site banner
PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2598 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 26, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What is the general reaction internationally to the US war against Iran? Like, is western Europe as anti-USA as they are anti-Russia in the context of the Ukraine-Russia conflict? How are people in other countries reacting to or viewing it so far?

I am looking for a compilation of writings from early European explorers, who first made contact with tribes in remote parts of Africa, India, Australia, North America, and South America. I would be curious to learn about the traditions, quality of life, and good/bad about pre-colonial life of these tribes before they were disturbed by outside influences. Trying to google this wasn't particularly fruitful, and this lost reddittor from 9 years ago is the closest advice I could find: https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/7gbg2t/explorer_journals/

Hardline racist conservatives would caricature the natives as savages. Mainstream media liberals would caricature the natives as living in paradise before the evil Europeans showed up. Which is it? I'd be curious to read the perspectives of the actual Europeans who were the first to meet these people. Anyone read any books from a historian about this? Looking for some reading material after I finish my Roman history book.

Partial match: Try The True History of The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo. It's more honest and unfiltered than most narratives.

I read a book about the adventures of Rene CaillieĢ who travelled alone in West Africa to reach Timbuktu at a time when most European explorers would not survive the tropical fevers. Probably this one. The area was under Moorish control so he disguised himself as a Moor, learned Arabic, pretended he wanted to convert, was essentially a hobo at times, very determined guy.

AI videos. Have you seen any good short films that were made with the use of GenAI tools, in entirety or in large part? I don't mean oneshot from prompt to full movie, it can be any kind of multistep process where the creator may generate character sheet images with one model, then use a video model to make videos, and any other steps with AI models can be involved. I can only find a handful, and they aren't great. Though YouTube's search is notoriously broken anyway.

The ones I could find are very flat storywise and are more like a techdemo, packed with action movie shots. I'd be interested in a more story and character-driven one or just anything where the filmmaker wants to tell a story. Less "I wanted to geek out with AI tools so I have to come up with a story for this movie now", more "I wanted to make a movie and now AI makes it possible and simple to realize my vision".

It seems that the story, the content is the harder part. Which isn't surprising, since having access to pen and paper / printing press / rich word processor software didn't suddenly turn everyone into a book author either. The bottleneck is having something to say.

Or perhaps the human acting performance is just too subpar for creative people to accept it as of yet. I mean that the people / characters in a generated AI video often seem to express emotions in an uncanny way etc.

Or perhaps all creatives who would have story ideas and execution capability don't use it because A) they are strongly anti-AI of the bluesky sort, or B) they anyway have access to friends who can act for their short films and it's more fun to do it with other people for such non-nerd creative types. or perhaps C) the latest generation of AI tools need more time to penetrate the creative spaces because they are still mostly present in tech-geek spaces only, i.e. creative types don't yet know about how good the latest models are and have dismissed them months ago when they were worse. or maybe D) creatives have very low tolerance of deviating from their vision, and current models are too random and too hard to control for them to be a good vessel to carry their vision and ideas.

Look up gossip goblin on instagram.

The stories themselves are pretty easy. There's a lot of people who already had 'stories' in their heads that they wanted to bring to the screen, to the point where script-fic is a little derogatory in fanfic spaces. And we're at the point where you can give an LLM a pretty rough idea and get a coherent story out from them (cw: 30k words AI-generated story, painfully full of obvious spaces for improvement and still about on par with recent Disney output).

The tech's just hard. There's people messing with it, and for short periods you can get human-like emotion and acting, especially if you're open to pretty non-standard definitions of human (cw: sound, hellhound with human teeth). And then the background fades into a dream, or the character suddenly looks subtly different, or things start clipping, or the lipflaps don't match up with the actions.

Some of that's because people are just dabbling hobbyists: if there are people building their own unique voice clones, converting renders or live video into to pose2video work, or doing a lot of layering, there's definitely no one publicly doing all of those things combined. There's probably a way to make it work, by exploiting first-frame-last-frame and controlnet. But that requires a pretty sizable set of storyboards, and a stronger vision, and the ability to maintain focus when you're presented with something close but not quite good enough..

It's also just hard to do at home. Wan2 or LTX kinda work on an nVidia 3090 or better, but it's minutes-per-generation in the simplest cases. Add on that overhead and it can take the better part of an hour to make a single ten-second clip. With the right workflow or tooling you might be able to make that work out - that's still about a week per hour of video - but right now those workflows are things you'd have to build yourself.

I'd expect we'll eventually get some sketch-focused artist or rough animation-focused modeler working directly with them, and it'll have some major benefits, but I couldn't tell if you if that'll be a weeks, months, or years.

Higgsfield is making some series with Seedance 2.0 and Nano Banana:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-vSa9_H98 https://youtube.com/watch?v=digHr6k38x0

I just can't stand watching this genre (superhero action movie or whatever), more than 30 seconds at a time, but it looks fine on a technical level. It would be great to have something with a bit more interesting story.

Wow, these are really good.

For the longest time ai video generation was really bad with style consistency and character consistency but I didn't notice any problems with these at all. My background is in design/visual art and I think they look really good visually. At first I didn't like the constant cuts which I took as downstream from ai generation but it does seem consistent with the action genre so maybe it was a choice and not a technical issue.

The worst part is that the dialogue and text seems really obviously generated. The lyrics in the song at the end of your second link is fully just copied from another real song ("Ooh I love you so, but why I love you, I never know") but it's way worse in the ai version.

How difficult is it for you to tell apart the human generated ones from AI, given your background?

Sorry Iā€™m not sure if youā€™re asking about video or text/scripts, Iā€™m guessing you mean video, and I assume ā€œhuman generatedā€ means like traditional CGI and/or actors being filmed (Iā€™ll call this combination ā€œHollywoodā€ going forward) so Iā€™ll answer from that angle

I would say for these two Highsfield videos specifically they are really really close to what Hollywood would look like. Especially taken out of context the ability of AI to mimic the CGI portion is extremely good and I think Iā€™d have to be more familiar with CGI itself to identify the tells. On the other hand there are subtle uncanny valley-esque tells that do give away that itā€™s AI, like the Asian male character in the first videoā€™s face appears much younger in a handful of scenes than in others which is strange. The women in the first video are much more beautiful than most actresses which also makes it seem fake. The monsters and robots and environments/action sequences in both videos are so good that I donā€™t think I would know they were AI vs trad CGI. Voices were sometimes inconsistent from the same character and more importantly lacked the distinctiveness of real voices.

I could go on, I think the conclusion Iā€™d draw is much the same as the conclusion that Iā€™d draw from ai chat bots or ai still image generation which is that all of these tools are very good at getting you to like 90% of a perfect product but itā€™s the last 10 crucial percent that itā€™s almost never able to achieve. In certain domains you can manually bridge the gap with a bit of human intervention but it varies from task to task.

Not as relevant but I also noticed that there is an issue with AI generation in general VS human work: when humans create something, the person making it nearly always does the best they can, or in the least something that they wouldnā€™t be embarrassed to produce given their level of skill or experience. And we are usually not overly critical of other peopleā€™s work, when they do a task for you we tend to accept it as their work. But with AI generation the latter problem is an issue where the person checking the AI generation is willing to approve work that is of a lower quality than what any human would produce because it took nearly zero time to produce and it wasnā€™t their own work so you might as well let it go through. Besides that correcting the final 10% to get it to perfect could take a massive amount of time, so in the end you might produce 100 times as much content but itā€™s all 90% as good so you think youā€™ll get 90 winners but the Pareto principle reveals that the final 10% is crucial to anything being good enough to succeed so youā€™ll run into rapidly collapsing returns

Disagreed on the 90% figure. The AI can spit forth from its datasets superficially accurate renditions of tropes and imagery from other works that it has seen. What it cannot do is perfectly mold every detail towards the purpose of a given scene. The act of expression is missing, and thus 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work is missing. All you have in the end are a variety of statistically likely tropes and images strung together in some pattern of Baudrillardian remove, lacking any signification or meaning.

As a designer and a creator and aesthetic person I would argue that "the act of expression" is nowhere near 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work. This is a really postmodern notion, if you're someone who like weeps at Cy Twombly or whatever then sure I guess that's what you think. But the technical detail of say, JC Leyendecker or Maxfield Parrish to me is easily 90% of the value of their work. I actually agree with you on the rest of what you're saying but I think you are devaluing broadly the value and worth of the technicality of craft or whatever which the AI can do in, on average, 90% of the same quality that a talented human can do. The 10 percent of expression in the end is crucial as I tried to lay out but it's not 100 percent of what matters.

Craft would be about strategically wielding the narrative elements in order to achieve affect or to convey meaning. In the second video in the post to which we are replying, when the girlfriend character gets stabbed by the demon, does it register as anything other than bathetic? Or does it even register at all?

Those artists you mention, they achieve affect through the careful arrangement of skillfully created elements. With the AI, there is no cumulative impact, and it doesnā€™t use skill to recreate things. All we have is a clunky copy-paste machine.

At first I didn't like the constant cuts which I took as downstream from ai generation but it does seem consistent with the action genre so maybe it was a choice and not a technical issue.

A bit of each, probably. Current-gen AIs can match the Action genre, which is why you're seeing action movies before anything else. In an alternate world where AIs could do characterization, dialog, etc. before visual fidelity, boobs, and explosions, you'd see different movies coming out first.

  • PI HARD - trailer length, but amusing
  • The Patchwright - short film, not clear how much is AI generated though.

The revisited Harry Potter by Balenciaga is both hilarious and surprisingly a genuinely good parody. There are still AI tells all over the place but they honestly don't distract from the short film itself.

It also desperately needs a fanfic that tells the back story of how Filch became like that.

There are still AI tells all over the place but they honestly don't distract from the short film itself.

I would say YMMV on that. I personally was pretty distracted by the terrible lip syncing and the overly pale skin tones for Ron and Draco. At one point, Draco is rendered so pale that he looks like the Joker. IDK if the creator had fine enough control over the product that it was a conscious choice on his part, or if it was just the AI sucking at pale skin, but it was jarring.

I would say that it's good for AI content, but still not just plain good. If a human made this by hand in Blender or something, I would be kind and say "that's impressive", but I wouldn't say it was quality work.

Breaking Balenciaga is the best Iā€™m aware of.

I watched some of it and itā€™sā€¦mid. My problem with AI art is that itā€™s all mid. Although here the idea is also mid.

I feel that so far, even good GenAI is either an excellent idea or lucky (or trial-and-error) output, and in both cases a real artist couldā€™ve executed better. Even for works where more effort would be wasted, like jokes and concept art, I prefer a simple handmade drawing like a sketch.

The one exception may be hidden images via Stable Diffusion ControlNet (e.g. text, QR code, spiral), because I havenā€™t seen any human-made pictures nearly as detailed and seamless. Also, GenAI is great for intentionally bad works, like memes making fun of AI.

GenAI is genuinely useful for routine tasks, forms, etc. where quality isnā€™t important; and with code, where quality is only important to an extent (nobody will notice your micro-optimizations or unnecessarily readable implementation) and there are decent objective metrics (lints and tests, and I still think AI code is hard to read). But art has no practical limit to quality, and good artists apply themselves to every noticeable detail. Also, art (like music, food, and attractiveness) is best slightly imperfect, in a way that human amateurs execute without trying, and experts learn (ā€œlearn the rules, then break themā€), but AI seems to struggle.

You may like Harry potter by balenciaga

I think AI acting is getting better and maybe more serious stories could also be told, see for example this proof of concept (the actual content of what she's yapping about is quite boring, but the facial expressions and voice tone are getting more and more realistic).

I agree itā€™s getting better.

Although I think it will only surpass human art if/when the user has fine-grained control, because my favorite art is that I can relate to, and a general LLM isnā€™t relatable. Iā€™d rather use AI to make art I really like (even with difficulty, as long as thereā€™s a clear progressionā€¦Iā€™ve wanted to get into art, but itā€™s overwhelming and Iā€™m particularly bad at it), than have the AI autonomously make something I mildly like.

Or if/when we get ASI.

Not sure if it's what you're after (nor the creative process they're using), but the ongoing "Amelia" series on Brit-Twitter is producing coherent and effective political shorts on a fast timeline...

