OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
6hr ago
We probably shouldn't be that surprised - the approval of the tribe is something humans are pretty-close-to-hardwired to crave, and the interaction of that instinct with social media can go very dark places. Would you rather be a famous freak, or a healthy, happy nobody? It's not surprising that young people in particular sometimes choose 'famous freak'.
(Apparently it is disputed just how much Gen Z kids want to be influencers or content creators, but even in the lower end, 5% of people is still enough to give you a big supply of freaks.)
I think age does come into it. Most of people doing this are kids, and people in their teens or early twenties often don't really understand lifelong consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are things like taking hormone treatments, getting surgery, or over-eating. Often it's only when you get a bit older and start to feel the creaks and pains that you realise you really do need to take care of your body. Still, if we combine big ambitions, insensitivity to or ignorance of consequences, a greater tendency to reckless behaviour, and brains being hacked by the virtual crowd, this is what you get.
When I was at school, there was usually a clown or a reckless attention-seeker in the class. Sometimes he (it was almost always a he) would pursue attention in obviously stupid, self-destructive ways. I remember a boy whose 'thing' was going up to to the fence during recess and throwing his packed lunch into the road, and watching it being run over by cars. Other students found it funny and cheered, so he kept doing it, day after day. I sometimes wonder how that guy felt a few hours later, as his stomach rumbled...
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I'm actually not sure this is about trans or gender at all.
Finnster reminds me of nobody so much as Nikocado Avocado - somebody who put a huge amount of himself online, obtained a large and enthusiastic following, and became addicted to the likes. This then leads to the person sharing himself more and more, modifying and selling his body in order to gain more and more attention, no matter how permanent, unhealthy, or damaging.
It's tragic, and I feel awful for the people doing this to themselves, but ultimately I have more condemnation for the social media system they exist within, and even for the slavering audience.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I agree, whenever rationalist types discuss AI, it sounds like they're living in an alternate reality.
That's largely my feeling here - a baffled "what the heck are you talking about?", in that what they describe this supposed 'AI' being or doing is just totally detached from anything these systems have been able to do in reality. It feels that they are inhabiting a totally different world entirely.
I guess it's fun that they're indulging their hobby of amateur science fiction writing, but I'm just not seeing any of the points where this is supposed to touch on the real world.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Charlie Kirk was a meme prior to his death, though, surely? Those edits with the TPUSA slogan, and the tiny-faced Kirk? After Kirk's death I remember a wave of articles explaining that, contrary to what many on the left thought, he was not just a meme, but rather a significant and influential political organiser. As the immediate aftermath of his death fades, I am unsurprised that he is a meme again.
KYM has a page on TPUSA going back at least to 2017, thank you Internet Archive, and it includes pictures of Charlie Kirk used for meme purposes. Part of it, I suspect, is just that Kirk had a kind of silly-looking face, and when he tries to look serious, it always comes off slightly askew. I've since seen videos and he was a lot more natural-looking and sounding in person, but the goofy pictures of him made him easy prey for meming, and that hasn't changed.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
And, well, bluntly it seems completely in-character for everything else we've seen of Platner thus far.
Could you convict him of rape in a court of law? Probably not. It is a notoriously difficult accusation, after all. But as something to add to the pile of evidence that Platner is a lousy person. I'm inclined to agree with Josh Barro. He lacks conscientiousness. He has poor executive function. He fails the character test for office.
(And just because I feel defensive, yes, there are a great many people currently elected to office in the US who also fail the character test, including many on the right, and including the president. This is also bad. But one bad thing does not excuse another bad thing.)
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Sure, but that's exactly the same thing a homeopath or a chiropractor would say. The word 'woo' is pejorative. Nobody uses it of himself or herself. I think the subculture is the interesting part. Whether it's nootropics or the older counter-culture embrace of mind-affecting drugs, or to take substances out of it entirely, the way that both original-flavour-hippies and rationalists have gotten really into meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, and eastern spirituality, I think there's a noticeable qualitative similarity.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Musicians still exist, but the community of "instrument players" around me is going increasingly gray. Young people generally don't create music, or they stick to various flavors of electronica that they can produce on their own.
This reminds me of Jacobs' concept of 'handmind'. The physical business of manipulating an instrument introduces resistance and friction, and perhaps also opportunity, that is not necessarily accessible otherwise.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'm surprised that people are surprised by this, to be honest?
If I think about 'rationalists', I think about people who are really into 'AI safety', who experiment with and use nootropics, who are keen on inventing and trying new life hacks, who are actively interested in reinventing things like relationship models from the ground up, and who for some reason are associated with California and the Bay Area...
Obviously that's a group that are going to be into woo because, well, they're already into woo. They always have been. They're already cousins of traditional hippies, right? They're pro-tech where the older generation of hippies tended to be anti, but you can see the kinship, surely?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
For what it's worth this observation is actually consistent with my experiences in other countries as well. I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London. The smaller and mid-size cities, on the other hand, are lovely.
