popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
10d ago
Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.
In an ideal world, video game ratings would not cover violence but addictive content.
On the surface level, it's hard to tell the difference. Mario Kart is harmless. Civilization is risky. World of Warcraft is potentially life destroying. Only after you fall into a few traps yourself can you spot the difference from a distance.
popocatepetl
12d ago
Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
Didn't you just say "The decline should be observable within a few years"? Isn't that projecting to begin with?
Of course not, it's a testable prediction to confirm/disprove my priors on the present or near-term state of technology. @faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men; I say that is ridiculous, and that in this current AI companion technology will barely move the needle at all in terms of parasocial escapism. The only way to adjudicate these wordviews is to make predictions that will either pass/fall, which necessarily involves wait time to see this technology hit mainstream society. This is something I note that AI maximalists generally decline to do, merely making breathless statements about how AI will change the world "soon". (These inevitably fail, but the AI keeps getting better at wordceling or shaperotating, which was not in dispute from most AI skeptics.)
I would be happy to make a 6 month window prediction, or a 10 year window prediction — eg "fewer than 5% of teenage boys will spend more than ten hours talking to AI girlfriends per year — but I doubt you/faceh would accept the first, and I wouldn't even remember the second prediction by the time it proves correct.
EDIT:
And if it AI doesn't become cheap / good enough, how does that affect the question of whether AI GFs / porn being superstimuli? The question seems completely unrelated to me.
The question is not AI GFs being superstimuli; it is them being significantly better, more seductive, and thus more dangerous superstimuli, which was OP's claim. There is no evidence that that's here; there's no reasonable evidence that it will shortly be here, and there I plant my flag.
popocatepetl
16d ago
If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough
So we're still projecting. Sure, hypothetically, if.
From @faceh's toppost I got the impression he was saying the new, dangerous superstimulus is already here in the form of this questionably dubbed Death Note Misa reading you Grok responses.
popocatepetl
16d ago
dating sites are more of a superstimuli than speed dating bars? Social media vs. talking to people IRL? Watching porn on VHS vs on your phone?
.... the superstimuli lies in having an interactive agent that actively adapts to your prompts, your life circumstances, etc.
So, from each of your named examples, you see one rapidly increased at the expense of the other.
Do you expect OnlyFans, Pornhub, VTubers, Twitch, etc to start suffering big time because a more stimulating version of the same thing has emerged? The decline should be observable within a few years. I on the other hand expect that all those will continue to do just fine, because they're more or equally stimulating to Grok AI companions.
I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to. Then streamers and camgirls emerged for the personal touch. This is just a technically impressive but less potent instantiation of what we already have.
Register my prediction as "Society reached the saturation point on pornography and parasocial escapism without AI in the early social media era". The level of social dysfunction will increase because older cohorts are dying and social mores are decaying, but I don't expect Gen Alpha will be any more goonerish than Gen Z because of this technology.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
The other problem is that the wordcount of these stories doesn't only come from bloated prose; it comes from the design of the story itself. In Wheel of Time, for example, Robert Jordan should have simply axed the Faile Shaido arc and the Andoran Succession arc, which would take a hundred pages to tell even were he writing efficiently.
Even putting aside the limitations of LLMs, re-writing this kind of flaw in a novel is like adjusting the amount of flour and yeast in a cake that's already been baked.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
But reincarnation (not to speak of magic) should be a big proof that there is more to the world than material shit. Fang Yuan should have rather perfected his soul.
Yes. I do wonder whether there's hidden message here under the Daoist-flavored nihilism.