Political as in commenting on concrete British political events, or more like political drama as a genre?

To maybe specify better what I would like to see is stuff in the ballpark of this, just with better ideas: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bYW_7rWjQMs Or a good thriller, or something psychological, or a good scifi that makes you think etc.

I guess a good start for people with fewer ideas would be to do film adaptations of interesting online short stories or highly upvoted nosleep stories, or even just regular short stories that appeared in print over the last 50 years or more.

Very much the former -- it's an unabashed propaganda campaign that would be completely unsurprising if it were done conventionally by some government hiring actors etc -- indeed it's in response to just such a campaign by the UK government!

What's interesting about it is that it seems to have been put together in a matter of days, by (as far as anyone knows!) non-state actors with limited resources and strong government operations. (the videos are probably illegal in the UK on the grounds of promoting hate)

So more of a worked example of AI videogens to create impact IRL than anything with much artistic merit. Just as handheld firearms democratized warfare (for a while), maybe publicly available AI (plus social media) will democratize the mobilization of egregores upon the genpop?

https://x.com/LBC/status/2015894345770045489 (MSM backgrounder)

https://x.com/ABridgen/status/2013157247820406995 (first video)

https://x.com/AmeliajakSolana (whoever's doing the videos -- I notice they've pretty much switched to images now, so probably Sora is indeed what they were using -- you'd need to scroll way down for the rest of the videos, they were coming out regularly a few months ago)

What phrases are mostly innocent in the US but innuendo in the UK? Have some colleagues in the UK and would like to make things funny from time to time. I have no idea what they mean by "you alwight" and I want revenge.

The classic is "fanny" which means "bum" in USE and "vagina" in BrE, although it is now an old-fashioned term that suggests "Carry On" films rather than pornos. But American tourists talking about their fanny packs will definitely still be laughed at.

Also "jock" is a stereotypical high-school athlete or a piece of male underwear in USE and a mild slur for Scottish people in BrE (and a nickname for "John" in Scots dialect, like "Jack" is in standard BrE). I don't know how you get an easy innuendo out of that, but it should be possible.

Also endorsing @FtttG below - "pants" has a lot of potential.

My first thought is 'gangbanger'.

Some time ago I listened to a British podcast where some people were reading YA novels, and in one book the protagonist was attacked by a group of "street-hardened gangbangers" and the entire group was left sniggering for a good few minutes. I know that it means 'thugs' in American English, but the mental image of being jumped by a bunch of gangbangers in the British sense is really quite funny.

I don't know that "gangbanger" is mostly innocent in the US. I'd say it's something like "Johnson" in that the obscene simply coexists with the non-obscene.

The difference is that the innocent meaning does not exist in BrE, so even where the innocent meaning is clear from context, British ears default to the obscene one.

One thing I noticed in the preteen Braveheart discourse is that while ā€œantisocialā€ in the US describes someone who doesnā€™t go outside, in the UK it describes street hoodlums.

For the former meaning, Brits and Irish tend to use the word "unsociable".

Interestingly both ways make sense. In the US, antisocial is against or uninterested in socialization, whereas in the UK it's meant as the opposite of prosocial.

Some examples that might be helpful.

  • "Bender" can be used as a derogatory term for a gay man.
  • "Bugger" can used as a verb meaning "to sodomize" (I don't know if this word has an innocent meaning in the US).
  • "Pants" refers to boxers and briefs, not trousers.
  • "Pissed" means drunk, rather than angry.
  • "To pull" means to get a girl to come home with you e.g. "I managed to pull at the pub last night."
  • "To shag" means to have sex with (I assume a lot of Yanks are familiar with this owing to Austin Powers).
  • "Slag" means a promiscuous woman.
  • "Spunk" means ejaculate (n.).

Once, a British girlfriend relayed to me an episode in which an American friend (during normal girly sleepover shenanigans with cuddling and little personal space) commented to her something like "your pants smell nice".

(I thought it was a bit weird even with the American meaning.)

Yeah, either interpretation sounds weird.

"Spunk" means ejaculate.

I remember it being a minor plot point in Money by Martin Amis, where the protagonist has to break it to a certain Spunk Davis that he'll have to pick a different stage name if he wants to make it in the UK.

Whereas the comic book artist/writer Randy Queen has joked he can never visit England.

Well, he can now.

I can't help thinking of a recent Ladbible Stories video I watched where they interviewed a British porn director named Dick Bush. That's not a stage name. His parents Christened him Richard Bush and nominative determinism took care of the rest.

Most Americans would be familiar with that use of ā€˜buggerā€™, although it sounds like an old person, or ā€˜to pullā€™ in that sense. Slag sounds like a British insult for a loose woman, but I didnā€™t already know it, and Iā€™ve definitely heard ā€˜spunkā€™ used as a noun for the same term in American English, but not a verb.

Spunk is a noun not a verb. In the words of a great man:

ā€œYouā€™ve got spunk and ballsā€¦ and I like that in a woman.ā€

My impression is that even in the US, 'spunk' to mean 'spirit' or' daring' is in the decline, probably because of the spread of 'spunk' in the obscene sense?

From Australia I am accustomed to the verb 'bugger' as a pretty light swear. I might say, "oh, bugger me" or "bugger this" in public and it's about the same level as 'crap'. 'Bugger' is not as rude as the F word, for instance, as you can probably tell from the fact that I do not hesitate to write 'bugger' but I do hesitate to write the F word.

That usage of "bugger" - basically as a milder version of the nonsexual use of "fuck" also exists in BrE. When turned into a noun, it becomes "buggeration".* "Bugger off" means "go away", with the implication that the person you are telling to bugger off is annoying but not necessarily hostile - you could tell a friend trying to strike up a conversation while you are busy to bugger off but not to fuck off.

* "Bugger" as a noun is an extremely severe homophobic slur unless it is obvious from the context that you are talking about Ender's Game. @gattsuru below is correct to point out that "silly bugger" is another exception.

I think on my ranking of swear words, "bugger off" is harsher than "get stuffed", but less harsh than "piss off". I could say "go bugger yourself" or something to make it more intense, but that still feels fairly 'light' to me.

It's hard to imagine 'bugger' being very offensive, at least to me, because it's such a funny word? Aurally, it sounds a bit silly or amusing. You cannot say 'bugger' with the same harshness or violence as most of the four-letter words.

"Nigger" isn't harsh because of the sound or the meaning, it is harsh because of the history. "Bugger" used to refer to male homosexuality (which is not the primary meaning in modern British English) has the same issue.

Oh "spunk" would still primarily be used as a noun in the UK too. I was using "ejaculate" as a noun, not a verb.

ā€œSnape!ā€ nutted Slughorn, who looked the most shaken, pale and sweating.

Iā€™ve heard over there ā€œjacked upā€ means things are really good. Over here ā€œjacked upā€ means things are really bad. Only in some contexts does ā€œjackedā€ mean things are good in the US.

Supposedly bugger's supposed to be just 'annoying person', and you'll hear 'silly bugger' in some circumstances, but I think that was a corruption from Gordon Ramsay and Terry Pratchett (and Father Ted, maybe?). It's still pretty low-stakes as an insult even among people that know the original context, though.

Under similar metrics, my impression's that 'arse' is a lot lighter-stakes than the UK take, though it's still not very harsh even in the UK. Same for 'bloody' as a prefix, which I still don't get.

From the other direction, in America, "cunt" is considered rude enough that I'll avoid it in explicit pornographic contexts (though not all Americans will), and could be a firing offense on the first use. Made a work trip to Australia very awkward.

"Cunt" would be at least a write-up in a white-collar workplace in the UK, and probably a firing offence for someone without unfair dismissal protection*. The Australian usage is Australian-only. (There was a survey about what words were unacceptable on British TV even after the watershed, and "cunt", "nigger" and "Paki" were in a class of their own for offensiveness, well above "fuck")

The difference between the US and UK usage of "cunt" is that in the US the primary meaning is as a misogynistic slur (so the cuntiest cunt in America is Hilary Clinton) whereas the primary usage in the UK is as an generic slur for obnoxious and/or unpopular people (so the cuntiest cunt in the UK is Boris Johnson).

* Under British employment law, once you have been in post for two years you can't be fired for a single offence unless it meets the legal bar for "gross misconduct". Calling a male cow-orker a cunt would be misconduct, but would only be gross misconduct if your workplace had a written policy saying that foul language was gross misconduct.

Made a work trip to Australia very awkward.

They also use it very freely in Scotland.

In my experience it probably depends on the workplace and culture? I'm Australian born and bred and have a white collar full time job here, and I not only never hear, but would never say the C word.

Never forget what woke took from you.

I think this was my polite upper-middle-class family and upbringing, actually, and I do not regret it.

Same for 'bloody' as a prefix, which I still don't get.

"Bloody" is generally just used as a generic intensifier. I have a very vivid childhood memory of listening to a newsreader talking about Bloody Sunday on the radio and feeling baffled as to why she was suddenly cursing mid-sentence.

ā€˜Bloodyā€™ is supposedly the descendent of a minced oath for ā€˜by Our Ladyā€™. I donā€™t know if itā€™s true or not.

A 1909 dictionary of Victorian slang agrees, "by our Lord" (blood) "by our Lady (bloody), including a mention of a "blady hell" having been found in 18th century literature.

Of course, it also includes "birdofreedomsaurin" as a legitimate word, so...

Birdofreedomsaurin (Amer.). Birdof- freedom soaring. A jocular mode of describing the altitude of the American eagle. Used mildly in England to deprecate any chance American extreme expression of patriotism.

ā€I think that Prince Louis Napoleon was over-dressed. I know that in his green or purple stock (I forget which) he wore an immense breastpin representing an eagle in diamonds, not the eagle with displayed wings, that is, the American ' birdofreedomsaurin ' ā€” but an aquiline presentment with the wings closed ā€” the eagle of Imperial sway.ā€

Thatā€™s very funny. I guess itā€™s a play on the dinosaurs being named around this time, like stegosaurus?

The generally proposed etymology is that it derives from a now defunct curse ā€œGodā€™s blood!ā€ which was shortened over time to ā€œā€˜sblood!ā€ and then became used as an intensifier.

I understand this to be a folk etymology.

Similar minced oaths do exist - my mother was very fond of "strewth!" while I was growing up, a mincing of "God's truth!" - but I believe 'bloody' predates any plausible minced origin.

Sounds plausible.

I can easily say "Bug-her"

"I don't want to bugher too much, she's really getting stretched thin."

Isn't "fanny" the classic? A silly term for "butt" or adjective for "belt pouch slung over your butt" in the US; a vulgar term for female genitalia in the UK.

"Make sure your reflective vest is long enough to cover your fanny."

When did anti-racism become incorporated into a person's character after Civil Rights in the US? Talking to boomers, even liberal ones, it seems their attitude is mostly that personal prejudice is, while not encouraged, also not a big deal so long as you don't let it cloud your judgement in an official capacity (such as discriminating while hiring). Even many boomerlibs I know talk in racially disparaging terms about people they don't like (i.e. a black driver who cut them off). I'm around 30, and growing up in Houston with an ethnically diverse social group it seems that ideologically everyone was on board with equal opportunities, but if someone was personally racist it was more of a personal quirk than a major character flaw unless they were, like, in a criminal organization or something. I'm PMC, and grew up PMC going to public schools, so I may have been in a bubble.

To give a tongue in cheek quote from my dad, "When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?" It seems that there was a gap in between when everyone agreed the nation as a whole should act in a race-blind or even anti-racist way and when people decided that it's imperative that people as individuals abandon racist feelings/beliefs.

I'd also be interested in if/when this happened in other nations as well, such as the nations of Western Europe.

The other day, I was telling herself about the spree killer who targeted massage therapists in Atlanta. Being that most of the victims were Asian women, initial reports understandably characterised it as a hate crime targeting Asian people. But when the perpetrator was arrested, he went to great pains to explain that he didn't murder those women because they were Asian, but because they were vile whores leading him (and other men like him) into temptation.

