wemptronics
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User ID: 95
I'm a huge fan of the hospitality and courtesy norms. It's just unfortunate it's just not a very good way to organize things at any macro level in the absence of a petrochemical lottery win.
I think we're being gracious by making sure no guest crosses the threshold without an offer of beverage. If I notice a confused looking tourist I'll try to make sure they're okay and know where to go. I feel good about myself when I do these things.
Here on the other side of the world dirt poor Afghans drop everything to treat a complete stranger to dinner, offer them a place to sleep, and make sure they have a ride to the other side of the country in the morning. They do all this even though they can't communicate with the stranger. It's a major reality check for any pride I have in so-called Southern hospitality. Maybe it's not a great way to organize society, but it's still impressive.
wemptronics
5d ago
Hah! I haven't gotten the impression he hates interacting with locals. He has a strong mind for independence, is somewhat guarded, but he must have higher openness than most to want to do what he does. His own personal hell is probably traveling to Hawaii or Prague with 3 other couples to bicker about the daily itinerary. Now that'd be fun.
Matt Lakeman is a blogger who reads books about a country, visits that country, and synthesizes this experience into a single article. He also has some type of crossover with SSC which might explain why his posts are memoir sized. The most recent post-Taliban Afghanistan travel post where he visits each provincial capital in Afghanistan I thought was fun. Fair warning, In This House Long Form Means Long Form. It is over 45,000 words, so clear your Sunday afternoon.
Lakeman writes throughout about the overwhelming positive attention, hospitality, and friendliness he received from local Afghans. He relays he wasn't bothered by most Taliban members he interacts with -- mostly they are bored security guards -- although notes at least one scary character. Norms of politeness, friendliness, generosity, and "sovereignty" are mentioned throughout the memoir. As I understand, he means sovereignty as shorthand for the likelihood of an individual of a culture to value a stranger's personal space, which Afghans most certainly do not. A real quagmire for nerdy travel bloggers! The positive attention he received was so great that Lakeman has dubbed Afghanistan the friendliest place on earth-- a title won from previous champ, Iraq.
Is this fun? Unsure, but I'm deleting all the other jibber jabber I wrote about it. General travel thread... and/or travel blog thread.
P.S. If you do read it consider evaluating this claim. "I think there is something to the idea that being – by Western standards – overly friendly and hospitable to strangers is indicative of a collectivistic and tribalistic mentality that in extremis leads to terrible conflict, often intranationally"
P.P.S. Bonus internet throwback Off-Road Trip Through the Democratic Republic of Congo series of forum posts circa 2010 (also long) This one is definitely fun.
"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.
Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.
Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.
In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) allocated $78 million dollars of its federal money towards competitive grants. That same year Mellon graciously funded $540 million in grants and fellowships. A historical look at NEH appropriation on the NEH website demonstrates the shrinking pie. A shrinking pie problem that is compounded by greater fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that contributed to fragmentation, and now, pain.
These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.
Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.
On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.
I can find no easy way to break down Mellon's grantmaking by interest or cause in the time it took to create an afternoon write-up. I can tell you that Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these proudly tells me that $934 million dollars went towards Gender Equality. Mellon's report seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.
An NYT comics guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique as well others that came before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.
I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:
Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.
The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.
No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they possible can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.
How familiar are you with the case? Because it reads like a swinger presenting conman type succeeded in persuading a bunch of dumb low life deviants -- more likely to be rapists -- to entertain his own fetish. Some portion of them were fully cognizant of the situation, but others were too stupid to see the game or indeed convinced themselves their fantasy was real. A French retiree pimping his wife of 40 years without consequences. In other words you, a low life, congregate on Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum so you're very motivated to indulge in your preferred paraphilia. The number of men in the Wiki chart without prior criminal convictions is a minority.
If we restrict the circumstances to the worst aspects of the real crime as we see it, then I feel safe with an an estimate of <1% of men as likely to participate in it. If we ignore the substance abuse claims said to a judge we have: a child porn guy, sixteen prior convictions including child sexual assault guy, a repeat domestic violence offender, "eight prior convictions for theft" man, career drug dealer fled-to-Morocco guy, a previous inpatient at psych ward, and a one Mohamed Rafaa who had served time for raping his own daughter. What percentage of men are likely to do any of those things? There's an answer to some of your questions in the data of sexual offenders.
A couple do sound like average enough middle-aged men, but then I'm reminded these were late middle-aged men (old for rapists, statistically) found themselves guilty of rape after they trolled the Roofie and Rape Unconscious Women Fantasy forum. I don't think there are any men in this case who were surprised when they discovered they were quite willing to engage in a criminal taboo. Bob, college student, who decides to have sex with Anne after a night out on the town because she said she would put out but fell asleep is something that sounds way more generalizable to me. Bob committed date rape, and I'd guess 5-15% of men are potentially like Bob. The complexity of consent is no stranger to this forum and few cases are as clear cut as sex with a drugged French retiree. Bob rarely finds himself popping into the bedroom of an old, sleeping French woman with her scumbag husband cheering him on with high-fives and assurances from the cuck chair.
Sex with an unconscious Scarlett Johansson lookalike does sounds like something with more potential popularity among men. An unconscious woman, however, is next level for "Are you done yet?" My assumption is that sex with an unconscious stranger is (I imagine) categorically different than bad sex with a disinterested or bored woman no matter how attractive they are. (Can confirm.) So we're back to asking about general rates of sexual deviancy and willingness to act on that. Almost all men will have sex with women not fully interested in the sex, but <5% could shamelessly rape strangers to completion as unconscious sex doll objects without memory.
You know who I bet could answer your questions well? Aella.
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