photos on a female celebrity's phone that were only ever intended for intimate partners doesn't have much ground to claim that she "enjoys sexualizing herself" with no qualifications.
Sexualizing herself for whom? What level of sexualization and in what context?
(As an aside, I'm not actually sure that the Ariel Winters articles you linked demonstrate what you're trying to claim. In the first link, she's talking about "backlash" she received for a sexy graduation dress she wore, and a nude bathtub photo. In that context, her comments about sexism and the industry seem to be less about people sexualizing her in the first place, and more about people daring to say negative things about her choices of sexy attire and photos. This seems to make the first article continuous with the second one you linked, not contrary to it. I agree with aspects of your intended conclusion, but I don't think you picked a good example in this case.)
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
The example of the Roman dictator Fabius also springs to mind. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
vorpa-glavo
14d ago
Wouldn't one business-related explanation be that local reporting in legacy media is practically dead already?
This was always one of the arguments of what would happen as the internet killed and absorbed more and more of legacy media over the last several decades. Fewer local papers means fewer local journalists. Fewer local journalists means fewer local scandals exposed.
Local journalism was never a perfect guarantee that every scandal would inevitably be exposed, but when there was a small fleet of local journalists supported by subscribers in every medium-sized town in America, I can believe it was far more likely for something like "childcare welfare fraud by Somali immigrants in Minnesota" to be looked into, once an interested local citizen sends the tip in.
vorpa-glavo
17d ago
I think "most people, left or right, will probably band together in a disaster" is compatible with a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.
vorpa-glavo
19d ago
Is it really oikophobia, or just political tribalism?
I still think that old proverb, "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against the world." generally applies.
The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
I've also implicitly compared them to Lovecraftian horrors and hive-minded vampires in this same thread. I'm not sure why you're hammering this point. It isn't a gotcha, it is built into what I am saying.
And I wouldn't say "blame" is the correct word here. I said it is noble to be Socrates or Helvidius Priscus and die for your beliefs. That isn't blame. I just personally think that there is more wisdom in being Plato or Maimonides. People are allowed to disagree with me, and turn themselves into Socrates or Helvidius Priscus.
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