There's something darkly amusing about a man who will freely admit to being a sex addict, to deliberately targeting physically and economically vulnerable women for violence, to blaming women for his inability to control his own sexual appetites, to despising prostitutes and sex workers, to being a murderer ā€“ but I'm not racist, guys!

The process in the 2010s went something like this:

  • The mainstream media, and sub-mainstream outlets, would craft an emotionally-poignant faux-tragedy out of an event related to race, eg Michael Brown.

  • Political operatives would boost these stories by sharing and responding to them online, treating these events as an intimate and civic tragedy of totalizing emotional importance. Some of these operatives just wanted Democrats to win, some of them wanted to grow their account. And some of them were actual die-hard antiracists (a tiny minority with a distinct origin in academia, coming out of Soviet anti-American Marxist tactics to weaken America).

  • Normal youth in America, absolutely starved of any civic or collective-religious ritual or belongingness, and not understanding anything, would imitate the operatives in mourning the faux-tragedies. This is something that seems important to do unless you know the game being played, and it is also cathartic in the same way watching true crime or a tragic drama is cathartic. This also brought them attention.

  • Because the faux-tragedies targetted the empathetic, the mourners were often young women, which means that young men would engage in it driven by pure desire to have sex with them.

  • With each additional sequence of catastrophizing an event, the grievance seems bigger and bigger and more legitimate and pressing, and the operatives etc were racing to develop the most ā€œstickyā€ narrative because by making your message stickier you get more attention online, then your message was imitated, etc.

If you do this enough, ā€œantiracistā€ becomes a desirable thing to signal within the cohort affected by this messaging. If you totalize the importance of racism, then you are also totalizing the importance of anti-racism. And it feels good to put that identity label in your bio.

Itā€™s fun to draw a comparison between BLM-era ritual mourning and the Khameneist ritual mourning in Iran, and indeed there have even been cross-over episodes. They both have the intended aim of recruiting political allegiance by lazer-focusing on an ostensibly sorrowful, unjust, dramatic death, identifying with the suffering victim, and then embodying a sort of repented or amended spirit which comes out of it, especially within a space for collective effervescence.

When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?

One of Jesus' two crucifixion mates accepting him as his Lord and savior and getting into heaven might qualify as the ur-example. Since wokism is a secular mirror of Christianity, accepting its core tenet should also qualify you for redemption even if you have been eating kids.

Part of the point of st dismas is that he didnā€™t get out of his earthly death sentence.

  1. That doesnā€™t say anything about Earthly forgiveness.
  2. No, it isnā€™t. Any mapping of modern progressive idpol to Christianity proves way too much. You might as well say that Lean Six Sigma is a secular mirror. Or multi-level marketing. Or the normal criminal justice system.

LSS is a fucking cult.

But not a particularly Christian one.

I thought it was fairly explicitly tied into Japanese spirituality via martial arts, so presumably some mix of Shinto and Buddhism.

Does it import anything other than calling its ranks ā€œbeltsā€?

I certainly didnā€™t spend the money to get inducted into its higher mysteries.

I'm equally unfamiliar, but the origins are definitely Japanese - it claims to be selling the insights that underlie Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System. The question of how much the TPS is a native Japanese thing and how much it is just W Edwards Deming's ideas being applied in a country where all the vested interests that could sabotage them had been nuked into oblivion is controversial in the process improvement world.

I remember listening to a podcast where two (older, white, liberal) hosts were talking about the movie, In Bruges, and they both discussed how the movie can be tough to watch these days because the protagonist, who is supposed to be likeable and sympathetic, says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things. And then one of the hosts had a moment of clarity and verbalized that the protagonist is also a literal hitman who murdered a child, which is substantially morally worse than making a joke about fat black women.

says a bunch of racist, fatphobic, and retardphobic (?) things

Ironically, the director had real difficulty in getting Colin Farrel to use the word 'retard', because his daughter has Downs Syndrome.

Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?

In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.

On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.

Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.

In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad.

Gangster movies are almost always written with an implied moral framework where murder is not bad if done in a way which complies with the unwritten rules of gangsterism - with the paradigmatic example being the various killing Michael Corleone is involved with in The Godfather.

The child murder in In Bruges was bad because Colin Farrell's character killed (a) the wrong person by mistake and (b) a child. A clean hit on the priest he had been paid to kill would not have been a problem in gangster movie world. Although I agree with other posters that In Bruges is not actually written in this moral framework, and is arguably satirising it.

I think that's possibly an accurate description of the innerworkings of progressives, but I also think that's an excessively Culture War-brained perspective.

In Bruges isn't about whether murder or prejudice are morally permissible. At its core, the film is about guilt and the potential for redemption through a dual character study of Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson). I think the main questions the audience is supposed to struggle with is whether Ray can be redeemed and try to find happiness after living an evil life which culminated in him accidentally shooting and killing a child while shooting and killing a priest, for money.

Ray's racism and fatphobia are played for laughs and fill out his characterization. They indicate that he is gruff, prickly, generally uncaring of others, and he likely comes from a lower class background where such beliefs are normal and tolerated. The film implicitly acknowledges that Ray's prejudices are morally wrong while also casting them as very minor sins against his more serious crimes. A small part of his redemption arc is apologizing to a dwarf who he carelessly insulted earlier in the film.

Or to put it in your terms, pricing Ray's history of murder and penchant for racism is the point of the film. The viewer (and Ray for that matter) are trying to price them in relation to his potential for redemption.

What my prior post was mocking is the idea than a modern culturally left-leaning American finds it more difficult to sympathize with someone who makes casually racist statements for fun than someone who kills people for money and murdered a child. Both of those factors are presented as flaws in Ray's character in the movie, but the film clearly intends for the latter to be much worse than the former, as I think any ethically sane person would. The podcast hosts inverted their moral focuses because they, IMO, have broken progressive values that raise the evilness of bigotry to the stratosphere. Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.

And I get that if I actually sat down with the hosts of Unspooled and asked them, "do you think that saying 'nigger' is worse than murdering a child?" they would come to the same conclusion as me, but that only further highlights how far their progressive values take them from ethnical reality.

EDIT - Also, the idea that being against racism against fat black women is taking a stand in the modern culture is extremely culture war brained and kind of nuts. Vanishingly few people in the US are anti-fat black women qua fat black women, and the few that are have no political power and don't listen to podcasts co-hosted by the head film critic at the Los Angeles Times. If the hosts talked about In Bruges in this way to signal their contemporary cultural war position, then that is a sad condemnation of their world views and I wished they would just get back to understanding the film on its own terms (which, to their credit, they eventually do).

Basically, they have terrible pricing models for rating the evilness of actions.

NOOOOOO. You just gave me a brainworm about trying to develop a market risk or counterparty credit model downstream of such a terrible pricing model and now I want to drink a pitcher of sulphuric acid or zip all my confidential e-mails and leak them to FT Alphaville or something similarly stupid.

See also shows like The Blacklist and its main protagonist, Raymond Reddington. Described as an extremely ruthless individual with no qualms about killing or torture, Raymond ran a vast criminal empire that was surely responsible for untold suffering. Yet the viewer is meant to find him sympathetic because he rails against environmental destruction or white supremacists. He has the "correct opinions" on the "politically correct" side, so ultimately it's acceptable to root for him and be invested in his story.

If you go far back enough, anti-racism was a controversial position and so was a poor proxy for how socialized someone is. At some point, when Civil Rights and proto-wokeness started to become the official civil religion (that is, taught in schools etc), it became a pretty good proxy for good socialization. Afterwards, only dysfunctional people act racist. I couldn't give you the exact year.

That makes me think of how subculture based this change is. In the media and public PMC culture open expressions of racism against protected groups are socially radioactive. At the same time, almost all boomers, including the PMC ones, I have met and most younger men either are casually racist or don't consider it a huge negative in a person. The culture of the younger men I suspect is partially an oppositional culture against PMC culture. I bet different subcultures have different values and different dates for when this became a value of them.

Yes. The boomer attitude about personal prejudice is that it is a cognitive barrier to rational thinking (it will make your hiring less meritocratic and your company make less money). It is a-moral because boomers were not brought up in PMC culture, just around for early Civil Rights.

Casually Racist Young Man (as opposed to young man with boomer tendencies) is probably similar to Satanists. As a reaction to Christianity, they are still a slave to its moral frame, just inverting it. This is essentially Curtis Yarvin's primary objection to some of the online right, I think. So the young man is racist because he is rebelling against mom, basically.

Another way this is stated is that a lot (though maybe not all) of online right types are Blue Tribe apostates -- not Red Tribers. If we start to see casually racist Red Tribers, it would be weird. It would probably indicate that Red Tribe is really losing cultural ground to the Blue. I don't mean in the "is lower status than Blue Tribe" way. I mean Blue becoming so hegemonic that Red Tribers start to identify themselves with it at a level enough to be apostates and become enslaved to its moral frame.

"When did being a racist become worse than being a serial killer?"

Given that Jeffery Dahmer spent a good part of his police interrogation trying to make it very clear that his victim typology was just co-incidental because of where he lived and that he was not a racist, I would say 1991.

And he was killed, apparently, by a black inmate who didnā€™t believe him. So in a meaningful sense Dahmer was killed for being a racist and not for being a serial killer.

What failure modes can you foresee if insurers start paying their patients for choosing cheaper healthcare services?

Right now, patients want the best service their insurance plan covers, which causes hospitals to come up with more and more expensive services that are only marginally better. Insurance companies have no real incentive to drive prices down either, as they are legally obligated to spend their money anyway, and the more people pay them, the larger is the absolute share they are allowed to keep.

But what if the insurer could offer you two hospitals, both covered by your plan, and by opting for the cheaper one, you would get the bulk of the difference in cash, with the insurer pocketing the remainder as rightfully owned profit not subject to the 15% rule? Theoretically, it would cause hospital networks to manage costs more aggressively, as cheaper service would now be a real competitive advantage. "Do you want a $30k C-section, or a $20k C-section and $9k in cash?"

Private medical insurance in the UK pays you Ā£100-200 a day if you receive NHS treatment for a covered condition. Almost nobody takes up the offer.

This is what copays and deductibles are supposed to handle. The insurance shouldn't be paying you for cheaper stuff, you should be paying more for the more expensive stuff. If you pay 10% of everything then it's "Do you want a $30k C-section (and pay $3k out of pocket) or a $20k C-section (and pay $2k out of pocket)?"

My understanding is that these are largely messed up and don't entirely function this way. But the idea of the insurance company paying you is just a really mangled version of this plus theft from your employer who is paying the insurance company.

But your copay example is the realtor incentivization problem, just in reverse! If copay is proportional to the total price, people won't be sensitive enough to small changes in their copay.

How much can I make in a year of substandard (or sub-excellent) healthcare? How hard is it to think up a reason to get more care and therefore more cash?

Currently, the patients bear some cost for seeking healthcare: even if their out-of-pocket expenses are zero, they still have to invest time, effort, and discomfort. Under your idea, seeking care becomes profitable. Probably more profitable than working at a job for some people.

In practice, this almost certainly looks like lots of mid-levels and generic drugs, so @throwaway05- what does that look like? More unnecessary tests, probably, but are generic drugs worse than name brand often enough to matter?

What failure modes can you foresee if insurers start paying their patients for choosing cheaper healthcare services?

I think the core issue would be determining what is an 'equivalent' healthcare treatment. To use the above example, "Why is the $20k C-section cheaper?". If it's just location arbitrage that's one thing, but if the doctors are actually giving different services, such as using different anesthetics or having fewer staff on call, that's another. To stay on the birth example, a birth with an epidural is a different experience than a birth without one. How should that be handled? Additionally, the differences for a lot of things likely are only legible to doctors so any patient choosing them would be at an information asymmetry, which defeats the purpose of letting them pick since in many cases they won't be able to make an informed decision.

All of the above wouldn't kill the project, but I think you need additional scaffolding to both ensure that patients can make informed decisions and that the choices they are given are all viable/equivalent. You also need tort reform, so the patient can't come crying to the courts when picking cheaper option B causes issues.

I'd like this forums advice regarding the two current job opportunities I have:

  1. Network Engineer Internship: 17 an HR with benefits. 3-4 months. Recruiter says I have a 25-50% chance of a full time offer if they have a spot available and if I perform well!

