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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36679 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true. They're clever memes someone heard and want to apply all over the place wherever their opponents gather.

To whit, I've heard LARP applied to online groups, who clearly fail the LA; to actual violent terrorists who clearly fail the RP; and to everyone in between. It's mostly meaningless, just meant to associate your enemy with losers in capes.

Thanks for posting this and defending it for me because I was going to post pretty much the same thing. I'm not a fan of when someone takes a term with a vague but widely understood meaning and then creates a very specific definition and uses the term as if that's the real definition. Academics do this a lot, but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

Anyway, I think the rule should be that if the people using the term can't tell you what they mean by it exactly, it means nothing. It may make people feel smart to come up with a hyper-specific definition of LARP but then they just find the general public using the expression the way they want. So it's pointless.

but I'm afraid you did this yourself a while back with your precise definition of tackiness. I realized that throughout the rest of that thread I was very careful to use alternate language whenever I was tempted to say tacky in a context that didn't fit your definition, which made me realize that, as fun as your definition was, it didn't really reflect how people talk in real life.

On the one hand I'm flattered anyone remembers my writing.

On the other, this comment really makes me step back, in that I had a lot of fun writing out an elaborate definition of tacky, and thought I was doing so in good fun towards an enlightening descriptive view of reality; when apparently an intelligent reader would interpret the comment as a proscriptive definition.

Raising the questions: Am I bad writer? Or are the people I think are using too elaborate definitions also just having fun and hanging out?

LARP, Cargo Cult, Skin Suit, The Purpose of a System is What it Does, The Cruelty is the Point, Master/Slave Morality are all terms that are just used as boo-lights when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

I'd strongly disagree. All of these have utility in describing human individual and group behavior. I say this even though I strongly disagree with even proper applications. The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

"The cruelty is the point" is a critique of the endpoint that starts with "be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness". Meanness, cruelty in other words, is the core of many social enforcement mechanisms. Pointing out that some action is "cruel" will often not get people to abandon that action, because to at least some degree they believe that "cruelty" is necessary. I certainly do.

The concepts are coherent, and even if heavily misused, their proper applications are still relevant.

Notice how my sentence ends:

when they're used as conclusions or insults without extensive structural arguments justifying why they are true.

The cruelty is the point can be justified in numerous ways as a phrase used to describe some policy or behavior.

It can also be used as a lazy insult to imply that one advocates a policy out of a sadism or hatred without showing one's work.

Sitting around running extra processor cycles justifying why what you're doing isn't a LARP or maybe it's a LARP but that's good actually is fine, but it's a waste of time when LARP is just being thrown out as a lazy generic insult by your interlocutor.

A good point, and my bad for not reading more closely.

Cheers.

"The cruelty is the point" isn't typically used to describe people who believe cruelty is necessary to serve a greater good (eg as a deterrent) - nine times out of ten, the implication is that the target believes cruelty is desirable in itself. Ends vs means. Some people think we need to punish criminals "cruelly" to deter others, even if, in a perfect world, no one ought to suffer; other people think justice involves making criminals suffer as punishment, even on a desert island. "The cruelty is the point" is typically used to accuse the first kind of people of secretly being the second kind of people, but hiding behind more socially acceptable utilitarian justifications.

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