In general I think I prefer the smaller towns.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Yes, for what it's worth, I've visited America a few times, and my experience has generally been that it's a nice place to visit but I am very glad I don't live there.
I don't want to judge all of America based on the big cities I've been to, because it is very large and diverse, and people have told me that I would find the Midwest or some of the smaller states and towns much more congenial, but you would have to pay me to make me consider living in New York. I find it quietly terrifying that people who live in that bubble have so much global influence.
So, maybe there are parts of America I would love, but for now, I still call Australia home.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
WhiningCoil didn't mention anything about the monarchy, and certainly I feel no shame in the fact that we have a king.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this.
Surely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., are evidence that other people can and have built comparable countries?
The whole process of "English people sail across the ocean, establish a colony, and build a free and independent nation that provides for the material prosperity of themselves and their descendants" has happened multiple times.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I think I'm mostly just annoyed by this sort of thing because the ABC is publicly funded - it's a federal agency and is in theory supposed to be politically neutral. Now, it isn't, and everybody knows it isn't, but even so I think it is unusually brazen of them to publish a piece, not marked as opinion or analysis, that firmly takes the view that the Trump administration is the enemy and opposed to the founding principles of the United States.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Hmm.
It's embarrassing to change one's mind, but I think I am coming around a little on this one. I think I'd like to see how the word 'jurisdiction' is used in other statutes contemporary to the Fourteenth Amendment, to get more of a sense of how it would have been read in the 19th century, but I'll grant that it's not crazy to say that, for example, a tourist currently holidaying in the US is not subject to its jurisdiction in the same sense that a permanent resident is.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I know you mean the American ABC, but I would like to submit this from the Australian ABC as some of the most naked and patronising propaganda I've ever seen.
I think Trump is disastrous, but on the fourth of July you should probably not publish the Declaration of Independence annotated with "by the way, Republicans are evil" after every paragraph.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
That's a reasonable reversal. What are some of the things that Trump and his administration have done that I approve of, or that I think went well?
I suppose that's an easy one for me, because I approve of most of the anti-DEI stuff. I think that moving towards more merit-based systems of hiring in the federal bureaucracy was generally good. I believe the administration has taken some action toward funding charter schools, which I approve of. Illegal immigration on the southern border has significantly decreased in Trump's second term, and that's a good thing.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
SSPX is qualitatively different to the Union of Utrecht. The culture and internal structure of the specific breakaway sect matters.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Shouldn't you add more of your own comments, rather than just repost the views of... er... some guy on Twitter/Telegram?
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I don't know anything about you as a person, so if you are not one of those people who feels reflexively obligated to defend everything Trump says or does, then I do not pity you or have contempt for you. I think of personal friends who voted for Trump on the view that he was the less bad of the options available to them, and who do not make excuses for his bad qualities.
Where I come in - sympathising with Meskhout - is when dealing with people who seem to be committed to the, for lack of a better term, Trump cult. I suppose a simple test is to ask a question like, "Can you tell me some things Trump has done that you disagree with, or that you think went badly?" Every politically sane person has some disagreements or disappointments even with their own favoured side.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Fair enough. Just take me as making an unrelated comment, I guess.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I do sympathise with our own ymeskhout on Trump and his supporters - okay, I grant that certain claims of malfeasance might be false or overstated, but the instinct to defend him, the requirement to defend everything no matter how corrupt or absurd, is profoundly humiliating.
In what way was the Roman empire a one world government? There existed plenty of peoples outside of the Roman empire, whom Christians went to and converted. St. Thomas famously went east, even (some say) as far as India. In the Bible itself, Philip converts the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), who is on the way back to his home country. Ethiopia (or Kush, probably) was not in the Roman Empire. Or are we discounting Christians in Persia?
If we take Pentecost as our example, the list of peoples (in Acts 2:9-11) includes many from outside the Roman empire, including Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, and Arabs.
I think that much of the early church existed inside the Roman empire, and did not advocate the overthrow or destruction of the Roman empire, but firstly the Roman empire was not a world government, and secondly Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman empire.
If I were making a case for Christian one world government I might instead frame that in terms of Catholic claims about the papacy's universal jurisdiction. Fortunately I'm not Catholic and I consider those claims to be in error. I think that visible signs of church unity would be good and I'm broadly in favour of ecumenism, but I don't think that requires some sort of global secular government.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
It can be both, of course. Babel is the divine frustration of a human-willed plan, which is therefore experienced as tragic, even if the scattering was intended all along.
One is tempted also to compare it to Pentecost, partly because the gathering of the nations is the obviously necessary corollary to the scattering of the nations, but also because Pentecost shows us the Holy Spirit speaking to all people in their own tongues. The gathering does not remove the diversity of languages, but includes and accommodates it.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
If you let me get on my hobby-horse, I'll argue that the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince. Its understanding of itself is shaped much more by secular forces than it would like to admit.
All churches exist in history and are shaped by forces beyond themselves, but then, Protestant churches generally make 'lower' claims about themselves. We are the locally and historically contingent expression of the universal church in this particular place and time.
This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.
The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.
It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.
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