  2. IT Support Engineer: Full Time, no benefits. 21 an hour. Basically another helpdesk job, Id accept it if there were benefits, but there arent any, so theres that.

Honestly, I feel that the Network Engineer internship is gonna look much better on the resume. I'll get the touch real equipment! And something tells me if I do well performance wise I can move up and stay permanently. But I'd like advice from other people who've been there. (Obviously, If a fulltime job with benefits pulls through, Ill take that ideally, but I'm playing the cards I've been dealt here.)

Everybody is agreeing that the internship looks like the better offer given what you have said here, and I think theyā€™re right. That said, I would put more weight on the particular teams and companies, if you know anything about them. Some teams will actively look to give juniors room to grow, and others will just install them as a cog in the machine and leave them there.

This advice is prime

The people you work daily with matter a LOT more than pay if you're looking at jobs with "intern"

I did internships that were a profound waste of my time, contrast that with an intern on my team last year who got a phenomenal experience (he was competent so we have him complex work) and we liked him so much he's coming back full time

I'll caution that, without further detail, Network Engineer Intern is probably a lot of Cat5E pulling and crimping, and a lot less fighting with Cisco IOS, than it would sound like from the job description. That's better and more experience than it sounds - the difference between implementing spanning-tree on a lab environment and troubleshooting it on some wild unmanaged switches is night-and-day - but it can feel a little hazing-like from the inside view, and you'll want to keep up your more specialized skills.

It seems to me that internships with placement opportunities not only signal "I'm aiming for a higher job" but are also harder to get relative to full-time IT support type positions. So not only is the opportunity cost higher if you were to not go with the internship, but the signals align with what you likely want for your career. I'd go with the internship unless the finances don't allow it. Sure, it sucks to then go around and job-hunt a second time, but there's nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship (plus if you find another opportunity, it also inflates your value a bit if they want to bid to keep you).

Although where exactly you are education/career-wise might matter a bit. The one caveat here is how good the reputation of the internship company is. 17 seems pretty low, so I'd wonder if that stinginess extends to the rest of their org.

Just my 2 cents, gut reaction

nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship

And as an intern without an offer, you can openly jobhunt while employed, and even get help from with your jobhunt from your co-workers. You can't do that in a normal job.

This is huge. Having your current boss invested and engaged in your job hunt with you is amazing. It's like having a hot ex-girlfriend as your wingman.

Here is my resume for reference

I donā€™t currently work in IT but my family and a lot of people I know come from the infosec world. If I were you Iā€™d take option A, network engineer intern. Do well, continue to network and try to gauge what a realistic offer from them would be if you make the cut. Hope you do well!

Recruiter says

In house or external? External Recruiters are frequently full of shit, they make their money by getting bodies into seats, that stay there. You getting a full time likely would get them a bonus. So of course they want to sell you (and themselves) on that possibility. They likely have no clue or decision-making power.

In house

Which RPG / MMORPG has the best aesthetics?

For some reason I really like how FFXI looks. I find the low-res more pleasant than the high-res FFXIV.

Oh! Oh! Phantasy Star Online!!!!

There's something in the aesthetic of that game that always look "new" and shiny.

I always liked Stellaris. The overhead was too much for me to invest too much time into it though.

The aesthetics ceiling for MMOs is low, but I was fond of Ragnarok Online back in the days.

As for RPGs - Seiken Densetsu 3 is the pinnacle of obligate pixel art, Hyper Light Drifter for a more modern and stylised one, and for 3D Genshin Impact's environmental art team continues being fantastic.

I actually love how good most Final Fantasy games look, especially Final Fantasy 16.

Persona 1, Persona 2: EP and IS, Super Mario RPG, FFIX, FFVIII, FFVII. Saga Frontier. Prerendered backgrounds look so much better than anything full 3d. Legend of Mana. I love the art and some of the graphics from the Rune Factory series but they are really a hot mess and basically unplayable as actual games imo.

I liked the aesthetics of Guild Wars 1, but the heavy bloom style is very of its time.

For me, hands down, Myst Uru.

That's a deep cut, but yeah, I can see it

I was always fond of The Secret World.

Will second this. It's not a great game mechanically, but the aesthetics and soul was fantastic from the first zone to the endgame.

our wisdom flows so sweet. taste and see.

I tried TSW once but just really disliked the mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay, which was a shame because it did have fantastic aesthetics, and this gothic, World-of-Darkness-esque, slightly-twisted modern-day setting dominated by conspiracies was a great idea for an MMO.

So big week in models - in the matter of hours we got GPT-5.5, Deepseek V4 and Opus 4.7. What are your impressions so far - mine - GPT-5.5 is the least underwhelming of the 3. Deepseek is really capable at insane prices, Opus 4.7 at least for me it totally undistinguishable from 4.6

Also the limits are absurdly tight on the 20$ level.

GPT 5.5 doubled in price with little discernable increase in quality (for my uses)

Apparently it uses less tokens for reasoning/more efficient with tool calls. Unfortunately some of my uses have high input token volumes so this is less useful to me.

Codex usage noticably higher.

Makes sense, OpenAI and Anthropic are the only games in town, demand is through the roof, and Anthropic has a supply crunch so now OpenAI is taking the opportunity to harvest margin.

Thank god for open source models for keeping (delayed) pressure on the labs.

Also google needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP

Haven't really tried the other two much myself, high costs kinda scare me off where I find it hard to believe the value is there for my use case, but I'm looking quite closely at Deepseek V4 Flash specifically, because the cost-to-performance seems to be pretty insane.

I mean, the official API price is $0.0028 per million input (cached), $0.14 (cache miss), $0.28 per million output. Has a 1M context window, and per OpenRouter, because their stats have above a 90% cache hit rate, this means the effective weighted price per million input is only $0.015 per million. That's really crazy. I need to test a bit more to figure out where I'd place the intelligence exactly, but...

NONE of the current frontier 'cost-efficient' models come even remotely close to that. For comparison Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite is 0.25/1.50 input/output per 1M, Gemini 3 Flash is 0.50/3.00, GPT 5.4 Nano is 0.20/1.25, GPT 5.4 Mini is 0.75/1=4.50, Claude Haiku 4.5 is 1.00/5.00. Sure, it's not as good at coding as Gemini Flash, allegedly, but also allegedly it's better at agentic workflows. Those are some pretty significant gaps, approaching an order of magnitude in some cases.

So yeah, Pro is also very cheap and that might make some waves, but contextually Flash is SUPER cheap. Like, obscenely so.

This to me is a big deal because part of what makes AI so compelling is the cost/benefit ratio. With a model like V4 Flash, especially input-heavy workflows, there are plenty of scenarios where it's literally cheaper to throw 5 different approaches at the wall and pick the best than to make a single attempt with a model that's just a hair smarter. We'll see how well it does when encountering actual codebases and such, but I find that it might potentially enable a slightly different type and set of workflows than we're used to.

It's hard to say for sure these days because especially with agentic coding the harnesses are so important (and often what works for certain setups doesn't transfer that well, including across generations of models). I'm curious if someone will figure out a good way to leverage this new cost-benefit balance, because it potentially changes e.g. how you might spin up subagents quite a bit. Although possibly as I mentioned the model is just a bit too stupid to do a large enough range of useful work. We'll see, gotta figure out how much is benchmaxxing vs inherent quality.

At the same time, the Claude shift in tokenizer probably long-term helps efficiency and intelligence, but short term you're looking at a 10-30% flat increase in costs on higher token costs alone, before you get into the token efficiency of the models themselves, at least per the numbers I was looking at initially.

Opus 4.7 seems to handle the stock ticker tests I do better than 4.6. I assume it's the new tokenizer. Otherwise the only difference I notice is that it's more expensive to run on the same thinking level

What tests are those?

I'm not going to go into detail, but the basic gist of it is that exchange ticker symbols tend to be short strings with a lot of overlap. Despite the textual overlap, each one has a distinct identity and they are not interchangeable. While some LLMs deal with that kind of thing better than others, they all tend to have problems that get worse as the context window fills up, and compaction tends to cause problems as well.

As a toy example that isn't much of a problem anymore, BND and BNDW are not the same thing. They have different holdings, different rates of return, and different tax implications. That little W at the end means a lot, but next token prediction can have a hard time with it.

So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This time around it is resonating, perhaps because the abstract desire for freedom is on my mind.

Series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches by a lady authoress. I use that term because she would probably hate it. But the stories, while having decent plots, are spoiled by the authoress not being able to keep her damn yap shut about class, race, and sex. Guess what, gentle readers: 1890 Victorian England did not share the same social attitudes as 2020s California! Yes, I know you are all aghast to learn this, but women were kept down by Da Man, the less well-off were kept down by Da Man, and non-white folx were kept down by Da Man. That was one very busy man, I gotta say.

She also falls down in basic research, e.g. referring to somebody as Mr. So-and-so, then calling him a lord. If he's a lord, then he's not a mister.

If she could cool it on the SJW preaching and do some basic "England or Scotland is not the USA, a local constable is not the equivalent of a sheriff, no gentleman would refer to a woman by her first name if she's not a family member or long-standing friend, etc." work, the stories would be much better. Oh, and stop having Watson trying to winkle out of Holmes "So, dude, you ever had a girlfriend before? Like, ever?"

It's clear these stories started off as fanfic and she also clearly has her own headcanon about the characters and their past, but the underlying plot is good enough to keep me reading even while I'm yelling at the screen about her preaching.

The Sherlock TV show fandom had almost as strong a Britpicking culture as the Harry Potter fandom - if you wanted to write fanfic you were expected to get it Britpicked, and there were lots of British fans willing to Britpick it for you. But I guess the Doyle's Sherlock Holmes doesn't have the same kind of organised fandom.

Even the Sherlock fandom had some (early) doozies, I recall one fanfic where someone made John Watson a fan of a particular baseball team (the explanation was he'd been introduced to it by Americans in Afghanistan, but I think the Doylist explanation was "I'm American, I can write about baseball but I know nothing about rugby").

I'm as British as they come and I was a New York Yankees fan for a while after a summer job at Brookhaven where most of my housemates were Yankees fans. Baseball is the perfect sport to watch on TV while multitasking housework or low-effort admin in the same way that cricket is the perfect sport to follow online while slacking off at work.

Down with three true outcomes - live balls and skilled defensive play are the best bit of baseball!

~300 pages into the unabridged Les Miserables. So far it seems oddly like a parellel inverse of Count of Monte Cristo; assumed identities, long prison stretches, changes of fortune, redemption vs revenge, guilt vs innocence, rising in society vs falling, self interest vs pro sociality, life at the top vs life at the bottom.

He Who Fights with Monsters 12. Seeing as I've read 12 of these things I am having fun but he can't help himself insert some reddit tier lib takes. They are infrequent enough that I find them manageable and he is semi-self aware. He's gotten better about not rehashing the previous chapter (I'm sure this is because of how he releases on patreon) at the start of every chapter. I think it was book 10 I could basically skip the first couple pages of each chapter.

The Pilgrims of the Damned: The Assembly Book 3 by Steve McHugh. Book 1 never did get too political, and the writing is still pretty snappy, so we're going with it. MC is looking more and more like an expy of his previous MC as time goes by, but it's been long enough since I've read the Hellequin chronicles that this isn't an issue for me.

About two-thirds of the way through A Canticle for Leibowitz. Story is starting to pick up now. Committing to reading at least 10% a day until I've finished it.

Somewhat recently I finished the series A Practical Guide to Evil. Pretty fun. I wish I had time to put it into better detail, but the world and setup is interesting. It's a sort of fantasy-with-superpowers type world? I don't know if I've really seen a book do it quite this way, however. The core concept is that "character archetypes" called "Named" periodically form in the world and with powers to match. For example, there's a Black Knight that shows up every few decades in the Evil-aligned nations, and a Paladin or whatnot who will show up in a Good-aligned nation. Roles can and do evolve if you survive long enough and are successful (e.g. you might start as a Squire and later evolve to e.g. a Mirror Knight). They have 3 limited-use (recharging) powers that are partly personal partly role-based. Fights between them tend to loosely follow some meta-narrative type rules, like starting a 'Rule of Three' set of conflicts between two rivals, or how Parties of Five tend to naturally form and are more powerful. It's a typical fantasy world (magic, nonhuman races, vaguely medieval) but with better than average worldbuilding IMO. The Evil-aligned empire on the continent exploits Orcs and Goblins to fight in their armies. You get periodic crusades against them, and periodic bouts of world-conquering too.