By analogy: there's throwaway worldbuilding in another cultivation webnovel, Zenith of Sorcery, that there are six afterlife planes you can be sent to after death. The character of the plane correspond to the choices you made in life: you can be send to a noblebright valhalla-type world of heroism and adventure, or a wireheaded-type plane of hedonistic pleasure, etc. Interestingly, the dead souls of each world think they've been sent to heaven. The "worst" is Red Prison, which is a constant state of warfare and struggle for power. My headcanon is that Fang Yuan got send to Red Prison.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Good writeup. While I enjoyed reading 600-ish chapters of RI, it suffers the webnovel problem of just being too long. The thematic juice has been mostly squeezed by the end of the first arc. With the revelation that the "righteous" "family" Gu Yue clan was actually
I put RI in the same category as Worm or Wheel of Time: I admire it, I'm glad to have read it, and while 'low status', it's a rare modern novel that speak to the reader, eternal themes, and the times at different levels. But it desperately needs to be about 30% its wordcount.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
This is yet another condemnation of GDP as a metric for prosperity, then. Whatever the numbers say, starvation was dramatically less common in the New World colonies than the old world. If an economist wants to quote numbers to me, that tells you what an economist is worth.
You'll see the same thing here among the more predestination-leaning Roman Catholics (like those following Thomas Aquinas)
Predestination-leaning Roman Catholics are just "Roman Catholics". God perfectly foresees the free choices men make within time, and thus has perfect knowledge of who will be saved. This, in the Catholic view, does not infringe on the agency of the sinner in responding to/failing to respond to grace. Some people see this as a logical contradiction: "If God already knows I'll steal cream from the office fridge on Tuesday, how do I have a free choice?" But the teaching makes good sense to me, as God exists outside of time; an easier way to conceptualize it might be to imagine that we made choices at the beginning of time, but are now experiencing them linearly.
Which leads to the core difference:
For everyone, if they were to repent, would be saved. Not everyone will in fact repent, but only those whom God predestines.
Per Total Depravity and Irresistible Grace, the very choice to repent is motivated purely by God, and the choice not to repent is likewise compelled by God. Agency does not exist. The sinner who will not repent was never free to repent, and the elect who repents was never free not to repent. The universe is a clockwork contraption devised for a glorious divine drama.
If God designed it that way, Lily Philips could never not sleep with 100 men, nor repent for sleeping with 100 men. It was all a plan, scripted by God, for God's greater glory.
I do not see the calivinist view as inherently ridiculous (or even monstrous, as people often describe it), but it is a real difference from other denominations.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
It's to be noted that the one thing the managerial class is incredible at which allows them to rule is this effect. This dissolution of responsibility where you're not even sure who's in charge of things anymore. Hypernormalization. [...]
Therefore I recommend that bit of wisdom from Clerks: if you're a contractor on the Death Star, you knew the risks. When the mobsters come to the house of their rival to shoot him and his people, they don't care that you're just there for remodeling.
Unfortunately, Brazil (1985) is the better reference here. Another feature of managerialism besides obscuring responsibility is that it makes the whole society complicit. Most everyone with a living wage, enough to support a family, is working on the Death Star.
It's a problem.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
There are plenty of desperate 30 something single women in Catholic circles.
Single, and honest-to-God never married despite being Catholic all that time? Huh. I suppose I'll believe you, but it seems wild. My thoughts were that @Capital_Room's best bet would be to date a secular woman marrying late, then either convert or get special permission. But given he's not actually Catholic I suppose these concerns are moot.
Now try finding that meaning when you're a 43-year-old unemployed man who's never managed to go on a date
Your purpose is to fix this. Are you sure there's nothing else you could be doing to improve your standing with regards to these problems? Truly nothing?
Gotta be frank. If he's going to be Catholic, he can't marry divorced women, or any non-Catholic (EDIT: you can get bishop permission), and the lower end of his strike zone is about 32 as of today. It may be joever for the married vocation.
If you have to ask, you fundamentally do not understand Christianity. [...] You appear to be using a model where forgiveness is for lesser sins, but too much sin means that this forgiveness is overwhelmed. In the first place, there are no lesser or greater sins
Also, from @SubstantialFrivolity: The girl who bangs 1000 dudes in one day is no worse, in God's eyes, than the sweet old grandma who snapped at her grandson in a moment of frustration.
It's hard to say uniformly "what Christians believe" about sin and hell because of denominational drift. The Catholic church certainly teaches different levels of eternal punishment exist for different degrees of unrepented sin. (And, correspondingly, different levels of virtue in life grant different amounts of glory in heaven.)
So yes, it's a mess. Even the most agreed-upon doctrines, such as that any sinner can repent and be saved; find dissent in at least a few churches, such as Calvinists with their TULIP.
(While I'm here, another denominational difference: a Catholic would say that Lily Philips loses eternal punishment for sleeping with 100 men by repenting, but the damage to her soul still requires purification, which can be accomplished in this life or after death. Eastern Orthodox Christians have a similar idea, but they have 'purification after death' rather than purgatory, and it varies in the particulars.)
Like Scott, he obfuscates a few specific descriptive beliefs about black people. Are you mad he doesn't provide a neat framed quote for the decentralized cancellation and lawfare apparatus to hone in on him?
The dissident right makes no bones about the fact it's distinct from the mainstream right and will list out the ways they differ. There is no "pay no attention to the party behind the curtain, I don't know what you're talking about, it's just called being a decent regular person" routine of the woke left. The fact they have a name for themselves should make the difference abundantly clear.
That being said, I agree with that the online right aren’t doing themselves any favors with the constant grievance-mongering and obsession with identity. It’s a huge problem when you start seeing everything through the lens of oppression, whether you're on the Left or the Right. or how certain groups are being victimized by a shadowy “elite,” is doing a lot of harm to meaningful discourse.
Meaningful discourse is harmed by people who dismiss arguments by aesthetics and "optics" (read: social bias) rather than dialogue about truth/falsehood. The question of which/if groups are being victimized by institutions is one with an objective answer.
This post can be rounded down to "those people look low status, and you don't want to be low status, do you"? I find the claims of woke identarians to oppression of blacks and women spurious based on reasons X, Y, Z. On the other hand, the claim of the "woke right" that white men are under systemic attack has no solid answer, so is merely met with a bare sneer.
but that they’re stuck in a feedback loop of resentment, much like the Left. They’re taking a legitimate frustration with cultural decline and turning it into an obsession with victimhood, which only makes the situation worse.
The solution of the "woke right" is to create parallel institutions and organize, organize, organize. See: Scyldings, OGC, Basket Weaving, Exit Group. It's hardly a counsel towards parasitism or learned helplessness.
But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.
Vaush and Tate are comparable poles of youth-targeted far-left and far-right influencerism, but the chud dad reacts to Vaush with a contemptuous snort, not like the /r/parenting folks above.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.
So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.
It's hard to think of content that arouses in the anti-woke right the sense of a priori absolute evil that Tate does to the feminist left. Maybe MAP advocacy? Children-targeted sissy hypno?
Sure, righties "hate" BreadTube, but it's not quite the same hate.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
Anyone here know anything about Catharism?
For a quickie, I enjoyed this blog, and thought it gave a good ELI5 view of what they believed vs. other spiritual traditions.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
It's also a fascinating little read on medieval daily life. The inquisition flipped over everyone's mattresses, so you get a lot of the seedy details on what (at least one) 13th century community was 'really like'.
I wonder if the priest sleeping with half the village's women and girls was typical, or if that was due to him being a weird gnostic heretic.
This is the problem a lot of ethnonationalist philosophy suffers from, it starts from the assumption that ethnos is primary.
People are still thinking on 1789-1945 terms. Ethnonationalism (really, it should just be 'nationalism') thrived then because the military meta made loyal mass armies the backbone of a good army. The only other period in history quite like it, as far as I know, was the infantry meta of the Warring States period 475 – 221 BC, and if you look at the institutions of Qin, the winner of that conflict, they sound exactly like something out of 19th century Prussia.
Absent this, empires frequently bring in outsiders to help them rule even their core provinces. The Mamluks had their Circassian slaves, the Turks their Balkan janissaries, the Roman emperors their freemen and barbarian-staffed administrations.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
It's so insane. It's like the European elites looked at all the problems Americans have with its black underclass and thought to themselves "I gotta get one of those".
The American elites don't have to deal with the problems of a black underclass. On the other side in the ledger, empires as far back as the Babylonians realized that ethnically divided provinces were easier to rule.
Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.
Are you able to expand on how you achieved that? Particularly how you got from suspending materialism to (a) and (b)?
Sure!
I didn't know the word at the time, but the technique is something Catholics call "active recollection". Periodically throughout the day, I would perform a kind of rapid partial body scan, thinking 'Where does this there-ness in my hand come from?' or similar. And then I would close my eyes and ignore everything external, and "push" my mind's watchfulness inward, looking for someone looking back.
According to a prayer manual I read later, this is one method of 'putting yourself in the presence of God', which is precondition to mental prayer. Unfortunately, according to prayer theory, God initiates contact and you merely respond, so I can't promise this technique will work for anyone reading this.
"As the soul being diffused throughout the whole body is present in all parts, so God penetrates our whole being and dwells in its every part, imparting to us life and movement. And as the soul resides nevertheless in the heart in a more special manner, so God is in a most particular manner in your heart, in the very centre of your spirit, which He vivifies and animates, being, as it were, the heart of your heart and the spirit of your spirit" (St. Francis de Sales)
I performed this mental ritual especially in the morning when waking up. The awareness, or perhaps the fear, of God continued for ten, twenty minutes, an hour afterward, and eventually started riding with me as a constant companion, like a depersonalized super-superego perched on my shoulder.
What does God feel like? It is changing as my prayer life develops, and it changes within prayer as I go deeper. God (the Father) feels like an ocean: he does not seemingly come to greet you, but you descend into Him, where it is cold and dark and you fear for your safety. And then there is what Christians call the holy spirit, which is like rain, and it washes you towards the ocean. Depending on what it wants from your prayer, it can fall on you as tears, reconciliation, and immense catharsis (this is what most people want from religion); other times it is intellectual, and ideas will arrive fully formed in your mind, accompanied with a "gentle breath" of overpowering peacefulness, often at odds with the content of its ideas. (A few months ago, the holy spirit pacifically informed me that heaven is somewhat like being tortured to death.)
Come to think of it, here's something else.
When I was age 12, I learned to masturbate. I started creating a "wall" around my mind. I would imagine a small point in the center of my mind and "push" everything out, to a 5 foot radius around me. I would put my force field up whenever I was doing the deed or having sexual thoughts. To anyone observing me, I would say they weren't allowed, they weren't allowed.
I forgot I even used to do this until a few months ago. The universe felt dead and my thoughts "alone" for twenty-odd years between then and now.
In retrospect, my early meditations were unconsciously about breaking "the wall", and allowing for things "beneath", "between", or at any rate very intimate with my thoughts. (Psalm 139 relevant: "If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are.") Before, I had unconsciously felt there was some "private room" I could withdraw to and consider the world freely, from an spectator's remove. Ironically, I even assumed this when meta-contemplating my own thoughts and desires from a materialist perspective. Of course, whether one accepts the framework of materialism or theism, no such room can exist.
Did Scott miss the plot here? CS Lewis has remarkably little to say about God as punisher. That's one of his signature traits as an apologist. In one brief section in The Problem of Pain, he concedes it as part of a thought experiment to defend the goodness of eternal hell in its most repugnant aspect. But everywhere else, he describe sin as self-torture, and hell as something you do to yourself.
Here lies the primary genius of Lewis as a Christian essayist. Reading him, you really feel, intuitively, that Sin, Hell, and Death are the same thing, rather than the last two being something God arbitrarily imposes on those who do the first. It's the explicit theme of his novella The Great Divorce, where God tries to draw everyone into heaven, but they flee into outer darkness because they prefer their bitter and envious ways. More theoretically, in Mere Christianity, he spends his chapters on the capital vices showing how they make you miserable even at a natural level — in my opinion, this chapter on Pride is one of the greatest ever written, and even a fourth grader can understand it.
Here is a poem in his first work of apologetics, Pilgrim's Regress, sung by an (implied) angel when seeing doomed souls on the fringes of hell:
This is, on its own, counterintuitive to accept, and IMO the through line of Lewis's oeuvre after Pilgrim's Regress is showing how it's true. CS Lewis's God is a big softie.
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