The context for the books however is that the main character is born and orphan in a middle, traditionally Good-aligned kingdom that usually gets the worst end of the stick when the Good nation of city-states to their West and the Empire to their East rampage all over their land. She is recruited as an Evil Squire, at first, to the Black Knight. However, said Black Knight and the Empress have conspired to "break" the typical cycle of Good vs Evil. They carefully try to avoid narrative traps in their fighting, stamp out Good heroes before they can get enough experience to start winning, treat the conquered middle Good nation abnormally well with expanded autonomy and economic prosperity, and develop the Empire's army into a more egalitarian and deadly fighting force, with expanded rights for nonhumans. This means that the MC's home nation is slowly turning... Evil! Mostly. But "Evil" in a, well, "practical" way as the title suggests. The idea is to be juuuust not-Evil and competent enough to prevent Fate spawning too many Good heroes from ruining everything. In their eyes, Good are jerks who are overly rigid in their thinking, while Evil has the potential to be pragmatic and level-headed about the greater good, paired with a resentment that narrative usually blindly favors the Good. Throughout the series the main character slowly adopts more and more of this attitude, but also tries to look out for her home nation and eventually grows quite powerful both personally and politically.

There is some character stuff of course, starting a bit tropey but gaining depth as you go on, some inventive fights (the main character often has to resort to tricks and cunning to win against the often narratively stronger Good heroes), and a surprising amount of politics and political maneuvering. And yes, the meta-narrative impact on fights is pretty interesting to see, especially among the more-experienced Named. You might get a hero who deliberately sets up a noble sacrifice as a giant fake-out, or deliberately as part of their fight strategy sending someone to wander around and thus rely on divine providence to guide them to the exact right spot, or a villain who tries to avoid their monologuing tendencies which inevitable backfire, but sometimes leaning into As the series expands you do eventually visit most parts of the continent, other nations' politics and alliances often become highly relevant. You've got a surprisingly deep and fleshed-out history of the nations involved. Which I've always really appreciated in series, like for example Wheel of Time was great in part because you ended up actually using the map over the course of the series with a nice sense of scale. A fair amount of the series is mostly war-stuff, though, which you either love or hate.

And you've got some comedy too. There's a city-state to the south that is an exaggerated democracy, where everything is put to a vote and the bureaucracy is intense and they almost never agree to do anything, but also has secret police who are constantly trying to guard against Tyranny. We get periodic epigraphs from some of the Named former Emperors, from Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful (the best unexpected quotes), Emperor Traitorous (infamous for several quadruple-crosses and such), etc. that occasionally give Hitchhiker's Guide vibes. Anyways, it's originally a web serial and that shows at times but nonetheless was a very fun read if pulp fantasy is your jam.

As an aside, in the original serialization, this world does apparently have a reason that the world is stuck at a certain technological level. Apparently there is a race of "gnomes" which are implied to be super-advanced, flying or space-faring or something, that will deliver a warning if an invention happens or line of research is pursued they don't want. If the warning is ignored they basically nuke the city from orbit. Is this elaborated on anywhere else in the novel aside from a few random mentions? No. They in no way affect the plot. I guess that's one way to set up a fantasy world's tech level... (IIRC in the published, edited novelization which is in progress, the second of ~6 currently about to come out, which I do recommend as an improvement over the original, this idea was dropped in favor of some kind of Fate hand-wavy thing, but IMO the gnomes are more funny)

So, basically, the set-up is: Evil Empire becoming Less Evil, more Good? Then hurrah, Good wins! Maybe in a sneakier way, having the Evil guys be less Evil in order to win over the middle kingdom, not provoke Fate into creating more Good heroes to fight them, and so forth, but definitely sounds like if they are moving pragmatically towards "yes, we are working more for the common good and not cackling fiendishly while throwing babies into furnaces", then how Evil can they really be?

Eh, partially but not entirely. For one, these Named technically have allegiance to the ā€œGods Above or Belowā€. So thereā€™s a bit of divine pressure. In that sense Good is more ā€œdo what you are toldā€ and Evil is more ā€œspit in the eye of the heavensā€ (also tolerate dirty tricks and blackmail and stuff in combat for example) and so thereā€™s technically a hard divide there and in terms of the Roles that arise (narratively self reinforcing too which is part of the point/problem). So evil and capital-E Evil in this setting are overlapping but distinct.

Also the Dread Empire still will do stuff like assassinations, collateral damage, even massacres, that kind of stuff, and to some extent the main character participates in that too; part of the broader setting, kind of cleverly, is that the Empire doesnā€™t have good farmland or rather, much of their land is ruined, so they turn to massive blood and sacrifice rituals to magically sustain crop output and avoid starvation (and invasions of course for food plunder). Thereā€™s some plot threads that try to connect the macroeconomics to the political conflicts IIRC. The predominant human ethnic group in the Empire (there are several) have a culture of backstabbing and poisoning and such. Did I also mention that despite having many more mages, they deal in necromancy and diabolism as very prominent magical disciplines?

With that said yes, the whole overall arc of the series is an attempt towards pragmatism on the side of Evil but also seeing if Good can work together with them sometimes or even come to a kind of accord rather than be a constant kill on sight cycle of violence. And a central tension is in order to get that, you have to gain raw power first, but not so much that a better future becomes impossible. But itā€™s a series with several books so we see some variety and detail come out over time.

Iā€™m curious to know if Iā€™m truly the only person on TM who finds reading fiction to be extremely difficultā€¦

I've been on a huge fiction candy binge. I don't know how many books a year I was reading per year for the last 10 years but it's been pretty intermittent. Start with the birth of my second kid I gave up all mobile gaming, and have read what I feel is an unhealthy amount. 7 Dungeon Crawler Carl books and on book 12 of He Who Fights with monsters in 5 months. Wife even says I've been doing more than my fair share around the house and taking care of the kids. Still feels like wasting a lot of time.

I was always a "smart kid" growing up but I hated reading. Of course I discovered blogs 10 years ago and I enjoy reading Discourse about news and current events (and i don't do it to learn about the issues or the events).

I realized a couple years ago that I just don't like fiction and narratives that much. There are dozens of us maybe!

Very interesting. Good to know Iā€™m not alone.

I was always very much an autodidact. I never really ā€œtook offā€ in terms of any burning desire to read until I was maybe 16 and when it happened I raided my fatherā€™s library and tried reading everything I got my hands on. Donā€™t know what it was but one day something just clicked and I dove right into it.

Iā€™m not as smart as people think I am. I feel like Iā€™m deceiving people at times when they say that. Yes, Iā€™ve read a lot of books, but genius is unmistakable when you see it. When you see what the kids at MIT can you, youā€™ll quickly understand why these people are in a different galaxy.

One thing I always do when I read non-fiction is pay very close attention to the bookā€™s bibliography. These are a gold mine that often go completely ignored by the reader. It often links directly to other books, articles and other authors. Iā€™d always go and look up those books and the background of these authors to see what their expertise is in.

What that meant was I always kept my ear close to the ground such that even if I didnā€™t know the answer to a question (usually because I was more interested in reading something else), I knew ā€˜exactlyā€™ where to look and who to ask and could ā€œpointā€ people directly to the answer and give it to them that way.

I think Iā€™m maybe more rational or educated than I am ā€œintelligentā€ in the sense of just raw mental horsepower. I have a very good memory and rarely forget things (although itā€™s a problem because usually when I donā€™t want to engage a point with someone I just tell them ā€œI forgotā€ or ā€œI donā€™t remember,ā€ and those who know me very well, never believe it), but very few of the ideas Iā€™ve come up with were invented by me. A lot of the time Iā€™m quoting or paraphrasing or extending the logical arguments of others Iā€™m persuaded by it really feels like plagiarism when others attribute it to me.

That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?

It doesnā€™t mean Iā€™ve never read it, Iā€™ve read a lot of fiction that I like, including most of the classics of old science fiction, but a lot of it is also a drag.

My father was a voracious reader all his life and loved his science fiction. But back when he was in high school he tried reading all the Dune books in sequence and said he just couldnā€™t do it because he abhorred Herbertā€™s literary style. He said Herbert is overly descriptive, he felt suffocated by reading him and didnā€™t let you as a reader use your imagination. And then one day he picked it up again and read every Dune book back to back in the same day and felt pumped up afterward; somehow he was able to just do it.

Iā€™ve read all the Dune books too except for a couple from the prelude series that Brian wrote. I had the exact ā€˜oppositeā€™ reaction my father had. I absolutely loved Herbertā€™s writing style because you didnā€™t have to do any work. Everything is given to you. I found myself not having to do any intellectual heavy lifting and everything simply fell into place.

Iā€™m sure itā€™s related to other odd quirks I have. I also canā€™t stand Quentin Tarantino films for instance. God, I hate his movies. And it comes down to his non-linear storytelling. I intensely hate that. Watching that stuff leaves me feeling schizophrenic and nauseated and confused as hell.

Mentally I tend to be a holistic thinker. I naturally operate in the mode of ā€œseeing the big picture.ā€ I struggle mightily proceeding with a story in piecemeal (itā€™s probably why I was also bad at cardboard puzzles as a kid). I lose my sense of reference when things tend to go ā€œoff scriptā€ from the plot and much of the time donā€™t even recognize when itā€™s happening. I remember once, my dad and I went back and watched old black and white episodes of the Twilight Zone and he got frustrated at me for failing to pickup the moral of the story and he was guiding me through each episode as we were watching it.

Thereā€™s a lot of fiction I love and even more I dislike, but it varies widely depending on who the author is. Iā€™m sure itā€™s all fundamentally related to the same thing. I tend not to pickup and context very well. Maybe my friends were right and I am a high functioning autistic. Who knows.

I've never read Dune but this makes me think I might like it. Is it like reading a textbook? Do you like reading textbooks?

Both of the fiction books I've ever binge-read were hard scifi. I only read them because I had heard second-hand what the themes were, and they sounded interesting. Both of them had "that one chapter" where the author dropped the thin veneer of story to dictate the book's theme like a textbook. This is not a criticism exactly, but just something odd I noticed.

I wouldnā€™t say it reads like a textbook in a non-fiction sense, but I found reading it to be easier than other people have. And yes, I do like reading textbooks. Broad surveys of things, hard science primers, encyclopedias, handbooks, material that tends to have a direct focus on a given topic, etc.

Fiction books written in textbook style:

Adding A Disturbance of Fate. Warning: heavy doses of Kennedy idolatry and boomer leftist althist wank to be expected.

edit: Also A Short History of the Future and the classic After Man and the somewhat lackluster follow-up Man After Man.

Very interesting. Thank you.

Is there a specific term for this type of literary style?

I think there unfortunately is not. The closest tropes seem to be Scrapbook Story (the story is composed of in-universe documents, which may or may not be textbooks) and Encyclopedia Exposita (the story uses excerpts from an in-universe textbook as chapter epigraphs, but is not itself an in-universe textbook).

I inhaled Uketsu's latest story, Strange Maps, yesterday, and found it pretty fun. For those who don't know, it's a Japanese mystery/vibes youtuber who made the break as an author with stories that can essentially be compared to golden-age murder mystery fiction (contrived "figure the perp, motive and mode" puzzle tales that try to be fair, optimized for puzzle design and vibes rather than for realism and literary value).

His stories are refreshingly free from the last 60 years' worth of epicycles of ironic self-awareness, and while the premise in this installment (protag investigates an uncanny handdrawn map found on his grandmother's body when she committed suicide) feels less fresh than the ones that gave him his break (real estate listings for houses with weird floor plans, which turn out to be key to unravelling sprawling conspiracies involving murder, scams, mental illness and cults), he got much better at staying grounded and inviting suspension of disbelief until the end. It's also great weeaboo bait for the sheer Japaneseness of the set pieces (Corrupt WWII military-industrial dynasties! Isolated fishing villages with creepy idiosyncratic cults! Women on lifelong quests of revenge! Salarymen who get black-out drunk with their scumbag boss!).

Trash

A Conneticut Yankee in king arthur's court: This trashy isekai light novel was written by mark twain in the 1880s but it follows most modern Trashy Isekai light novel tropes to a T.

MC is sent to a magical world via Isekaitis? Hammer kun is truck kun

MC is sent to a world where his modern knowledge makes him into a god? Check

World is effectively built around MC's ability? Check

MC gets a harem? Check (kinda)

and the big one you already knew it. The Title is also the premise.

Re:Zero: I have no clue why but I read 20 volumes of a time loop mystery. The thing that this story does is make our main character go through many different time loops in succession each "arc" is basically one time loop where our main character must both figure out the mystery and defeat the opponent. But our main character suffers a lot. Even though we have plot armor as an integral part of the story he suffers much more in interesting ways than most fantasy characters. This story is very well done with deep lore.

Stuff I read that is a waste of time but I can pretend to justify it better

The Chemical Formulary: A book of chemical recipies made in the 1930s has a lot of interesting ideas and also some of the worst ideas humanity has ever had.

One line you're reading an idea on how to prevent fog on your car then a little later you're reading about putting thallium in the ground to kill ants

The Geneva convention : I swear reading the Geneva convention has changed my opinion of fictional wars. Mainly I start to think the "good guys" are actually just fucking war criminals a lot.

The federalist papers: Some very interesting old papers where you get a great insight into the opinions of the founding fathers both how much foresight they had and how much they lacked. Really a great series of documents showing that these guys were absolutely insane. (in both a good and bad way)

I hear Isekai and its tropes trashed constantly. Why is that? Compared to other genres (kung-fu fighting shonen, school slice of life), is it more predictable, more numerous, not as enjoyable, or something else?

Because it's derivative, formulaic, and its gimmick has been done to death. Most of it is blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy. And most of it just plain isn't good, at all.

I say "most of it" as a hedge because I only sampled very little of it and it's entirely possible that there might be exceptions, but across what I've seen, the rules hold. It is in fact uniformly trash. Slop, if you will.

I agree with @gattsuru wholeheartedly on the (absence of) merits, but the reason why the genre gets uniquely trashed is imo the insane output and popularity both in Anime and in fanfic/royalroad-style amateur writing, coupled with a certain level of pretentiousness. Shounen is literally defined by its target group being boys, you don't expect it to be deep and if it is, that's a positive. Slice of Life also is defined by being light and fun. Isekai on the other hand has a very bad case of "this is not like other Isekai I swear" followed very quickly by checking absolutely every trope in the worst way possible. Spoiler: If you try to write seriously in a genre trashy enough that you need to put in a disclaimer that it's not like the rest, choose a different genre. Or just own up to the fact, you probably are just as trashy as everyone else.

For this reason, imo KonoSuba is a decent contender since it's comedy and doesn't pretend to be something it's not. Likewise, Overlord is funny in its complete over-the-top ridiculousness, but it's hard to tell whether the author intended it that way, so probably more a case of so-bad-it's-good.

And secondly, Shounen and Slice of Life are arguably troperific in a mostly-wholesome way; For example, boys loving exciting adventures and people usually becoming friends after fights, that's just fun & nice. Isekai, on the other hand, is frequently quite degenerate, for lack of a better word. Especially the tendency towards harems puts it quite close to erotic dramas just with an inverted target audience.

There are well-received ā€œnormal(ish) person transported to alternate worldā€ works, like Gravity Falls, Narnia, Idiocracy, Harry Potter.

My guesses:

Isekai doesnā€™t even try to justify why the normal person is in the alternate world. Presumably writers who choose Isekai instead of Isekai-like prefer not justifying major plot points.

More likely, because most Isekai are trash, people who like Isekai tend to prefer trash, and people who dislike trash tend to have prejudice against Isekai. So either a) the author makes an Isekai-like to avoid the prejudice, b) they make a trash Isekai, or c) they have a small audience.

Thanks for your response, although I'll admit it didn't help me very much. For one, I didn't list "trash" as a reason, and the closest analog was "not enjoyable." I don't understand art criticism, so if art critics (or other taste gatekeepers) give vague criticism, I just phrase it descriptively as "they did not enjoy it." Should I just note that as your position?

"Not justifying major plot points" is interesting. Is a premise the same as a major plot point? In lots of fantasy there are magic systems that do not have any justification. I'm assuming that this is not a case where there are repetitive, periodic deus ex machina or a systemic problem with bad writing? If the premise is this unrealistic thing, like who cares? Is It's A Wonderful Life trash? Is the issue that Isekai tries to steal valor by having a dumb premise and doesn't even bother to do something interesting (="enjoyable") with it?

Youā€™re right that plenty of good works rely on unexplained premises/plot (e.g. any involving magic, Bojack Horseman why animals are antropomorphized). So I take back my first theory.

Second theory: ā€œtrashā€ can be substituted for anything and the general point holds: when the work is clearly Isekai, people have predefined expectations, people who like / dislike the genre like / dislike those expectations respectively.

Why this applies to Isekai more than other genresā€¦because Isekai tends to be predictable, so the expectations are stronger.

You can "not justify" something in the sense that we don't know a justification for why gravity exists and works the way it does, and you can "not justify" something in the sense that despite everything we've been told about gravity, an apple falls up instead of down.

Shouldnā€™t it be enough to be able to suspend your disbelief when it comes to literature? Itā€™s not at all like hard sciences.

Once youā€™ve come the postulate of necessity in philosophical terms, youā€™ve reached the end of the explaining that you can do. At some point these are just bottom level features of reality. Reality only has one level of organization, and thatā€™s the lowest level; despite the separate cognitive elements that keep track of the different levels of organization.

Naturally, I suspend disbelief when reading most literature. However, suspending disbelief for increasingly formulaic and lazy disbelief-inducers gets boring.

If apples are constantly falling up even though we're always told they fall down, it would seem to be a systemic, periodic problem and not just a silly premise.

So it sounds like: the initial Isekai premise is just the first instance of the inevitable general tendency to Make Shit Up (commonly called 'bad writing'?)

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened (and it was never explained), I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

If there are apples falling up periodically yet it's never recognized or addressed in-universe even though it drives the entire plot, again, bad writing.

If an apple fell up once so conveniently that the entire plot happened, I'd consider that bad writing unless, I suppose, the irony of this one unexplained anomaly is the entire premise.

This seems obviously correct to me, except that empirically it's just wrong. Off the top of my head I can't actually think of any other examples in which it's wrong, though; is there some meta-irony here about how there's this one unexplained anomaly in the category of narrative quality of anomalies?

More comments

I really wish there were some good isekai works out there, but as a genre it's near-uniquely prone to promising really good central ideas, and then immediately dropping them for glorified wish fulfillment antics. It's not that the stories are predictable, but that where they're going is just not very interesting, and the conflict with the potential makes it really obvious. And that seems to have only gotten worse as the genre has matured.

So you have a fascinating world with deep questions... that's not going to get answered or explored. You have a character that's badly out of depth in a world where that's a punishing problem... and is going to be overpowered godmode in ten chapters. You have a relationships that have to cross massive cultural boundaries and make serious compromises... and it's not going to matter, because the main character's going to have between three and ten waifus dangling from his arm regardless of where they can even speak his language. You have an opportunity to seriously think about the portability of knowledge or critical thinking skills when entering a world where even the laws of physics are different... and it's almost always going to go full It's Magic I Don't Gotta Explain Shit.

They can be fun reads - trash can be fun, and I'm not above reading or writing power fantasy or fixit fics or harem comedy - but they're seldom deep books, and almost never good and deep. So they're trash.

Connecticut Yankee at least tries to be bitter (albeit as much to keep with the time travel stable loop thing than out of real conviction), but it's still very central an example of the genre's problems: Hank's dropped into a complicated society he deeply disagrees with, and the answer is Invent Gun and Get Lucky (both figuratively, and separately with a literal eclipse). The only real depth is using the as a metaphor for then-current problems (the aftermath of slavery, papists, the gullibility of the populace, so on), but Twain's heavy-handed enough that they're equivalent to a modern-day writer putting Ronald Grump as a isekai villain.

To be fair, Twain was also writing in the 1880s, so he was literally inventing a lot of the tools of modern literature, so it's hard to blame him too much for not reinforcing his themes with his events. But modern-day writers don't have that excuse.

Spellsinger is my personal nemesis: it opens up with an everyman protagonist who genuinely gets squicked out by the realistic conventions of a fantasy (furry-adjacent, my kryptonite!) world, along with a 'magic' that borrows from science and that the protagonist doesn't have any unique strengths with... and then there's a two-page transition that turns into the protagonist solving every problem with the power of badly-mangled rock song. It's one of the few books I've literally thrown across the room. I've read some stinkers, but this is a book that could have been a lot more.

If you want recs, RE:Zero is good if you don't mind the gore, Magic Kingdom for Sale Sold is a pretty central example of the genre and its flaws done reasonably, Vision of Escaflowne is better-known for its visuals but does a good job for its time. Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is decent if very much worse than Tenchi Muyo for 'stupid harem hijinks'. Dark Lord of Derkholm is kinda a deconstruction, enough that I don't really count it as isekai, but it does a good job of pointing out the problems.

Ar'Kendrytheist is one of very few works to actually take its setting assumptions seriously (and finish), but it's very long and extremely progressive-coded (if only rarely so woke as to be actively detrimental rather than merely smarmy), so I'm a little cautious to put it into the clear recommend list. Arguably Beware of Chicken as a 'shorter' (aka several novella) comedy, though it's not as good about avoiding the pitfalls. I have high hopes for the Contention series, but it's just at the crux of both 'what's the answer to our grabbing mystery' and 'does the main character naturally learn from his mistakes, or does he just get overpowered' at the end of Book 2 and that's kinda the turning point between good-for-isekai and awful.

Isekai is usually a thin excuse to put a protagonist most palatable to the modern audience - a modern person - into a wholly alien setting (making the setting "modern world but changed" would require extra work on integrating the changes while keeping the MC relatable). This is seen as immature reading.

It also intersects with tropes such as power fantasy (protagonist has some power that puts them ahead of natives, usually not gained through effort).

What I'm actually reading.

Finishing up the last book in The Warlord Chronicles, Excalibur, which I'm really enjoying. It's a gritty (although maybe not that historically accurate) Arthur retelling that I think thematically captures a lot of what the Arthur mythos is going for. Also reading After Virtue, which I am starting to enjoy more.

Warlord Chronicles is great. Always makes me crave playing a welsh ruler in crusader kings 2, 867 start, and forming prydain. Culture converting all vassals and provinces is mandatory, get bored afterwards.

Theres actually a CK2 mod for Warlord Chronicles, but it's not that good.

Makes me want to learn Welsh, especially since my ancestry is almost 100% British and Irish (with some Scandinavian blood). Would be practically useless but is very beautiful.

Do you know about the Winter King mod for CK2? You can just directly play as the book characters in the 480 start (edit: I see that you talked about this, guess the mod isn't that good)

Oh yes, I did. The mod is just not quite done and feels empty, but it's been 2 years+ since I last tried it so it may be better now.

I have 0% Welsh, Irish, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry but when I reread Warlord Chronicles I feel an insatiable urge to drive the Angles and Saxons back into the sea, just as Arthur would have wanted.

I hated that book. Review below

First the plot. I think I could live with an unbelievable speculative world, and even with arrogant writing, if interesting stuff happens to interesting people. Very little happens in this book, and very little of what happens is due to the agency of the main character. I get that that's part of the point: women in this literary universe (and in the world in general) are so often oppressed and powerless, and its difficult to them to feel like they have any agency. But it doesn't make the main character very interesting, or even very feminist. Offered is kind of sniveling coward who goes along with pretty much every thing that's done to her, only taking matters into her own hands when she wants to have sex with the chauffeur (which I suppose could be read as empowering, but did not come off to me that way).

Secondly, the world building. Margaret Atwood markets herself as an author of "Speculative Fiction" rather than "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy" because she prefers to think of herself as someone who writes about things that could happen. The thing is, The Handmaid's Tale could never happen in this country, especially not on the timescale suggested. Polyamory is not something acceptable for the Christian right (although not so on the left), and the reduction of Women to sex objects is not something that Christianity preaches (the most revered women in the faith is A VIRGIN). Even if some kind of twisted version of the faith was to appear, there's no way it would be able to seize power in the country, and have such widespread support on the timescale suggested. And that's not to mention the whole issue of political conflict in a society with a declining birth rate. Atwood does this kind of okay in some aspects: most everyone in the Handmaid's tale just seems tired: no one actually believes in all the crap that the regime puts on, which I think fits with the general narrative of declining population. That, however, does not fit with the brainwashing or the force of belief required for Gilead to overthrow the US government. Again, I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of Atwood's about fundamentalists. A lot of fundamentalists actually really deeply believe what they say they do. What Atwood presents here is yet another caricature of religious extremism: hypocrites who don't actually practice what they preach.

Given some historical context in which this was written (aftermath of Reagan's election and Iranian Revolution), the world of this book makes a little more sense. However, Atwood's concerns about the rights of women have, at least in my opinion, aged badly. Although the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, many states, including Massachusetts, still have the right to abortion enshrined by their constitutions. The religious right is increasingly irrelevant: their champion is a hedonistic old man who fails to even make lip service to any kind of religious morals. Threats to women rights rather have come from capital, and the insidious reduction of everything, from bodies, to free time, to meaningful relationships, to the grasping hand of the market. Atwood so poignantly critiqued this system in her MaddAddam trilogy, and it was frustrating to not see that same level of analysis here.

Finally, I found the writing to be unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. Frequent, un-signalled flashbacks, and lack of quotation marks were the worst offenders. I get that this was supposed to be due to the framing device of these being audio transcripts, but it still grinds my gears. Atwood is not unique in this regard (looking at you Cormac Mccarthy). I also found that the framing device didn't really do it for me: somehow this being a university lecture ~100 years after the fall of Gilead made the whole speculative world even more unbelievable for me.

The main issue with the book is that she understands the aesthetics of certain religious groups but has no real understanding of the mechanics of it.

In real life young attractive and fertile women were treated exceptionally well. The young women pharaohs had children with lived in luxury. Young women married to princes lived in luxury. In no culture do elite level men keep the mothers of their kids in basements.

On the flip side elite level men generally have had an easy time finding women and don't have to resort to capturing women. Taking slave wives that live in poverty is something low class men who would engage in.

Atwood really fails at evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Her books confirms my belief that many of the worst ideas in modern politics comes from people literature background who don't really understand the underlying mechanisms.

In no culture do elite level men keep the mothers of their kids in basements.

Well, it wasn't a basement, it was an attic, but the Russians basically did.

The women's quarters of the tsar's palace were particularly elaborate and were equipped with a separate courtyard, dining room, and childrenā€™s apartments, as well as a large group of maidservants, wet nurses, nannies, and ladies in waiting.

The women the elite had children with effectively lived in spas with exceptional luxury. The idea that they were forced into a miserable existence doesn't match reality.

Maybe if you limit your definition of "the elite" to just the czar. Not every boyar could afford a setup like that, but not sequestering your woman is low status, so solve for the equilibrium.

A few comments

ā€¢The Sons of Jacob definitely arenā€™t supposed to be a mainline Christian denomination. The name ā€œJesusā€ is pointedly never mentioned by anyone in Gilead, ever, nor is anything from the New Testament. The SoJ have difficulty controlling the Deep South due to Baptist insurgents, which would imply that many hardline denominations are not on board. Additionally, book Gilead has a strong racial apartheid element, with the ā€œSons of Hamā€ being confined to South Africa style Zanzibar-stans. This would seem to imply the SoJ are a strain of Dominionist weirdos and not mainline Christians. This was changed in the tv show to make the SoJ racially egalitarian, which honestly probably tracks better with radical Christian groups today. Many of the lower level political commissars of Gilead are former rad-fems, which also doesnā€™t really track with any 80s right wing or religious movement (though it seems oddly prescient today).

ā€¢It seems to be implied the fertility crisis caused massive social pressure which allowed the SoJ to seize power, and that the handmaids and the rest of the social structure are more of a semi-pragmatic measure to deal with that, and not just some stupid LARP. It annoys me that in the show Canada seems to be able to just be a normal liberal brunchtopia in the face of an existential demographic crisis.

ā€¢I think post-script seemingly taking place after the fall of the regime is an homage to Orwellā€™s 1984 with the Newspeak dictionary at the end.

I have only read two novels by Atwood, but the thing that seems to run through both of them is that she combines the subtlety of a pulp writer with the pretentions of a literary fiction author. It's a bizarre combination.

For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".

For those of you who have read the culture novels - do you consider them to be utopian or dystopian?

I was discussing them with a friend recently and he views them as profoundly utopian. On the other hand, I view them as one of the best examples of a soft dystopia that I've ever read.

I just finished Matter the other day.

The Culture is utopian, even though itā€™s built on two great injustices.

You canā€™t compete with the Minds. This is a fact of the setting, rather than a societal choice or a zero-sum game, so it doesnā€™t move the needle into dystopia.

You also canā€™t manufacture meaning, even from unlimited material wealth. As a consequence, the Culture chooses to mine it from weaker civilizations. Half the books interrogate the morality and practicality of doing so; the other half elaborate on what kind of mythology lets a society justify it. But at no point does this abuse fall upon the citizens. It is an externality.

No downsides for the citizens, no dystopia.

You canā€™t compete with the Minds. This is a fact of the setting, rather than a societal choice or a zero-sum game, so it doesnā€™t move the needle into dystopia.

I disagree and proclaim the opposite. If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia? If anything it would make it even more dystopian since there's no getting out.

It's the same with the Minds. Humans factually being glorified pets is horrifying, and moreso if the Minds are truly unbeatable. It being a societal choice would make it less dystopian, since that means there's hope yet for humans.

Maybe I confused the issue.

I wanted to say that unfairness in the setting doesnā€™t imply unfairness in the society. Itā€™s unfair and unsettling that humans have to share a universe with superior artificial intelligences, but theyā€™ve managed to construct a utopian society in spite of it.

If the Culture were the only game in town, I would be more inclined to call it dystopian. But leaving/schisming/self-effacing is a large part of their appeal. I think that forgives a lot of the paternalism.

How do you know weā€™re not already glorified pets in some societal experiment and/or universe simulation?

I think your first point is stronger. The author asserts ā€œthe Minds are correctā€ but canā€™t prove itā€™s coherent with reality and general humanity. If I define Society A as ā€œa utopia where humans are in constant agonyā€, is it a utopia? Itā€™s self-contradictory.

How do you know weā€™re not already glorified pets in some societal experiment and/or universe simulation?

Strictly speaking I don't, but in the same way as I don't know whether there is a invisible teapot floating somewhere in space. I've never considered arguments along these lines particularly convincing; No matter how omnicient and omnipotent a being might be inside it's perceivable universe, you can always claim that it's all just an elaborate fake orchestrated from beyond. The possibility should be kept in the back of one's mind, but unless there is particular evidence in its favour, I'm fine with just dismissing it.

If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia?

It's a dystopia because of the "oppressive" downside, Culture Minds are not oppressive, just superior.

That may be another avenue of argument, but netstack's claim that I was contesting was that inevitability does (not) overrule a dystopia.

To your point, I might prefer to have a gracious owner as opposed to a hostile one, but not being a pet in the first place takes precedence.

I think they were a perverse writerly attempt to subvert or undermine utopia.

Taken at face value, the Culture seems like liberal utopia - individuals all have near-absolute freedom, luxury, and so on. Almost any conception of the good life can be freely pursued in the Culture, and the Culture will probably help you do it. Nonetheless, in practically every single Culture novel, Banks everything he can to problematise the Culture.

It's the same instinct as with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The author introduces us to a seemingly-perfect system and then the entire rest of the series is an attempt to pick apart or destroy that system.

Thus onwards with the series. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture starts a massive interstellar war that kills trillions of people. In The Player of Games, the Culture lies to and cruelly manipulates the protagonist while engaging in an act of unilateral aggression against a poor society that poses them no threat. In Look to Windward, the Culture mishandles the Chelgrians about as badly as anyone as anyone could. In Excession, I think it is significant that the Culture fails the Excession's test. Even on the level of characters, these books are not filled with happy people. The Culture character in Consider Phlebas, Balveda, puts herself into stasis and then commits suicide out of moral disgust with her own people. In The Player of Games, Gurgeh is selfish, slimy, and difficult to like, and Flere-Imsaho is a hypocritical liar. Excession contains that one guy who makes himself into an Affront because he craves the one liberty that the Culture will not give him, the liberty to be genuinely cruel to un-consenting victims. And so on.

The Culture is set up so as to theoretically be a utopia, but after reading just a couple of the books, I think Iain M. Banks hates the Culture, or at least, is keen to find its flaws. He doesn't cheat and give the Culture an obvious evil side (the Minds really are benevolent, humans really can engage in positive and meaningful work, this isn't made possible by any kind of oppression or injustice, etc.), but he is constantly looking for the ways in which this society is unsatisfactory. The Culture cannot manufacture meaning, or sense of communal purpose. The best it can find is the tawdry impulse to make more of itself.

'Dystopia' doesn't seem like the right word for something clearly designed as utopian, at least, as a logical extension of liberal values into a context of arbitrarily high resource availability and technological capacity, but at the same time, the word 'utopian' conjures up a sense of approval.

I think the Culture is a utopia that its author disapproves of, if that makes sense? Some readers are blind to nuance and therefore take the Culture as unironically good, but I don't think that reading stands up to closer examination. But Banks does everything he can to make the Culture fit most people's imagination of utopia. The result, at least on my reading, challenges some of those values. If the Culture is a utopia given those assumptions, and yet, as I think Banks wants us to, we look at the Culture and feel at best deeply ambivalent, that suggests that our assumptions might be flawed.

But what other ones are there? No one in the Culture novels ever articulates a very convincing alternative - Idiran or Chelgrian theocracy hardly seem better, Azad is awful on multiple levels, and the Sublimed steadfastly refuse to explain themselves. Balveda kills herself after enough time has passed that the Culture can mathematically 'prove', on utilitarian grounds, that the Idiran War was justified - as if she knows that this is wrong, but cannot explain why. Can we do any better than her?

The problem to this view is that, as far as I have read Iain M Banks own comments on The Culture, he seems at least positively inclined, and he definitely is the kind of leftist that could plausibly like a society such as The Culture. So the most likely conclusion to me is that it is his best attempt at the kind of utopia he personally would want to live in, but with enough intellectual and moral integrity that he tries to seriously challenge it over and over again, as opposed to choose the easy way and give it challenges tailor-made to look good against..

I disliked and dislike The Culture as a utopia, but now I wonder if Banks was writing his own version of Omelas. Here is someplace where you can have anything you want (within certain limits). But you, as a human, are a pet. You'll never be a Mind, and indeed there are references running through the books about how the wet meat brain level of processing is the very, very lowest even a drone falls back on only in absolute emergency. Humans just are not built for it, no matter how altered they may be.

The Culture is also hypocritical and doesn't care about it. They preach liberty and nobody should interfere with anybody else and the rest of it, but in order to maintain their hegemony, if the Minds even imagine any rival civilisation might become a threat at some undefined time in the future, they set out to undermine that civilisation. And, as pointed out in other comments, they'll use blackmail and manipulation to get the human agents to work for them. They don't engage with other civilisations on a level with them, so they play nicely there, but if you're not as developed (by the Culture norms) then expect to have your entire world turned into a game piece for the aim of "more influence, more safety, more existence" for the Culture (and if that destroys your world, well they'll cry prettily about it then decide it was the right thing to do in the end).

So the Culture resembles Omelas in that it's an utopia on the surface, but don't look too closely at the grimy underbelly. And some do try and walk away from it (the various characters who leave for other civilisations or who end up so damaged by their work for Contact or Special Circumstances that they can't fit back in).

For me the most surprising thing about reading the Culture novels was the tone of them. I had mostly experienced the Culture beforehand through people excitedly talking it up as a utopia, or describing it as what they want to build after the Singularity. To then read the books and find that, even just on the level of the basic prose, Banks doesn't like the Culture was striking. He does not describe it with the kind of enthusiasm that you would expect a utopia to merit. His characters often spend most of the story trying to escape the Culture only to fail. After all, most of the alternatives to the Culture on offer are plainly worse than it.

The Culture novels are mostly from the 1990s (the first, Consider Phlebas, is from 1987, and the last, The Hydrogen Sonata, is from 2012; but I think the most significant ones are probably The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and Look to Windward (2000)), and I think reflect the angst of a kind of end-of-history ascendant liberalism. Have we won history? Liberalism wins, everything else falls by the wayside? And while liberal polities in the 90s had problems, suppose we extend this trajectory into the future so that all those temporary problems are solved. Endless material prosperity, endless personal freedom. What now? What is left to do? And if you find this in some way insufficient - why? What's missing? To me the series seems to be grappling with that question, and it struggles to articulate a clear answer. There's this restless discomfort with the Culture, a feeling that this isn't enough, and yet the Culture is still the least-bad thing.

I feel like the Culture doesn't so much celebrate the triumph of liberal values as it does mourn their triumph. The Culture is pretty clearly its setting's stand-in for America or for the West more broadly, and it reflects a kind of pre-2000s angst about American intervention.

Thus with Idir, Azad, the Chelgrians, the Affront - the stories keep coming back to the question of when and how it is desirable for an ostensibly more enlightened, compassionate society to intervene in a weaker one.

The case the Culture could often make for themselves is twofold. Firstly, they can 'prove', in a mathematical, utilitarian sense that they are making the galaxy a better place. The Culture are good effective altruists in that their interventions reduce suffering and increase sapient welfare. They show this 'with apologetic smugness' but show it all the same. Secondly, their principles of individual sovereignty can justify many of their actions. Special Circumstances violates them a little, as with Gurgeh, but because the Culture is an anarchy that only recognises individuals, not the rights of states or communal political organisations, they can resort to this to explain their inventions.

Okay, Azad never attacked the Culture. But Azad is not a monolith - Azadian society is a strict and oppressive hierarchy, and Emperor Nicosar is not the incarnation of the will of the people. In fact the Culture itself never attacked Azad. The Culture deliberately engineered a political crisis that would cause an Azadian revolution and which, they predicted, would set Azad on the path of becoming more Culture-like. But the revolution would never have happened if the Azadian people had not wanted it. The Culture refuse to accept Nicosar's or the Azadian elite's description of what Azad wants. They speculate, probably correctly, that if you gave a secret poll to every single Azadian, most of them would want their government to be overthrown. The destruction of Azad is something like an idealised American intervention in the Middle East - the Iraqis/Iranians/Azadians will greet us as liberators. How would you make the argument against this? Azadian state sovereignty ought to prevent that? Why? Should the Culture behave more selfishly, in light of the fact that Azad posed no threat? One of the Culture's own justifications is precisely the fact that they have nothing whatsoever to gain from intervention. It proves their selflessness and the purity of their own motives.

One of my temptations would be to turn the argument back on the Culture. There wasn't a general poll of the Culture. Contact and Special Circumstances function like conspiracies. There is no group that is 'the Culture', which expresses a unified will. The Azadian intervention was the work of a small group of committed individuals within an organisation, Special Circumstances, that we are told most Cultureniks think of as sketchy and morally doubtful. So in what way are SC different to Nicosar or the Azadian elite they seek to destroy? Their answer may be as simple as, "We are selflessly acting to reduce suffering; Nicosar is selfishly acting to increase it". Is that enough?

I think they're fairly boring, meself.

The only one I was able to really sink my teeth into was Excession, and that's primarily due to how it focuses on the various Minds and the squabbles/conversations/complaints they get into dealing with one another and various Culture citizens.

Mind, part of the issue might be due to Banks falling into the typical habit alot of sci-fi writers do and making their protagonists/'human' charachters so goddamn unlikable. It's like there's a school of writing who think that 'cantankerous bitch' is somehow an interesting character.

Okay, maybe I'm being a little bit unfair, but it wouldn't stick with me so much if I didn't see so many writers doing it.

I didn't read a lot of The Culture, but honestly I have no idea. I mean the society is certainly way post-scarcity, but humans there are basically pets for the Minds, and we don't even know what Minds are about and what do they want, and not supposed to. Is it worse being Hitler's pet than a saint's pet? Is there any moral responsibility on the side of the pet? It doesn't seem like humans even have enough agency there for there being any distinction, really. Materially, it is described as pretty much perfect. Even intellectually, I am sure Minds can find something to occupy any of the pet's needs, whatever they are, including awesome adventures or great battles or whatever. Occasionally, they may even require the services of a human for some task (after all, we have K9 units in the police and the military) and even then, I am sure they would make it as safe and as enjoyable for the human as possible in the circumstances. But is is even a story about humans, that can be analyzed in human terms? I think this setup transcends those terms and makes them meaningless.

The easy answer's that they're a weirdtopia - akin to Caelum Est Conterrens or The Metamorphisis of Prime Intellect - but that's not very helpful.

It's hard to call them a pure dystopia. It's not 1984 or Brave New World or (the inside or outside!) of The Matrix; hell, it beats Reedspacer's Lower Bound. The average person's life is the sort of thing a large portion of the world would still call paradise, and the Minds are as gods. Many of its problems are downstream of showing the people are still (somewhat) people with rough edges and friction, or are artifacts of needing to be in a story where there is conflict, or to where something else can meaningfully be outside of The Culture.

But it's hard to call it a pure utopia, either. There are monsters, either from outside of the universe or just plain Klingon-equivalents. It is a world where people die, sometimes not even out of their own free will. The Culture might not be able to lose a war, but they can lose hundreds of billions of lives in one. The people just get bored. In a world with free energy and free automation, that's aiming pretty low. I'd argue that we only see people who excel because of their own fixations, where a healthier utopia would have more options and interests in arete for its own sake, but that could arguably be a literary thing. Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime, or the lack of people turned or turning into Minds or something on their scale.

Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime

The Sublime seems to resolve most of your complaints it seems to me.

It's a process any collective group can go through that takes them to a realm where it's proven nothing can die nor get bored (in fact, realspace is so boring in comparison most people never return) and there's endless discovery and growth.

It's more democratic than realspace since non-Minds can have it and apparently all sapient races can achieve it.

Man, reading up on Caelum Est Conterrens reminded me, despite my many sympathies for their basic attitude, how many rationalists seem to be dedicated to fulfilling the worst stereotypes about the scientifically minded. See this discussion's gem:

So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness.

There's this idea among the other-ways-of-knowing crowd that science can only ever talk about what we can currently define and measure, and that it is in particular obvious that there are things we will never be able to measure well, so science is limited to only a specific sliver of reality. This leads to the silly caricature of the scientist as a person who is only obsessed with measurable and entirely dismisses the immeasurable. Whereas I'd say most scientists have not only no issue admitting the limited scope of our current knowledge, they actively work on increasing that scope, precisely because they do not dismiss these concerns.

But no, this person just unironically dismisses caring about free choice (even putting it in scare quotes) as opposed to happiness, because the latter is easier to define.

Stereotype accuracy, indeed.

It's a sub-standard utopia. I'd take living in the Culture over present reality any day of the weak, but given their technology and resources, they're doing fuck-all with it.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the biggest downside to the Culture is their parochial attitude and small-mindedness. They simply lack ambition or gumption. They're the equivalent of a society that can mass manufacture graphene at scale, but only use it to make slightly nicer bicycles instead of space elevators.

Why? Fuck you, I ain't saying. I've got a mostly complete essay in the works which gets it into the weeds of it.

I'd take living in the Culture over present reality any day of the weak,

Nice slip!

Autocorrect is putting respect on Freud's name. That, or my acute sleep deprivation after 48 hours of travel is giving me dementia.

One parapraxis is a sign of dementia...?

Well, there has to be a first one. It's probably not going to be the last.

I think that they're an honest effort to imagine post-scarcity space liberalism and not hand-wave every peculiar question away, like the first iterations of Star Trek would. That the culture "society" (in quotes because Banks constantly reminds us that using words like society or law don't really apply to this rule by "loving" machines) is better than ours in some ways (liberty, pleasure, information) seems obvious, but esthetically it's less certain, and morally or metaphysically even the stories themselves seem to be often ambivalent.

I would certainly find them more utopian than dystopian, I think either of those are easy to define by answering "would you like to live here?" 1984-- no. The Player of Games-- Maybe, it seems a lot like 2026, I have gender ambiguous friends and get my dick busted by machines but at least I live on a ring world with a nice estate and can find interplanetary applications for my autism. I'm free but not really when you think about it, etc etc.

I haven't read the novels...but your comment reminded me of this discussion. It and this reply I agree with.

I think a life of only simple pleasures (eating, sleeping, etc.) would get boring, because I desire achievement, and I believe most people agree. I also think such a life isn't realistically human, it's what animals do, while most humans have long-term plans. Achievement also requires adversity, because one needs to at least imagine they could fail.

However, if the Minds were really intent on "preserving humanity", they could also give humans fake achievement and adversity, up to recreating life as it is now.

If you believe The Culture is a dystopia, what would make it a utopia?

You mean other than changing the core premise?

If forced to work in the framework as it stands, I'd probably need to see a mix of human agency (possibly by resurrecting the early and largely abandoned concept of Referrers), and introducing more AI entities that are less... smarmily dickish? The only AI character who seems to genuinely care about biologicals on a personal and moral level is Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, who other AI consider to be psychotic.

The AIs do care, the humans are beloved pets. High functioning pets that need a lot of room to play.

Edit: The example I heard about once is that as dogs are to humans, humans are to AI minds. A dog wouldn't understand why you brought him to the vet for a painful treatment, but it was for the dog's own good. A human couldn't understand an AI's motives because a human's mind is on a lower level of sentience.

Utopian! What makes you think they're dystopian?

The best way I can explain it is that it feels like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with better PR.

You have vast inscrutable non-human intelligences that run every aspect of society. It's ok though - they're really looking out for you (as long as you weren't one of the 851.4 billion). Don't worry about the fact that your body was manipulated before your birth to alter things as fundamental as your sexual preferences (which has frequently been a horror trope), or that it wil change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream. It's all for your own good. Trust us. You live in a perfectly free society. Agents of the inscrutable beings would never do things like engage in naked blackmail. That would be gauche. Even if they did do it, it's really for the best. Nothing to worry about.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis

or that it will change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream.

I'll note that even your link says "can opt to", and Wikipedia says

Most Culture individuals opt to have drug glands that allow for hormonal levels and other chemical secretions to be consciously monitored, released and controlled. These allow owners to secrete on command any of a wide selection of synthetic drugs, from the merely relaxing to the mind-altering: "Snap" is described in Use of Weapons and The Player of Games as "The Culture's favourite breakfast drug". "Sharp Blue" is described as a utility drug, as opposed to a sensory enhancer or a sexual stimulant, that helps in problem solving. "Quicken", mentioned in Excession, speeds up the user's neural processes so that time seems to slow down, allowing them to think and have mental conversation (for example with artificial intelligences) in far less time than it appears to take to the outside observer. "Sperk", as described in Matter, is a mood- and energy-enhancing drug, while other such self-produced drugs include "Calm", "Gain", "Charge", "Recall", "Diffuse", "Somnabsolute", "Softnow", "Focal", "Edge", "Drill", "Gung", "Winnow" and "Crystal Fugue State". The glanded substances have no permanent side-effects and are non-habit-forming.

which mentions optionality again and also mentions "secrete on command".

It's been a while since I've read them, but it seems like that if they're automatically dispensing drugs to you they're doing so under parameters you configured yourself, which seems perfectly fine.

Don't several characters turn off their hormone implants or get them removed? It all seems very optional.

It's been a while, but my recollection is that only really happens for characters who are disillusioned by the culture and want to leave it.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats