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The so-called "Anti weaponization fund" has been defeated due to public and internal backlash.
It was so unpopular that even Republican senators were furious and yelling at Blanche over it. According to Ted Cruz
But why did it die?
Republicans are willing to bow their heads to Trump on most things, but the same way defund the police was unpopular (because people like the police), senators really like the capitol police and don't approve of rewarding the cop beaters with money. Trump got away with the pardons, but actively awarding attacking the cops who protect them is a step too far from many.
It was also just really unpopular among voters. Just like the senators, voters don't approve of giving money to cop beaters. Not even many republican ones are supportive of that just because they did it in Trump's name. Of course it's also quite likely that many interpreted the question as a fund for victims of Trump's weaponization, such as James Comey whose lead prosecutor just stepped down or Jerome Powell but not all probably did.
As my own senator put it
Senators also felt that the deal was too blatantly corrupt and hard for them to defend with a straight face.
Either way, they've dropped it now and the fund is dead in the water. Interesting showcase of how many republican congressman haven't completely neutered themselves for the executive yet, they just mostly argue behind closed doors.
The Trump administration didn't do the Republican Party in general many favors by making it so easy for people to describe this initiative as a slush fund for Trump supporters, even if the idea of stopping government institution weaponization against Republicans is in principle good for Republicans. I think the optics of trying to do these things could have been handled much more subtly, especially when Republican leaders are already uneasy about the midterms.
Not while Trump is in the White House.
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One of the protestors mentioned on X they can still just sue the government and have them settle regardless of if the money comes from a specific fund or not. So may not matter much in the end. Just another example of GOP congresspeople trying to pretend keeping the moral high ground matters at all compared to simply wielding your power for your allies and against your foes.
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As an aside, I do appreciate that you bring a different viewpoint into TheMotte. Anyway, this slush fund is corruption, just because the other side does it doesn't mean it's ok that your side does it too. I do recognize that for a lot of people here it's a feeling of "look what you made me do" or "you made me do this", or maybe a bit of accelerationist, who knows, but the whole point is the ability to curb the extremes and either appeal or force each other to be better without violence and resentment. Anyway, I still feel the slush fund is small, I am more outraged about all the stock trading Trump does.
Yeah, it's always just an excuse for their own hypocrisy. One way you can tell that's the case is that "both sides!" use the same logic. It's like Scott's piece cautioning bias arguments https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/
It doesn't make sense that the pro Israel and pro Palestine side both felt the documentary was biased against them, so it's explained better by their own personality and victim complexes.
In the same way, it doesn't make sense that pro right and pro left sides both give the excuse that "the other one started it and we're just being equal", so it is explained better by their own personality and victim complex.
Hell just look at some of the conversations I've had here already. The standard of evidence for many motte users that cops unfairly assaulted a protestor on Jan 6th is apparently "this guy on X said so". Meanwhile cases, like a guy who shot a black man and was charged with manslaughter that have gone to trial, been convicted at trial and had the conviction upheld as illegal isn't enough if it's something they don't like. They're either shifting goalposts or have a standard of evidence that is completely alien to me.
This also of course goes into the classic partisan issue of thinking everyone is as partisan as them. The average American taxpayer, the victim of corruption from either party, is not some diehard progressive or die hard conservative. It's stealing candy from a baby and saying "but John stole candy too" as an excuse.
You are lying.
Let's go through the "many motte users" who made claims of unfair J6 assault while referencing X:
... I was planning to go through the other users one by one, but I actually can't find any others. Could it be that you took a single Motte user who linked to a photo on X, lied about what they said, and then used this as a basis for "many motte users"?
It's entirely possible I've missed a bunch of other comments. If you can link me to them, I'll be happy to review them to check if you're honestly representing them, or just lying about them too.
There is an incredibly easy way to see it, TheMotte like similar sites has a mechanism built in! His comment has 6 upvotes at this time meaning at least 5 others are in general agreement. Probably more considering some users might have down voted so it might be +10vs-5 or whatever I wouldn't know.
Does (at least) 6 people count as "many" for you? I can change it to "several" if you disagree what constitutes many.
If you hover your cursor over the score, you can see the upvote and downvote counts. (Allegedly, Reddit used to have this feature many years ago, but removed it.)
Oh thank you very much.
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So... you're not contesting that you lied about what he said?
Or are you hoping that, if you don't address that point, people won't notice?
To check I've got my facts straight: one Motte user links to a photo that they think shows unfair assault of a J6er. Six people upvote this. You choose to lie and represent this as:
This is called lying.
I am doing exactly that? I explained to you where the many people come from. I was wrong however about it being at least 6 users, someone informed me how to see the upvote numbers and it's at +8/-1 now so it was probably +7/-1 before and someone has added on since my original check of 6.
Your facts are straight, at the time at least six people (turns out seven but I didn't know I could check the ratio then) had upvoted the comment saying
And the only external evidence provided was a post on X, which also provided no evidence whatsoever that a protested was charged for bruising the officers knuckles. There was a video that maybe the X user believed was of police brutality, but nothing whatsoever was provided of what charges were or were not brought up of the guy.
Now could it be "Well people just upvote anything!"? No, because my comment was down voted where I said the tweet was a still image (I didn't see the video underneath but again it doesn't evidence the claim about charges were brought for what reasons), did a quick double check if there was any other corroborating evidence for the claims (I could not find any nor could the chatbots) and asked
So it's not that people are just upvoting anything. What is it then? A form of endorsement. Which would mean that +7 people endorsed "Here's an X user making a claim without any external proof" as a fine evidentiary standard.
In fact you followed up and also didn't find any external affirmative evidence that the X users claims were real! https://www.themotte.org/post/3781/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/449800?context=8#context
You literally went to double check and ChatGPT said it doesn't have any knowledge of that case.
As I said "Random X user just claims it" is F tier evidence in my world. I gave particular examples of evidence I would consider as quality like a Fox News article or court documents.
So to clarify There has been no even semi decent evidence provided that a protestor was charged for blocking his face from police fists and thus causing the knuckles to be bruised. The only evidence, extremely low quality f tier evidence, provided is a guy on X claims it happened without anything else attached. And yet this evidentiary standard was endorsed by at least 7 people.
@UwU -- this is a perfect example of magicalkittycat just openly fucking with people.
Dude, I asked you: "So... you're not contesting that you lied about what he said?"
The "many people" part is not part of that. You know this. Why do you deliberately conflate everything? Do you think people reading your comment are stupid, or are you just so used to lying that it doesn't even register as lying any more?
You lied about the contents of his comment. Then I asked you about it. This attempt to deflect onto "b-but I'm addressing that!" while talking about something completely different is exactly the bullshit you pulled when we were discussing Nowak.
You are lying, again. As I said in my comment, multiple times, the evidence was a photo. Not verbal evidence. Not someone on X "saying" something. A goddam photograph of a situation. You can disagree with his take on the photo; I'm not even endorsing his take. But pretending that the photo doesn't exist is a fucking lie.
Yeah, not actually relevant to you lying about what other Motte users said, though, is it?
Oh, go fuck yourself, you liar.
Mods, I'll happily eat a ban for this; sorry, but the gaslighting from magicalkittycat is getting ridiculous.
As anyone who cares to actually follow your link will see, I was explicitly pointing out your stupid, inconsistent use of ChatGPT. I've done this multiple times, and each time you deliberately misrepresent what I'm doing.
I wasn't looking for external affirmative evidence. I was proving that your position of using ChatGPT as a neutral, impartial arbiter is obviously insane and wrong. I look forward to explaining this to you another fifteen billion times, as you don't seem to be interested in ever actually listening to what other people explain to you.
You are lying.
"The only evidence, extremely low quality f tier evidence, provided is a guy on X claims it happened"
Again, for the infinity billionth time: there is a link to a photo. I'm not claiming it's good evidence; I really don't give a shit about the object-level claim. I give a shit that you are repeatedly lying on the Motte.
Like, you are just objectively, repeatedly, incontestably saying untrue things. Then, when challenged, you switch to an entirely different thing, smugly conflate the two, and act like that's what you were saying all along. It's absolutely pathetic.
I did contest what he said!
I said that I can not find any even semi decent evidence the claims of the X user he cites as his argument are real.
How about instead of having a meta conversation, we have the actual conversation where someone finally provides semi decent evidence for their claims a guy was charged for bruising and officers fists while blocking beyond "guy on X said so".
It all seems like a way to dodge that maybe said evidence might not actually exist. I couldn't find any! You double checked and didn't find it. So where is it?
Where in the photo does it back the claim the guy was charged for injuring an officer while defending himself? Seriously, go look at the photo and tell me how I can glean "This guy was later charged for blocking punches".
There isn't any way. It does not back up the claims at all.
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One day ban, cool off and please refrain from this sort of outburst in the future.
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Disappointed they backed down on this. Political slush funds are very powerful. Being able to reward friends is powerful. Dems ran this playbook for years and the dominated institutions. Having more money for bribes might get more gop working in the beauracracy now if you have money give them a check later.
GOP have been soundless since Iraq
At least they did something - it was terrible and dumb but by golly they did it
Giving money to supporters who were politically lynched by their political opposition? Step too far!
If Trump were 15% more competent …
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Your post confuses me. Which happens a lot in the bubbles of the internet. I don't really know what is going on cuz I barely follow anything closely enough.
My understanding is that this lawsuit was in part about the IRS targeting politically conservative groups. Which they were shown to have been doing back in the obama administration.
Why the stuff about cop beaters? I suppose that is in reference to people attacking cops during the Jan 6th thing. But I wasn't aware of many organizations that claim credit for that surviving until the modern day. I admit to not knowing the status of the proud boys. Though the FBI and CIA are still around and their funding is not linked to this, so that also doesn't make sense to me.
I think there is a very difficult political problem being pointed at here. Trump's involvement just muddies it all.
Government controlled by Party A has done things to wrong Party B. The judiciary is supposed to be an independent entity that steps in and arbitrates these disputes.
What exactly is supposed to happen if Party B does not realize they have been intentionally wronged until they control the government?
If they sue the government its just Party B suing the government they control. Of course they win. That is what happened in this case.
Options:
A. Nothing happens. B. Punish rule breakers. C. Reward victims.
I am heavily in favor of option B, but no one in power is in favor of that option. The people in power in party A that carried out the harm have a set of preferences like A > C > B. The people in party B that have been wronged have a set of preferences that generally looks like C > B > A.
Rewarding the victims is a good compromise option. Because the people that suffer are taxpayers, and who gives a shit about taxpayers? Republican politicians is apparently a fair answer for any who opposed this payout. Had the roles been reversed would democrats have done the same? I'm sure we will find out. (if we haven't already from some buried issue or court case that has been ignored for a few decades)
It's unclear who and what will benefit from the fund. Idk if the ambiguity and shadow is intentional or not, but many Republican senators such as Tillis seem to believe that it will be going to Jan 6thers among others, including the specific criminal ones.
Well do I have good news for you then. The Biden admin prosecuted Charles E Little John (the leaker of Trump's tax records) and secured a felony conviction against him. He wasn't let off lightly either, he got the maximum penalty.
Well in this specific scenario, we don't even have to ask then! The government under the Biden admin won the case and secured the conviction against the leaker.
Good to know faith in political system increased
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I don't think this is a great example, because Charles E Little John harmed members of both parties, and the stated reasoning for his conviction is not because he leaked Trump's tax records, but because he leaked the tax records of thousands.
If a member of government controlled by party A does something that harms both members of Party A and Party B (which includes many of the wealthiest members of both parties), then party A convicting that person to me doesn't seem the same as party A convicting someone that did an action that mostly harms members of party B with little harm to members of party A.
If Charles had only leaked Trump's record, would he have received the maximum penalty? Would he have even been prosecuted during the Biden era? Would he have been pardoned by Biden if he did face any penalty?
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The problem with this statement of the case, is that Trump was president when the IRS leak of his tax documents happened. And he's president now.
What Trump could have done is ask the case to be held in abeyance, which would freeze the clock on the case and wait for the case to be resolved until after his presidency finished up. That would have been the usual "avoiding corruption, or the appearance of corruption" version of Trump bringing the complaint that created the massive settlement fund.
This just results in the case being dropped. Why would you think this would work?
Why do you think it would not work?
The guy who actually leaked Trump's taxes got fired and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison. It's not like Trump never gets fair court proceedings.
Heck, he's won a fair few cases in the Supreme Court during this presidency. I actually believe that if Trump had held the case in abeyance, he would have gotten a just outcome from genuinely adversarial proceedings, whatever that might have looked like.
The decade-plus of two Democratic Presidential Administrations and their politically appointed Justice Departments coordinating and executing security state abuses and lawfare against Trump, rather than curtailing it or holding the people doing so to account?
You do not need to 'never' get fair court proceedings for the court proceedings you do get to be far more unfair to fair, particularly when lawfare strategies use the process as the punishment.
And for their conduct, major establishment Democrat politicians have publicly and repeatedly advocated packing the courts, with greater party establishment support each election cycle.
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The whole reason this could happen is that despite being president, he didn't control the government.
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The general impression (however incorrect in this case) was that it would go in substantial part to Trump personally. Even GOP voters know that it’s precisely Trump who paints himself as an immensely rich and successful billionaire, so this is giving some very rich guy a lot more taxpayer money, which is hard for politicians to justify.
More generally, every government rewards its supporters, and there are far more under the table ways to do it than this kind of fund. Trump has already done so much of it through the crypto companies, expediting approvals for various Trump tech aligned businesses, endorsing or engaging in partnerships with startups that have his sons on the board etc. If he wants to reward his supporters, this is the way to do it.
The main strategic issue for the right isn’t making it more profitable to be on the right, it’s on making it more personally challenging to be on the left. He needs to much more aggressively steal from and prosecute and expropriate violent leftist activists, make their life hell the way the left did to the right in power. This has far better long term utility. Put people on no fly lists, have banks close their accounts, stop renewing passports and drivers’ licenses.
The Trump admin has been trying to do this, they're not even subtle. James Comey is the most blatant and unarguable example.
Ironically this exact argument is exactly what FIRE, the free speech organization that became famous when it fighting against progressive universities, warns of.
This is to them, a door that hasn't been opened yet that Trump is opening now and if you want to see what weaponization against conservatives could really look like, then just wait.
Hopefully we don't get 2028 Dem who is that vengeful and abusive, I would like for us to start shutting doors instead of continually opening new ones. But I will at least be glad to point out these "it's ok to do what you want against your enemies" arguments to people who seem to suddenly change their mind in three years.
Thankfully the Trump admin will fail here. And so will the 2028 vengeful Dem. But what a shame that everyone just wants to keep opening doors anyway, eventually we'll cross a threshold where society breaks down.
FIRE is among the many, many, many organizations who lost their way and don't support what they say on the tin. Look at their tagline for that very article:
Do they think I'm an idiot? Do they think I haven't been paying attention? Did they forget the world they themselves have lived through?
I don't need to wait, because I've seen it for well over a decade at this point. I know exactly what it looks like when Democrats want to censor political opponents, and it looks like massive coordinated deplatforming from every institution or large conglomerate in the world.
What the fuck is FIRE thinking publishing this kind of dreck? They ought to know better, but then again, see my first sentence.
Can you give a single example where FIRE took the pro censorship side?
They're a free speech organization in favor of free speech and they know one way that you convince people to support free speech is to get them to consider "what if it happens to me?". Would you want to have the government claim you threatened the next president for saying 86 48?
Here is an example of them aligning with Democratic interests to facilitate homelessness.
Just like the when the Sierra Club starts talking about immigration rights instead of saying that immigrants to the US are bad for the environment, when FIRE starts talking about homelessness I recognize it as Conquest's Second Law.
They lost their way on free speech by standing up for free speech?
Cause that's what they're doing
They're the free speech org, of course they're against government ordinance that suppresses unliked or unwanted speech.
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Thinking about the Obama administration: malicious tax audits of non-profits, Operation Choke Point debanking conspiracy and Citizens United outright censorship. So yeah I don't have to imagine very hard.
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Wait since when? It sounds like you are just pissy that they have principles. Meaning they defend free speech even when its a conservative in the executive.
Their archive has a ton of recent cases that do not cleave to a left vs right dichotomy but instead a free speech principled stance. https://www.fire.org/cases
Greg Lukiaoff the CEO has talked about this before and calls it "hypocrisy projection"
https://x.com/glukianoff/status/1784609444124316135
You see this constantly in replies to FIRE lawyers, people who have no idea what they are will go "You didn't say anything about X or Y" when no, FIRE definitely did do that. It's constant from all political directions.
People just fling out accusations of hypocrisy at them to cover up for their own hypocrisy.
Being a principled person is a fun life cause you'll have people telling you're biased and unfair in every direction you can imagine and there's just no convincing them. They don't want to be convinced, you can lead the horse to a river, dunk their head in and make them drink it and they'll spit it out!
Lmao if you keep agreeing with me and I with you, someone might call me your sockpuppet. Brb gotta go touch grass with my real life obligations.
But yes, very intuitive to what behavior is happening here.
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”Goal posts were packed up and moved to Sudan” is one of those lines you wish you’d remember to use the next time it’d be appropriate.
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You're actually correct on this one; that's some good theory of mind.
On this page, you have a bunch of people repeatedly asking you for evidence your positions; you consistently obfuscate, deflect, and pretend to misunderstand what they're saying.
I understand that it's flattering to cast yourself as a principled person, and anyone disagreeing with you is just terminally stupid.
Thing is, it's not actually true.
Actually pretty easy way to to check it, let's call it the Mr Rogers test.
If Mark tells you that John is a thief, you might be more cautious of John's behavior. If Mark then follows up with "Mr Rogers is a thief", then you know Mark's head isn't screwed on right, he just claims people are thieves if he doesn't like them for whatever reason and his claims about John hold little weight. Mr Rogers after all was famously a very nice guy and no credible accusations have ever been made that he stole from others, so Mark just claiming lowers Mark's own reputation.
So let's look at things that are very principled to use as our baseline to see if people's accusations have any weight here.
FIRE is extremely principled, probably one of the most principled organizations out there. So someone who makes claims against FIRE loses any weight they have in other accusations. The comment currently making claims against FIRE is at +14, so at the very least 14 people here throw out frivolous accusations just because they don't like when principled beliefs are against them.
Well maybe these are not the same people interacting with me, but there's not that many people on the site so there's a pretty good chance that several of them are. I don't give them any weight because they've already lost it by failing the Mr Rogers test.
And it's not just FIRE either. I learned recently that Trace Woodgrains was effectively bullied out of this site roughly a year ago, someone had linked his profile in response to me talking a view of his. Woodgrains is someone I've seen to be respectable and honest and he's constantly been willing to speak up against both left wing and right wing views he disagrees with. He's quite respected in the rationalist aligned community. Taking such major issues with him that he is effectively hounded off is a failure of the Mr Rogers test.
That's to be expected, it's the default of the internet really. Even people I disagree with substantially (but respect as principled in their beliefs) have it happen constantly. Micheal Tracey is experiencing that treatment right now. I think he's wrong about Epstein and his many other denials of public officials accused of abuse, but he is very consistent in holding this stance. Elliot Hamilton (among many other X users) falsely accusing Tracey of being a partisan hypocrite have lost any weight I might have given their accusations. If I ever had Elliot Hamilton say I'm being partisan, I know I can dismiss that because he just says it if he doesn't like what you say.
Edit: Actually here Trace Woodgrains speaks out another big of the issue that's still ongoing https://www.themotte.org/post/1018/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-26/217142?context=8#context
Is it the case that there just isn't left or centrist rationalists capable of discussion here? Highly unlikely, Woodgrains himself is a good example of that. He's also a good example of what really happens, the community here is generally hostile in pursuit of the implicit purpose. Many users simply don't want to hear the arguments they disagree with, so the people who have arguments they dislike get burnt out from the hostility.
So Mr Rogers test, I'm not gonna put much weight into hounding from a site and people that also hounded out Woodgrains.
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I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it would be great for accusers of MKC to post receipts along with their accusations. Right now it just seems like people are ganging up on him for no good reason.
Well, this did happen just yesterday and today in the thread you're talking in right now. Pick your poison of long "Fetch more comments" threads involving the person you just replied to. Or go to the profile in question and search "Bottom" for low-lights.
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If magicalkittycat doesn't have to post receipts for claiming to be principled, or casting other members of this forum as stupid illiterate horses, then it's a pretty asymmetric demand that I have to post receipts to push back on that. (Also, "for no good reason"? You can literally see a reason in the comment I'm replying to! Anyone who goes "I'm great and principled; other people on this forum are stupid" is opening the door to being told: "no".)
Very charitable, thanks.
One reason that thread is so long is because I (and others like FtttG) spent a ton of time not being vague! We specifically repeatedly explained how mkc was being dishonest. If we'd been vague, it would've been a much shorter thread!
So, we explain the dishonesty in detail => thread becomes long => you say "thread is long, you are vague". Doesn't really seem fair.
But I do get where you're coming from, so I'll explain some specific points of dishonesty in that thread. This isn't a complete accounting, it's just off the top of my head:
Another problem with your policy of "I need specific individual instances of bad faith; I won't read a long thread" is that it allows posters like mkc to fly under the radar. If you're looking for a threshold of (say) 60% bad faith in an individual comment, and someone is consistently operating at 55% bad faith, then any one individual comment isn't going to set off your alarms. But the cumulative effect of 55% bad faith is much worse than a single 60% bad faith comment!
(EDIT: here is a clear example of mkc posting in bad faith. He got ChatGPT to say "this photo's caption is untrue". I got ChatGPT to say "I can't verify whether this photo's caption is true or false". mkc's response to this contradiction: "this supports me, I am right!" This isn't good faith; this isn't anything. This is purely him throwing whatever words he can at an argument, without regard for truth or consistency.)
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I didn't see this one in there.
So your stance is words are worth more than actions?
What about this one, this one, this one
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That article is a reprint and kept the tagline from the original. Lukianoff himself at least remains aware, though whether he still controls FIRE or it was skinsuited out from under him I don't know.
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What are we talking about? This is James Comey, he did all this to Trump first. High-profile supporters of the President have already been through being put on the no-fly list, or had their clearances threatened or pulled, or had bullshit process investigations launched against them. Comey pioneered a lot of it! They spied on Trump's campaign! And the people who did it, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, got sue-and-settle sweetheart deals from FBI because oh the public controversy has hurt their reputations they deserve millions of dollars in reparations.
Comey even had to break laws to do it. He had to lie and cheat. They simply cannot get him because Washington refuses to allow it.
Everything you are decrying already happened! That barn left the door, the horse is wide open. If you want to complain about weaponization of the federal government for political views let's start with Michael Flynn. You can go first.
Imagine the following alternate timeline: Crossfire Hurricane is a public investigation that plays a prominent role in the news cycle for the entire summer of 2016, culminating in Comey's announcement a few weeks before the election that he is considering recommending charges. Trump loses the election. Meanwhile, the FBI has quietly been conducting an investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server and it only becomes public knowledge after a leak is published in the Weekly Standard on Halloween. Trump loses the election, and some on the right speculate that the FBI investigation played a major role in the loss. Would you consider Comey a Republican stooge in that scenario?
This is not antipodal to my position, which is not "Comey is a Democratic stooge".
Moreover it's completely different from what actually happened. Crossfire Hurricane was based on an underlying charge everybody involved knew was bogus. (Hillary did process classified emails on private computer servers.) Comey stonewalled the investigation and appointed friendlies to Hillary to its top positions. His boss, Loretta Lynch, famously crossed paths on the tarmac with Hillary and Bill to warn them about the investigation. The FBI closed the investigation and was only forced to reopen it when Republican senators found new evidence and submitted it to the FBI, forcing their hands. Finally, Comey famously gave a speech recommending that Hillary not be charged. At every point in fact he acted to minimize the damage to Hillary. (Or to maximize his own leverage and political power, which is not incompatible with etc.)
The opposite world James Comey hypothetical looks something like this:
A large and public investigation is opened into Hillary Clinton murdering and eating a child. James Comey privately assures President Clinton that he knows these allegations are not true, then tells Congressmen and Fox News that raping babies is a serious crime and the dignity of the Republic requires taking this seriously. He gets fired, but not until after the investigation gets launched and consumes two years of Hillary's Presidency. It ultimately concludes in a report that, although there is no proof that Hillary murdered or ate any children, she refused to cooperate with the investigation and so we can't be so sure that she's innocent. And we know that there are Chinese school exchange programs in New York and Washington DC and Hillary met with the Chinese schoolkids and the Chinese won't tell us what they know. Hillary is eventually impeached for threatening the Prime Minister, but during the proceedings everybody just debates whether President Clinton ate those babies or not. Hillary wins and it gradually comes out that James Comey and all his subordinates knew the entire time that everything about eating babies was totally made up and came straight from the Trump campaign via the Bolivian government. Oops!
Now Hillary tries to have James Comey prosecuted, but, you can't do that, you can't weaponize the Justice Department like that! Democrats will really regret politicizing the government to prosecute their enemies, which is something Republicans have never done before. We can't even really say that James Comey is a Trump guy. After all, during the 2016 Campaign, there was a large public investigation into how Trump shot and Killed someone on Fifth Avenue, something nobody denies he did. It's well known how James Comey undermined the Trump campaign by giving a big speech saying that what Trump did was a crime sure but not a big deal. Besides, James Comey is a registered Democrat, he was appointed by Democrats who hate Hillary, so for him to be doing all this it must be out of a deep devotion to duty. (Maybe Hillary and Bill got a divorce.) He investigated both sides. He's non-partisan. There's just no other explanation except that Hillary is a vengeful witch who is politicizing the government and destroying America.
I like to imagine that Hilldawg Democrats are really incensed about "Hillary Derangement Syndrome" and that Republicans, who just elected Timothy McVeigh to Congress, are complaining about how the Democrats have all become like Hitler and it was much better when Obama was around.
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I don't want to see any politicians rewarding their supporters, but I guess I might as well wish to hold back the tides.
I'm particularly reminded of USAID disbursements to progressive NGO's worldwide, and also welfare allocations to client groups in Minnesota.
Yes. Basically this sort of weaponisation needs to be turned on their original developers. Only then you can you reach detente through MAD. There are some hardcore conflict theorists that think this will never happen and that the end goal is the destruction of the political opposition. Things have been pretty bad, but I'm surprised at how far this is all going.
Regarding this point, I have always been under the impression that NGO's that try to help people in foreign countries receive education, medicine, and emergency aid are progressive in nature. Assuming part of the president's policy is to make the world outside the US a better place by providing foreign aid, it thus follows that most of that money would go to progressive groups. Because by and the majority of charities today lean left.
Is that wrong? Are there solid charities out there which are either apolitical or lean conservative which provide foreign aid, but were neglected by USAID in favor of some kind of nepotism?
The obvious place to look would be religious charities, wouldn't it?
Many denominations have been captured by progressiveness.
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WorldVision is an explicitly Christian aid organisation with a generally good reputation and which I haven't seen accused of being skinsuited by leftists. (Christian Aid and CAFOD in the UK have, I think, been thoroughly skinsuited)
Numerous religious denominations, some of them conservative-aligned, run overseas missions which combine proselytisation with aid work, although I am not familiar with specific examples.
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The ostensible realpolitik argument was that by dispersing charity to foreign nations, the US was gaining soft power and influence. It just so happened that there were links between the Democrat party and the people running and working in the NGOs receiving the money to distribute (and fund the required salaries and overheads for the organisations themselves). This was often obfuscated by layers of organisations and sometimes lead to the money being spent on things that were incredibly dubious (eg $2M for sex change surgeries in Guatemala; $47K for a "transgender opera" in Colombia; $75K for a drag show workshop in Ecuador.)
I need to be fair and say I haven't really gone digging for a USAID spending breakdown by left and right wing causes. I guess in some ways 'free welfare' type spending is by definition left wing.
Realpolitik is not the only argument for foreign aid though. There is also the progressive view that those who own a lot should use their possessions to help those who have less. Since the US is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, she has a duty to help poorer nations prosper. If that is the motivation for program, it seems natural that the charities used would mostly share a similar world view.
I think this kind of altruism is a way more common justification among leftist voters than realpolitik. The latter is really just a way to clown on Trump. They want to donate because they believe it is the right thing to do, and would do so even if the benefit to their home country is basically null. Unfortunately, this is easily weaponized by activists. "One dollar is nothing to you, but give it to a family in Africa, and it buys all of them enough water for the entire day". You also see this to a fairly extreme extent in immigration discourse in Europe, where many on the left are more concerned about doing the "right thing" by admitting refugees and immigrants, than they are about the effect this has on their culture and economy.
Why not both? Gaining a good reputation for doing good things is the system working as intended. There's also downstream effects. The benefit of disease control activities in Africa is lower risk of eventually spreading to Americans. Alleviating poverty helps prevent anti-American terrorists from gaining power.
Has a nation-state ever started a war or funded terrorism against another nation-state simply because the richer state was richer and refused to provide charity to the poorer state?
Perhaps client states or vassal-like relationships could work this way, but they involve political subservience in exchange for material resources.
Alleviating poverty does not prevent anti-Americanism, it just alleviates poverty and creates a culture of dependency.
Simply because? No, unless you're counting warlords who want more stuff. But gangs and terrorists find poor places fertile breeding ground. If you have nothing, what are you supposed to do about them? And it's easier for the cartel to recruit a poor kid from the street than a middle class child. Life is all about contributing factors.
It does though? Are you going to tell me you aren't nicer to someone who gives you stuff? It's no magic bullet, but it helps. That what soft power is - influence.
And again I will point out the value of preventing disease outbreaks.
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Correct; USAID was a slush fund that provided cushy jobs to loyal progressive partisans as a reward for their agitation on behalf of progressive and/or Democratic Party causes, or in opposition to right-wing and/or Republican Party causes. If any of the money USAID spent managed to make life better for the poor and downtrodden in other countries, that made the US look better, then all the better, but that was not to primary driver of the program.
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There are very many (christian) religious charities operating in all developing countries, most of which obviously lean conservative (btw, USAID is still working with plenty of them to this day). For the most part, these are centered around providing the basics: Alleviating poverty, providing fundamental education, giving out medicine, etc. However, they are often accused of just wanting to abuse this status to spread their religion. Some of them even openly do so. In the past, the christian western countries would frequently overwhelmingly fund these charities, citing the same arguments as you do: They are the primary charities operating in these places. You should see how this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If they get funded but the others don't, they'll necessarily be the primary ones. That's how it works.
We have a very similar situation now; Imo arguably worse in some ways, but YMMV. Plenty of progressive NGOs are very blatant about spreading specifically their particular worldview. Usually in addition to basic aid, sometimes even without that fig leaf, but they'll often get funding anyway. And if you try looking into what they are actually doing on-the-ground, it's not only often exceptionally difficult to even find out where all that money is even going, but in the few cases where you can find something, they'll usually even exceed their claimed mandate substantially.
At least from my vantage point, we have successfully pushed these religious charities to tone down their missionary purposes and concentrate on the aid part if they want to get our funding. I'd like for the same to happen to progressive charities.
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It is basically political suicide for Republicans to come out against this without getting meaningful legislation banning it. Obama and Biden did the same thing dozens of times, for totals far higher than the current fund, for more spurious reasons. Unilateral disarmament is never a good idea.
The main difference for Obama and Biden era sue and settle, was that that the people footing the bill for the slush funds were private companies, or where there were large payouts from the taxpayers, congress voted and approved it.
The Trump situation is the current president suing the government he now controls in his capacity as a private citizen for a wrong done to him while he was previously president, by people who he was theoretically in charge of. The money is coming from the taxpayers, and the slush fund is being administered by the federal government. There's lots of ways this could have the whiff of corruption on a different order than the Obama and Biden era precedents.
There's lots of things Trump could have done differently:
Apparently it can't happen without Congress approving it, so it is not in fact the government that Trump controls.
Luckily, we live in a constitutional republic, so occasionally there are checks and balances on abuses of power by one of the three branches of government.
Doesn't mean that Trump isn't in charge of the executive branch. Just means that he doesn't get act like he's an absolute monarch who can do whatever he wants.
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It is becoming clear that the "Republicans" aren't really a solid entity; there's the Uniparty and there's the MAGA party. The Uniparty includes all the Democrats (including the DSA and Bernie) and the remaining old-guard Republicans.
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Well, you can only cut 'em off once, and these senators already gelded themselves long ago to remain in the good graces of the left. Not that interesting at all. And "cop beaters" sound an awful lot like Chinese Robbers. And honestly after all the NGO networks came to light, I'm mostly indifferent towards graft if it's going to my political allies or fellow travellers. The money likely will be stolen, it's just a question of whose side is strengthened by the theft.
If you will allow me a meta-question -- what was your intention with this post? Heavily spun partisan pro-MAGA screeds are boring to read, but so is this triumphalist leftist sneering. "Good to see at least some republicans aren't total CUCKS who want to steal TAXPAYER MONEY and give it to COP BEATERS" is a Twitter tier opinion. I guess you will get a bunch of >(you)s but that sort of violates the spirit of this place. Why not post some substantive analysis about why you think these Republicans still aren't fully sold on MAGA?
I don't think you understand how Chinese robbers fallacy works.
The fallacy is "some Chinese people are robbers = Chinese are robbers". Not "most Chinese people haven't done robbery = this specific chinese person who just robbed a store should be let off".
The average Jan 6th attendee did not commit any crimes, including violence against the police. The specific ones who did, the ones charged and convicted of crimes, did do crimes.
I did! The Republican senators stood up to this because they don't want to award money specifically to cop beaters (amid other criminals) who would have the "victimization claim" available to them and they don't feel like they can defend what appears to be blatant corruption. You think it's a Twitter tier opinion, I think you gave a Twitter tier response of not reading.
"Some Jan 6 Electoral Justice Protestors tussled with cops = we can round all Jan 6 protestors off to 'cop beaters'"
Looks like I understand it just fine.
What do you base this on? Taking politicians' sound bites at face value? Do you also believe congressmen when they say that the American Freedom Panopticon Surveillance Bill is meant to "keep our children safe?"
Anyway, I'm still curious to know what sort of discussion you hoped to start with your OP.
"Tussled with cops" is a brilliant way to try to lighten it. The people who attacked cops are cop beaters. Whether it's described as "tussling" or not, that behavior is wrong.
But that's not what happened! The problem isn't with the general jan 6th protestor, but the ones who committed a crime. Considering that Republican senators also seemed to interpret the fund as including the specific criminals who did crime, it at the very least was unclear even if it wasn't the intention.
Sure senators like Cruz or Tillis or Fitzpatrick could be lying about their objections here. But why? What do you suppose the real objections is then? That's a whole lot of Republicans who were apparently mad about it so it wouldn't make sense to just be "Tillis and Cruz hate all Jan 6thers in a way others don't" (Unless that was made up too I suppose).
It's already started a good discussion. What do you think the real reason is for Republican senator backlash then if it's not about crime or the appearance of corruption? Or if it wasn't from internal backlash, why do you think it was dropped?
I think most of the prosecutions were over the top. If you have cops threatening you, it’s not unusual for you to fight back. It was a completely chaotic situation where people who had never been in a situation where the cops are trying to stop them and wielding batons. Most of the protestors were older Americans who had up to that point only gotten a couple of speeding tickets. They were not hardened criminals who went in trying to beat up cops for no reason. They went in believing they were protesting the election of 2020 being stolen, they perhaps intended to chant in the halls of congress or something. Trying to treat such people as if they went in intending to beat up cops and harm members of Congress ignores the reasons they had and the character of those people.
I’m not completely on board with a fund, but these were not hardened criminals and talking about this as if the fifty year old small business owner was exactly like a gang member looking to shoot a cop is ridiculous.
Unusual? Yes, people attacking cops (especially in the way you can see on video, beating them while they're on the ground with metal rods and other weapons) is actually pretty rare.
But even if it was not that unusual its still illegal to beat up a bunch on cops. They were tried and convicted under a jury of their peers. A pardon does not change that they were found guilty, it is an act of clemency over the punishment itself.
If you want to take it a "it's normal to take a giant rod and slam it down on a cop while they've been knocked down on the floor" approach feel free to do so, most Americans do not agree.
I mean that honestly intent actually matters and nobody im aware of in this crowd had a substantial criminal record, nor at the time that they entered the Capitol did they intend to go around beating up cops. There is evidence of this, the most famous and obvious being the rather famous images of these same people respecting the ropes around the rotunda in the Capitol. But also the number of people who showed up in cosplay outfits and so on.
Had the cops simply used normal techniques of crowd control, I don’t think the people who would not cross a rope barrier are suddenly going to beat up cops. They started beating up cops once the cops broke out the mace.
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What about cops attacking nonviolent protestors on video, and then charging those protestors for the temerity of bruising the officer's knuckles.
That's just a still image, which also doesn't show what happened before then.
Most "police brutality" cases are out of context and don't show the police are responding to aggression.
Also checked to see if it was true at all
I asked
And for
And
Do you happen to have the charges against him where what they outline is that he blocked his face and that's what was the assault?
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Many senators are still very media sensitive. J6 carries undue weight in DC because of the media, the culture (95%+ of their neighbors will be Democrats), and other factors. The reality is that this is a tiny slush fund by Obama standards; has a very legitimate purpose outside of J6 defendants (for instance, reimbursing conservative media outlets for legal fees from when Biden forced social media companies to de-platform them); and certainly wont be the last such fund if ever a Democrat is President. The fact that this isn't legislation gives the game away that this is just Washington Generals behavior.
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Sexual Objectification
There is something that bothers me about watching progressive/feminist content on youtube, especially regarding the topic of objectification, and its particularly emphasized in this video, as follows:
To rehash for someone not familiar, objectification is defined as: the act of treating a person as an object, a commodity, or a tool, rather than as a whole human being with their own agency, feelings, and rights. The most common form, (sexual) occurs when a person is reduced to a mere object of sexual desire. It often involves judging someone solely based on their physical attributes or breaking their body into separate, "consumable" parts (e.g., focusing only on legs or a torso).
The main issue here is that this idea, at least on the surface is that it seems to be fundamentally in conflict with the the sexual revolution and sex positivity of many previous & current progressive movements. Pornography, prostitution, and strip clubs all fit the objectification bill quite neatly, and the data seems to support the authors argument that "sexual objectification" leads to or plays some role in many of these harms:
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
I suspect this stems from a pre-existing contradiction in certain predatory strains of male sexuality/sexual behavior (note, emphatically not all all male sexuality! Normal gents who want to honorably date a nice smart girl, enjoy common interests and glance appreciatively at her ass from time to time, not describing you).
The contradiction: Among certain predators, on the one hand, you get the objectifying impulse that says "this girl only exists in relation to my sexual desire, the only important parts of her are the physical parts that make me hard or that I envision fucking."
On the other hand, you get the aggression and post-coital disgust impulse that underlies the whole body-count discourse: My erection is so meaningful that being able to fuck this collection of holes and bulges is the most important thing in the world. But once I cum, these parts are disgusting, destroyed, degraded, and the body/mind attached to them should be cast out of my sight.
In its most extreme cases, this is the standard serial-killer's repeated torture, rape then kill/discard scenario. For prostitution and porn, it comes out in aggressive disgust/rejection impulses to prostitutes and female performers. Today, that's the folks who thought Riley Reid shouldn't be able to get married to a cool, successful athlete because all the penis contact made her gross. Historically, it was the consensus that once a woman had been traumatized or desperate enough to have sex with men for money, or let a man take pictures of her body for cash, she (but NOT he) should be expelled from normal society and untouchable by anyone but criminals, with no valid life course but exile, increasing degradation, then suicide.
So some feminists respond by saying, OK, objectification is bad, but even worse is the destructive disgust impulse after. So emphasize that women retain human value and agency even after being fucked over, establish that they are reasoning people who responded to the circumstances they were in, and that could include conditional compliance with predators wanting to reduce them to a collection of body parts.
And some feminists respond to the upstream objectification impulse by saying, nope, we need a system where women aren't reduced to a collection of body parts, period.
It's basically the Danegeld or Poland 1939 question: compromise with clear terms, or open resistance? But those are two different strategic approaches to a common problem, not really internally contradictory.
I feel like your depiction of historical prostitution is a little exaggerated. Obviously there's a whole category of high ranking courtesans who could do pretty well even without being actual wives of their clients. But even regular prostitutes were sometimes able to retire into respectability.
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Even if we take this figure seriously, what fraction of retail workers experience economic violence on the job at some point? "Sexual violence" is defined broadly - if we defined "economic violence" equally broadly then it wouldn't need to be a robbery - a shoplifter pushing past a security guard would qualify.
Honestly, why shouldn't we define "economic violence" that way?
Stealing sexual value is to women like stealing economic value is to men (for control over that is what that sex uses to impress the other), so a regime that treated men and women equally should logically treat both just as seriously.
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Yes, Gen Z video essay women and Boomer hippie free sex women disagree about a decent number of things. I'm unfamiliar with that specific Youtuber, the clip you linked to makes it sound like she's mildly disapproving of the female social media influencers who wield their sexuality to perform both trad wife and Only Fans.
Edit: looking at her Youtube thumbnails, she probably has mixed feelings about her own desire to generate more clicks by wearing extremely low cut blouses, but then in the actual video she's hiding behind a large microphone. She wants to be a serious writer and book reviewer who isn't just liked for her looks, but also to get some attention based of of her looks, because it's a savage competitive market out there. This isn't fair, for sure, but performance and storytelling in general aren't, especially among young women.
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If you don't bite the bullet and become sex-negative (many do) you can make the same argument left-wingers make for decriminalizing drugs: sex work being work doesn't make it unpleasant (plenty of work is), it just means it should be brought out of the shadows to better protect those very vulnerable women and given the protections of any hazardous job since those women are gonna do it anyway (apply the left wing skepticism, arguably selective, of prohibition here)
Millionaire actresses don't have to strip every four minutes on Euphoria unless
perv"visionary" directors like Sam Levinson want to make a point.This isnt exactly a slam dunk argument, though? Bringing it into the light arguably legitimizes the industry and the harms it brings.
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There are sex negative feminists who largely agree with you here. They tend to be anti-porn and anti-sex work.
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Imagine you're at an evening social event. It's comprised of men and women around your age. GigaChad is there as well. At some point, one of the women starts complaining about objectification and the male gaze. In the midst of her spiel, GigaChad (who was talking to another woman) turns to her and says with a smirk, "you don't need to worry, no one is objectifying you."
Do you think the woman would be pleased or upset by this comment? What does your answer tell you about the underlying true nature of complaints about objectification?
Is "people will happily debase themselves for someone they have the hots for" a compelling argument that debasement is actually good?
On the flip side, the stereotypical 45 year old overweight Karen wife implicitly offers the deal that if you shower her with gifts and expensive dates she will not nag you quite as much for a week and you might even get to have sex. The MRA-adjacent sphere is quick to point out that it is unfair to men that society basically approves of this arrangement where they have to dump their paycheck in return for basic human decency/being treated like they have any worth at all. Yet, male simps will happily dump their paycheck for a mention by a titty streamer, a smidgen of attention from a hot classmate, or a 60-second handshake with a J-pop idol. Does their existence invalidate the MRA complaint?
(Also, your fantasy scenario is implausible mostly because the GigaChad as imagined by male incels and female 50 Shades readers, who is so hot that he can make stranger women drop their panties with a wink and drop creepy porno pickup lines and be universally liked for it, does not actually exist, any more than the mythical GigaStacy who can be like "you will buy me that diamond necklace, right" to a random man does. In both cases the outside onlooker confuses instances of dominance over a self-selected followership for a universal power.)
Clavicular might not be quite capable of doing this but Roy's standard is somewhat lower. For example, Clavicular was talking with some girl that wanted to be exclusive with him and he went 'lol no, I'm gonna fuck other women' and she instantly folds:
https://x.com/permabulla/status/2045527650098171927
That seems pretty analogous to what roy was saying?
Gigachads and gigastacies might be very rare but are not wholly imaginary.
If the standard is just "one guy somewhere has said something that is generally considered bad to a woman and she was okay with it", then surely the instances of whipped husbands and wallet-cattle men should count too (and say the same thing about the "underlying true nature of complaints about" men being used as paypigs).
In fact, if that's the standard, a lot more things meet it. For example, the existence of 80 hour workweek hot-desking, hot-bedding startup drones in SF exposes the underlying true nature of complaints about workplace exploitation and work/life balance: you don't actually want reasonable working conditions, you are just waiting for a hot GigaChad industry like SV startups to give you the tingles!
But you said that Roy's scenario was a fantasy? Can Clavicular make arbitrary women have sex with him on demand? Probably not. Does he slay mad puss? Yes. Would he be capable of this if he hadn't looksmaxxed, famemaxxed? No.
SV startups often give equity that can be worth a lot of money, they are different from Walmart or McDonalds. The tingles are a real thing in both cases. People worked for Elon Musk very hard even when they could've been lazy and useless at Lockheed because he gave them the tingles.
It was a fantasy insofar as he described it as a generic party with a generic GigaChad in attendance, not a party which was attended by people who were specifically personal fans of GigaChad. If the story is just "there exists a guy who has some girl fans he can objectify and they enjoy it", that's not saying much of interest about the "underlying true nature of complaints about objectification" at all.
There exist cannibals who someone wanting to be eaten throwing themselves at them, but this does not make a case for your neighbourhood involuntarily-merely-wannabe cannibal that all the people who want to lock him up if he voices his desires are being hypocrites who are just waiting for a chad like Meiwes to come along. He could make a case that it is some kind of cosmic injustice that Meiwes found his willing meal but he has nobody, just like Roy could make a case that it is unjust that Clavicular has an army of hoes and he doesn't, but this does nothing at all to lower the legitimacy of complaints of those who just don't want to be eaten, or don't want to be objectified, or don't want to work 80 hour weeks, at all.
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Does the author believe that female nudity and violence on screen can serve an artistic purpose? Also, can that purpose not be a feminist one? Because if the answer to those is no, as it probably is, there is scarcely a point in discussing this.
Also, isn't visually expressing sexual desire for the simple sake of showcasing how powerful, seductive and all-encompassing desire can be an artistic purpose in it's own right? We all feel it, we're all extremely affected by it, so shouldn't it naturally take up a prominent space in our artistic expressions even if it doesn't serve to advance a larger narrative or make a political statement?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xpef-FKYAf4
The opening scene of Godard's Contempt is literally Birgitte Bardot being reduced to her physical attributes, as Belmondo praises and declares his love for each of her individual body parts separately. But this "objectification" is so obviously an act of devotion - after all, how could you truly love a romantic partner without also loving their waist, their hands, their ankles, their genitals?
You could fully cut this scene from the movie, and the narrative would be unchanged. It exists entirely to showcase physical desire of an exceptionally beautiful woman. And it's absolutely wonderful.
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Note that in the original form, the principle was that 'If a gun is shown on stage, it must be fired later in the story.' Live-theatre productions usually do not have as elaborate set decoration as film or television.
But was it portrayed as actually happening within the storyline, or was it a dream or hallucination? (I haven't seen the show.)
The checkov’s gun thing is still a part of storytelling. The general idea is to avoid telling people about things in a story that seem important but actually are completely irrelevant to the story. So I can’t tell you that “oh, by the way, Batman has a Time Machine,” then never ever mention it again.
Sure, but the specific phrasing of "if it's shown on screen, it must be used" is false for TV and movies. We don't expect that if a movie set has a bed in the background, the character will be shown sleeping at some point. Whereas in theater it probably is the case that if a bed is part of the set, it'll be used. The two media just have very different expectations for what is a normal level of background detail on the set versus a deliberate inclusion.
I mean if you insist on the very narrow definition of chechov’s gun. On the other hand there are lots of TV shows or movies that would be ruined by forms of the gun. One huge one is the abilities of characters and technology in science fiction and fantasy. Once I establish that Spock can do the mind meld and read a guy’s mind, the audience tends to question why that isn’t happening when this would be the obvious solution to the need to find out something that the characters need to know and the bad guy does know.
I think the rule is better stated as “don’t bring up a potential solution to the problem and then ignore it.” I tend to like Sanderson framing of the issue which is that ideally, your characters should try everything that the audience would think would work and have it fail. The gun would ignore that rule, because you have characters fighting and the gun is right there so the audience is thinking “why not just shoot the guy with the gun that’s sitting right there”
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There's some conflict between 'only mention that which is important' and 'create a realistic world'. Screenplay tends to be heavier on the former, but the underlying principles show up to a lesser extent in written form and even fairly expansive worlds. An RPG sourcebook is expected to be filled with piles of random junk... and it's also random junk that you should be able to use in a scene.
On the flip side, going too extreme towards minimalism or functionalism risks making the puppeteer's strings too obvious. Minor details and background characters that are inexplicable are a good way to make the world seem larger than your main characters.
At least from a google search, it's a daydream that's supposed to parallel the character's growing and destructive popularity as both an onlyfans and right-wing influence. Because subtly is for cowards.
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The movie/TV equivalent is having a shot that draws attention to the gun. But Chekhov's gun is more suited to very tight productions (visual equivalents of short stories or novellas rather than novels); something like a movie or especially a TV series will have many things which are not directly relevant to plot but go to characterization or setting. For instance a movie has a barfight, the barfight itself may be completely unimportant other than to demonstrate it's the kind of place where barfights occur. And certain genres rely in misdirecting the audience and will deliberately focus on unimportant-to-plot details to do so.
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Female sexuality is NOT suppose to make logical sense. So it’s the female ID but blown up at macro societal movement scale. The early Game pioneers like that odd Magic guy but also the NYT writer guy who wrote the book The Game had a word for it: Shit Test. So I googled that word and found a definition for it that I think works:
“What Are “Shit Tests,” Really? The term “shit test” isn’t about malicious manipulation. It’s a shorthand for the subtle challenges, disagreements, or uncomfortable situations a woman might introduce into a conversation or interaction. These aren’t always obvious, and they’re rarely intended as deliberate attacks. Instead, they’re often subconscious filters, designed to quickly assess your emotional stability, confidence, integrity, and self-respect , qualities that suggest you’d be a reliable and supportive long-term partner.“
I guess I should cite but no reason to click thru: https://medium.com/@therealdating/decoding-shit-tests-in-dating-a-guide-to-confidence-and-connection-bf3a41ee45c5
So the whole you can’t objectify thing/me is sort of just a giant shit test at a societal level. My gut says any female spouting don’t objective women or me is actually just shit testing. And providing you are the right guy really wants you to have uncontrollable sexual desire for her.
One girl who I sort of loved I remember one day I was walking her home I think after dinner. I think some form of can I come I asked a few times and she said No. 15 minutes after I left I get a text why didn’t you come up. Guess I played it wrong and misread the situation.
Female sexuality should not be looked at thru a rationalist brain. It has its own games it plays.
"Objectification" is a broad term. Certain acts that we could label as "objectification" are benign or even desired, others less so. For example, a woman's body being appreciated by a desirable man, most commonly a partner, is an example of the former - note that this is almost always in a context of the two people knowing each other; so the objectification isn't really absolute. In the moment, the focus could be on the woman's body and sexual desirability; but overall this situation is only desired by the woman because it is in the context of being seen as an individual, not just a body. On the contrary, a set of female boobs plastered on a product, a gratuitous scene in a movie, or porn, are different in that they lack the underlying layer of intimacy of knowing a woman as a person, and appreciating her for more than just her body.
I think this would still be selling short female desire for objectification though it’s clearly on a spectrum. Some of female desire for objectification being in a relationship may even be limited by social and religion conventions and perhaps more universal. Aella is an example and since she’s basically in the canon of rationalists communities can be used as an example. She clearly expresses rape fantasies. I think rape fantasies are an example of female sexuality of a desire to be exposed to uncontrollable male lusts and objectification. In pop culture 50 Shades of Grey would be the leading brand.
On political don’t objectify movements I think the conventional view is it’s a bunch of fat tatted up liberals that men don’t desire. Who desperately desire to be objectified but created this form of feminisms that it’s bad since they can’t get it. The giant societal wide shit test by females I am proposing is probably a secondary mechanism.
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For her. As a total package, personality and mind as well as body. Not "that's an amazing giant set of honkers right there, but if an even better, bigger, set of honkers came along I'd go for them (too bad the honkers, which are the only things I'm interested in, have to come attached to some stupid broad but oh well)".
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Why not? It's just the mirror image of stuff men do that women haven't correctly communicated when to and not to do, like that whole "take them seriously but not literally, also ignore half the things she says because that's how the emotional spam filter works [and the 'attractive self-respect' thing comes from the 'doesn't respond to every emotional outburst about X']" thing.
It's not a direct counterpart, but men and women are different and start from initial conditions (inherent scarcity, etc.), so it's going to be expressed differently. Men (especially straight ones- it gets complicated when they're not) don't really have the circuitry to appreciate why you'd want a Cluster B werewolf billionaire, so it's difficult to know when to act like one (re: PUA, which as I understand it sums up to 'treat them like they're in a porno'; women will do the same thing to men sometimes, but less often because it's [socially] costlier for women to do that).
I don't know what pornography you're watching, but as I understand it, it's closer to "women sense desperation, here's how you can signal your interest in sexual congress while simultaneously implying she's not a big deal to you".
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The standard feminist answer is that women objectifying themselves is empowering, but men objectifying women is degrading to the women. Of course, there are plenty of issues you can raise with this, but the standard feminist way of dealing with it is not to think about it too hard and to shame others who do - which, to be fair, is the standard way of dealing with most/all ideologies' thorny points.
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Perhaps my male brain is too compromised to process this, but I've never really understood why sexualising someone is an act of "objectification".
The Cambridge dictionary defines objectification as: "treating people like tools or toys, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own"
To sexualise someone means to explicitly render someone as the target of sexual desire - putting an actress in a short skirt allows us to see more skin, which allows us to muse about what she would like naked, which we imagine we would be privy to in a fantasy scenario where we have sex with said actress. It has very little to do with denying someone's opinions or rights, but rather honing in on one specific part of their human existence, i.e. their potential as a sexual mate. Am I objectifying a waiter when I only consider him as someone who brings my drinks and my check when Im a customer at a café? Would I be morally wrong to be weirded out if said waiter suddenly started talking about his personal issues and opinions and I told him I really only want him to serve me my order and nothing else? According to the Cambridge dictionary, I would be "objectifying" him in that instance, which sounds blatantly absurd.
But most importantly - being the receiver of sexual desire is a foundationally humanising experience! People want to have sex with other people, not with objects - that's why most sex toys are shaped to resemble human genitalia or body parts. That's why high-end sex dolls are painstakingly manufactured to appear as human as possible. To want to have sex with someone is one of the bedrock human drives that will forever separate us from machines - and thus likewise, being the receiver of sexual desire equally represents a bedrock of the human condition, limited nigh-exclusively to humans (a fringe amount of people are sexual deviants who want to fuck toasters or animals, but they're irrelevant to the larger topic).
The issue seems to emerge from the fact that alot of people, notably feminist academics, endow words with moral weight they simply do not possess - since they consider most forms of sexual attention as bad, it MUST be described by a strictly pejorative term that also conveniently opens up the act to monumentally larger implications - suddendly, lusting after someone also must imply you want to treat them "like they have no rights of their own", i.e. perceive them as essentially unworthy of human dignity. This is such a massive jump from wanting to fuck someone that it feels essentially alien to how anyone actually experiences sexual desire. When I looked at Jennifer Lawrence's leaked nudes as a teen, that last thing I was thinking of was restricting her rights and opinions - I was thinking about how amazing it would feel to have sex with her and literally nothing else.
Of course, there's an obvious subtle truth hiding behind all this: the profile of the person doing the sexualisation is exponentially more significant than the sexualisation itself in evaluating if its "objectifying" or not. As a man, being told by an attractive woman that she only wants me for sex and nothing else is a mostly extremely rewarding experience that has given me lasting boosts in self-esteem. Similarly, a fat ugly girl hitting on me and drunkenly attempting to create a hookup situation with me left me feeling disgusted.
Objectification as a term only really makes sense if it leads you to dismiss the person's agency in a context where said agency is relevant - i.e., interrupting a woman speaking to tell her to take her top off, which would imply you aren't interested in her humanity beyond her sexual potential.
A glance at the roots and political development behind the term should immediately make it obvious that we are dealing with an ideological concept, not a neutral descriptor:
How the FUCK does treating someone depending on their human body render the person an "object"? Humans ARE bodies, first and foremost. HOW you treat the body is what matters.
So virtually any transactional relationship is an act of objectification - seems somewhat insane to simultaneously insist that the term describes an objectively negative quality when it also applies to me working a job or asking my roommate to get groceries for me. Either objectification is wholesale bad, in which case it's definition needs to be reworked from the ground up, or objectification describes an inevitable social process with no inherent moral weight, in which case feminists have to stop using it as a buzzword for negative behaviour.
A lot of 'objectification' discourse is just a political weapon -- as you say, ideologues uncomfortable with sexual desire who turn to any argument against it -- or the Dworkin-style criticism of industries that doesn't meaningfully discuss or respond to specific acts or creations.
Unfortunately, the Dworkin/MacKinnon-style one is what's present here, and in a lot of youtube content dating back to Sarkeesian, so that doesn't help. Because it's supposed to be a criticism of broad structures rather than specific acts, it's largely not interested in specific acts... and coincidentally is largely unfalsifiable, up to and including handwaves when confronted with increasingly broad spectrums of pornography that either don't fit its model definition (femdom, gay porn) or do fit its model definition but don't actually objectify (women's erotica, woman-to-consumer sales, the growth of parasocial porn). The waiter counterexample just gets a 'mu' here: it's just not a relevant question to their framework.
But there is a meaningful steelman (and not some recent or made-up one) that's worth keeping in mind if you every write smut or romance (or even 'normal' stories that feature romance).
There is a difference between treating people like tools or toys, and sexualizing them or making them targets of sexual desire. It's the line between a character that's sexy, and a fleshlight with a smil. You can treat a tool well, or a person poorly, just as being a target of desire can be humanizing or not depending on framework, norms, and reciprocity of interest.
For an extreme (and het) example, look at het free-use style BDSM.You can play into the same kink by literally stuffing a woman into a hole in a wall and treating her like a sex toy for a parade of men to use, or you can tie her down to a breeding stand and then make a game out of getting an orgasm (or too many orgasms) out of her or tease her so long that she's begging for more stimulation. Hell, a lot of straight guys find the latter option hotter (or the former a little gay). There's no difference in agency between these two implementations: they can and often do have near-identical framing stories, and it's even easier to make the 'I'm a sex toy' version more clear about its consent. But the former is about the men's pleasure and the women's appearance, while the latter centers the woman's feelings and desire.
In writing, erotica or pornography with more of a story, that can be more varied. A lot of less experienced writers will try to make sex scenes so low-friction that the sub does nothing but sit there, look sexy, and maybe squeeze a little. But there's a lot of mileage in highlighting the sort of pinch points that show up in real sex. Overstimulation and 'forced' orgasms are kinks of their own for a reason. A sub finding a position uncomfortable and wanting to swap, or needing a different tempo or some time to adjust to the big dick in them, or wanting more foreplay before penetration, can be a great pacing tool. Someone using a safe word because they can't physically bend that way is a perfect tool to make clear that they are comfortable with or at least enjoying everything else, or act as a scene break. These inevitably inject questions about who can make what call and how those desires are negotiated, even if the writer ultimately wants to just to treat them as one-liners.
Now, I'll make the separate argument that objectification isn't always bad. The counterargument to objectifying a waiter ultimately ends up asking a lot of emotional labor from someone who, in reality, just wants you to leave a tip and get out of here so the table's clear. In sex, a significant portion of women (... and some men) like smut that objectifies the character they're projecting themselves into, because of that objectification. It gives them a vehicle to see their desires instantiated, without having to replace an existing character's conflicting desires and feelings, or require that projection to vocalize and admit their own desires. That's a particularly big deal for people who've been raised to stigmatize or hide overt expressions of their sexuality: denying the interior experience of 'their' character may be the only way they can really come to grips with it.
The steelman of the feminist argument is that objectification can be dangerous, even for the people who get the most out of it. Some men like the woman-as-sex-toy framework because it does make it easier to think about sex as solely about 'their' own pleasure, up to and including at the expense of what their partners want or what their partners are comfortable doing. Some women who need objectification as a way to bypass their shame do so to their own detriment, either ignoring or refusing to use environments where they could admit to their desires safely, or by internalizing the self-abnegate to destructive ends.
I don't buy that as a common concern, but I don't think it's a non-existent failure mode, either. The academic research is bad, since it's mostly revolving around priming effects with little pre-registered study and even fewer direct replication, and a lot of signal only shows up if you divide 'violent' (mainstream) porn from general porn, which doesn't encourage about direction-of-causation or salami-slicing-reasons. Still, unless it's entirely fraudulent, there's some level of signal, and if so the pro-sex side's larger population-scale data is partly recognizing other variables.
Your own example of leaked nudes is a central version: you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either. That's why the objectification theory uses that word, not just to smuggle emotional loading from the Dworkin version: you don't deny the rights or opinions of tissue paper, after all, but you still treat it as an object. I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet, and legally she might have had a cause of action against the leakers and redistributors.
((caveat: I don't follow celebrities, so if she's separately a well-known exhibitionist, objection withdrawn.))
Mostly unrelated but the recent Twitter discourse on CNC orgies has been funny. Especially Aella indicating that it's hard to ensure less attractive women attract sufficient rapists
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You've said alot of interesting things that I largely agree with, so I just want to hone in on one element I take issue with :
I disagree - in this specific scenario, my teenage self fantasising about having sex with a famous actress is not imagining fucking a lifeless ragdoll that just happens to look identical to Jennifer Lawrence. The fantasy obviously involves her being enthusiastic, willing, and desiring me during the encounter, which pretty explicitly means that her "opinions" or "rights" are comfortably sublimated in an affirmative manner into the fantasy itself. Furthermore, if I mention Jennifer Lawrence and not one of the million random porn stars or e-whores you can see naked on the internet, it's because wanting to fuck Jennifer Lawrence is bound to her personality, status, etc. making her more desirable than other women, which means that her physical attributes are only a minor part of the overall attraction.
This is true but it's a detail relative to the specific example I chose - I could just as easily have mentioned Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, in which case the non-consent angle vanishes.
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"Objectification" is, like "Male Gaze", originally a serious philosophical concept (in this case, from Hegel, who uses the term to refer to making something real, so for instance "shelter" is objectified into "houses") which was picked up by American scholar-activists in "Studies" fields who saw it and thought hey that's a cool term, it sounds bad, let's redefine it as Bad Thing my outgroup does. Funnily enough the Hegel term is closer to how men and women actually interact, and you could easily make a full feminist theory out of it, but that's hard and academics are lazy.
So what happens if the catcaller is black?
We know what happens
It disappeared faster than Kony 2012 once people started criticizing.
Oh, that's just copy of Sofie Peeters Femme de la Rue from 2012.
It's funny how the scenario plays out virtually identically across the Atlantic ocean. A feminist woman walks around a large city, in an attempt to draw attention to the problem of street harassment. People Notice™ that the harassers are virtually exclusively of non-European extraction, which is exactly the thing they weren't supposed to notice: they were supposed to accuse men-in-general, not the men who have culturally enriched all major cities in Europe.
A similar phenomenon is the subway shirt. I would almost feel bad for these women if they weren't the ones voting for this.
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You get mad at some vaguely proximate white guy.
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You're overthinking it.
Women want (hot) men to think they are hot. Unfortunately:
Women become less hot with age.
There's always a hotter woman.
Women are aware of these facts, and these cause insecurity. Men who go to the movies to ogle Sydney Sweeney's huge rack trigger both older women and women who suspect Sweeney is hotter than them because it directly competes with them for sexual attention from those men (some of whom are hot). In contrast, I've never heard of a woman in a relationship with a man she finds attractive complaining about her man "objectifying" her. It really is that simple.
You don't even have to go that far. The vlogger linked in the OP is rather flat chested, and still sometimes wears very deep cut blouses anyway, clearly visible in her thumbnails. She does not enjoy watching more voluptuous women looking sexy. Men also complain about media that flaunts being for someone with opposing preferences when they didn't think it would be going in. She seems to feel that way about Euphoria.
You and I may have different standards for "very deep cut".
I think this is basically what I said.
I'm not sure what you mean by this (I don't know anything about Euphoria).
I was basically agreeing, but for that clip you don't even have to go into aging at all.
I don't know anything about Euphoria either, but it sounds like she thought she would like it, thought it would be female gaze compatible, but then it wasn't. Like, I tried watching Outlander, enjoyed the love interest, enjoyed the costumes, but did not enjoy the rape and torture. So I stopped watching, but if I were a media vlogger, I would have stopped watching and also complained about the rape and torture on the way out.
Edit: looking at the trailer, it does look like the initial pitch to viewers is a lesbian romance between Zendaya and a flat chested blond girl, and them doing drugs together. It does look kind of like it might be a gender reversed version of what they were ineptly doing with Star Wars. "But what if we could reel in more young men with BOOBS though?"
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I largely agree with your analysis, and I think it's worth adding that there is a certain irony here. Ultimately, the feminist concept of "objectification" is based on the idea that male desires are illegitimate or unimportant. From the feminist perspective, men are just supposed to serve women without asking for or expecting anything in return. Without having their own independent and legitimate desires.
In other words, the concept of "objectification" is itself rather objectifying.
In any event, "objectification" is like any other feminist concept in that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The actual core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; and (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course, feminists don't like to admit to themselves or others that there's is an ideology of naked selfishness and hate. So they come up with concepts like "objectification" to act as philosophical fig leaves.
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That's one hell of an error bar, so the research is garbage.
Repeat after me: progressives are not liberals. I get that it's very confusing, especially if you're in certain bubbles that made much hay claiming they were the same (because in large degree the marriage of convenience between the two was still running at the time). The difference is that liberals actually like sex and aren't turbo-butthurt about its existence, while progressives are existentially threatened by anyone else but them controlling sex and sexual expression (because it is all the value they offer- that's part of why they're so attached to education as an alternate path). Needless to say this is mostly a thing with female progressives; the men might parrot it but they don't truly understand it (the ones that do tend to be traditionalists, which is just progressivism with the opposite gender valence).
The clue is that progressives tend to believe it should be legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it, which takes the price of sex up to infinity. Any sex (or sexual expression) that occurs must be maximally monetized, or it's offering an alternative to that monopoly.
This is why progressives get extremely angry about older men dating younger women: the
mottecope is "she's being taken advantage of", thebaileytruth is "she's getting more money for the sex than I ever would, which drives the price I can get for my sex down".When women say the existence of something "devalues sex", they're being literal because it actually does.
So it's not the sexual objectification they're objecting to, it's getting around the fee they feel is due. Sexual labor (which for women is "being observed while sexually desirable") without pay. Progressives don't like sex work because it makes that fee legible, which is a threat; its legality is generally a compromise they struck with the liberals in the original anti-traditionalist compact. They do reserve the right to play at sexual labor, though, which is how they justify to themselves having made that deal, and is also why they don't really have much problem with non-straight sex (it's orthogonal to the market).
Which is why it's also important to identify what kind of feminist you're dealing with- some are just happy not to be under traditionalism (and will deploy patriarchy and equality arguments to that end- that's who they originally came from, and still have some truth to them), while others are trying to impose a matriarchy instead (and generally using the descriptive liberal arguments as prescriptive weapons).
Score one for AI. Claude traced it to here, and said it was a range of results across different studies (with different methodologies and populations), not error bars for a single measure. I retraced the source and read the abstract, but I honestly didn't gain anything that the AI didn't hand to me already.
As an aside, I've stopped listening to the news in my car because I can't fact-check them while I'm driving, but it's easy to do on the web.
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The basic core principles of feminism are (1) more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women; (2) punishment and humiliation for men. Of course feminists don't like to acknowledge this to themselves or others, so instead they rely on a smorgasbord of more reasonable sounding principles such as:
(1) Women are the same as men and must be treated equally;
(2) Women are different from men and must be treated differently;
(3) Objectification of people is harmful and must be avoided; and
(4) Women are autonomous adults who should have the freedom to make their own choices in life;
(5) Women have been brainwashed by the "patriarchy" into making poor choices;
and so on.
Obviously these principles are not consistent with each other; feminists just use whatever is most convenient in the moment. If someone points out the contradiction, that person is ignored or silenced with accusations of "misogyny" or whatever.
So yeah, you are not the first person to ask "what if a woman objectifies herself"? But the reality is that feminists do not sincerely care about objectification. If objectification is perceived as beneficial (for example Taylor Swift doing a concert while wearing a slutty outfit and getting paid a million dollars), they are fine with it.
I think it's also worth noting that this idea -- that nudity should serve a purpose -- is far more flexible than it seems on its surface. For example, consider the sexy naked woman who makes an appearance in The Shining. One could certainly argue that her nudity advances the plot, since it helps to demonstrate Jack Torrance's sexual excitement and the seeming attempt to seduce him. On the other hand, one could argue that basically the same thing could have been accomplished without nudity, for example by implying that the woman is naked without actually showing it. Or by putting her in a seductive dress.
It seems to me that you can pretty much always argue it one way or another. And for feminists, it will almost certainly come down to the following: If feminists don't like it, then it doesn't serve any purpose. If feminists do like it, then it does serve a purpose.
I disagree that these principles are contradictory. They all express problems with a certain part of reality. It can be that women are not treated the same (or at least historically weren't) in certain areas where they should be, and yet it remains true that women are different from men and treating the sexes differently is better in other areas. It is also true that women (and men, too, of course) made choices in a restricted space of a certain unnecessarily gendered way of looking at the world, which it is good that we are overcoming or in many ways have already overcome; yet at the same time, both sexes should be seen as autonomous individuals. I don't see a contradiction, just a nuanced take.
And yet by some strange coincidence, these "principles" are applied so as to reach the conclusions which are convenient and advantageous for women.
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Stop saying "women" when you mean "feminists". (Incidentally, advice which most people should think about most of the time.) Feminism isn't a pure grift - individual feminists genuinely want other feminists to get more gibmedats and not just themselves - but the point isn't to uplift women as a whole, it's to subsidise a particular female life script (see Obama's notorious Life of Julia ad, but the critical point is that women who seek to have children in actually-committed relationships with men are SOL) with the goal of changing female behaviour such that a large enough pool of able women pursue meritocratic competition that they can achieve a 50-50 power elite by affirmative action without promoting obvious numpties.
I'm not sure what you mean by the word "grift." To me, if a group of allied people work in informal concert to grab resources, it's still potentially what I would call a "grift."
In any event, I don't see much point in distinguishing between "women" and "feminists." If a traditional stay-at-home non-feminist wife is having a dispute with her husband (for example suppose they are getting divorced as a result of her infidelity and the woman stands to get very little alimony) I'm pretty confident most feminists would NOT say "Well that's what you get for being a stay-at-home-wife and cheating on your husband. You should have been a good feminist, gotten a marketable degree, and stayed in the workforce." Rather, they would strongly support the woman.
The thing is, most women have strong in-group bias. And that's all feminism really is -- partisan support of women, right or wrong.
To be sure, women's interests are not all perfectly aligned. What is good for a upper middle class secular careerist woman in the West is not necessarily what is good for other women in the world. And this tension surely informs the goals of feminists. Especially given that Western feminists are part of a larger coalition with some very non-feminist members.
Nevertheless, "more goodies (money, power, status, etc.) for women" is a reasonable approximation of the core goals of feminism.
I would say an activist movement is a grift if the primary goal is to transfer other people's money to the activists and their immediate social network, but not a grift if the goal is to transfer money to the group the activists claim to be speaking for. The organised BLM movement, for example, turns out to be a grift on this definition - they raised a lot of donations and mostly kept the money. The traditional Black urban political machines are not pure grifts on this model - although they take a lot off the top, they spend more taxpayer money on their constituents than they do on themselves.
Well you are free to define the word "grift" any way you like for purposes of discussion. Regardless, feminism is what it is: An ideology of avarice and hate which pretends to be about equality and basic rights. Grift or not.
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I'll stop when self-proclaimed conservative women in positions of political power don't consistently fall back on feminist rhetoric the moment they feel cornered for their own actions.
As long as our conservative female defence minister here in Austria proudly asserts that mandatory military service should remain an exclusive male burden and that women can't be expected to share this obligation because "they still suffer from systemic injustice in other domains such as a housework or the gender pay gap" (her actual reasoning), I will continue to assume that feminism is mainly a in-group cudgel for women to wield against men and society for virtually any reason that they see fit in helping them get ahead.
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This is a standard case of society having a different set of standards for men and women. Women are liberated beings and can have sex with who they want. Men are dangerous predators until proven otherwise, and must keep their desires in check.
Because women are free, liberated individuals who can choose to use their bodies however they please, sex work is a valid occupation that should not be shamed.
Because men are dangerous and predatory, any man who uses sex workers is the worst kind of person who sees women as merely objects with no agency or value besides the hole between their legs.
Thus, being a sex worker is perfectly valid, although dangerous. Buying the services of a sex worker is one of the worst thing a man can do.
In discussion of Graham Platner today on Breaking Points, Platner is given kudos for claiming he was a bad boyfriend in the past, but that the current accusations against him and nebulous and thin gruel. Points to them for not falling back on Believe All Women (even if because the worst complaint against him is from a Republican who dated him, so it's thought to be motivated), but it occurred to me how unlikely it would ever to for a woman to feel the need to 'fess up to being "a bad girlfriend" and atoning for it, for a political career. It'd be like, "Psh, yea I was a BRAT, and anyway who said I was a bad girlfriend? Probably some douchebag who thought he was owed sex."
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Is this not just an instance of Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
In this case, by problematizing the appreciation of the women currently considered hotter than her as "objectification".
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obligatory PhD comics.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie commie, objectification is the default mode to relate to trade partners. The relationship of an Amazon shareholder and a worker in a fulfillment center or software programmer is one of 100% objectification. The shareholder does not know or care if the worker is putting in the hours to pay for college for his kid or to finance a substance habit. The only thing he cares about is that the fulfillment of the orders happens in a cost-effective way. Humans are only employed because robots and LLMs are not cost-effective ways to replace them (yet).
Nor do I think that this is bad, or would be different in some commie utopia. The ideal would be that humans use each other as tools in ways which incidentally also improves the situation of the used person. But this is merely a question of trade balance. I do not want my coffee to be produced by someone whom I can appreciate as a person with agency and feelings, perhaps deciding that today I will buy coffee beans from that farmer because I sympathize with his backstory or whatever. I only care about the general stuff in aggregate, that he is not enslaved and not overly exploited. Otherwise, my caring takes the form of pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on it, and I do not expect him to care about my specific situation, why I feel the need to caffeinate etc. As long as I care about his well-being in the abstract that I don't want him exploited, and he cares about mine enough that he does not want me to drink coffee with a lot of mercury in it, objectifying the other as a source of labor or funds seems perfectly fine.
Nor do I think that the objectification in sex work is one sided. If the guy sees the sex worker as a collection of tits and holes, it seems likewise reasonable to assume that the sex worker will see the john as a wallet with a cock attached to it.
When I walk through the city, I tend to model other people as bounding boxes for collision avoidance. Does this make me more or less evil than a guy who instead models the people around him as a collection of sex organs?
I do not have a bigger point to make (I am not into super-transactional sex, personally), but I find it dishonest to pretend that objectification is bad when it is the default way we relate to other people in any polity larger than Dunbar's number. "The cashier scanned my food" is as much as an objectification as "the big-chested blonde walked by my table".
That comic could very well have the brain on a stick in both panels as none of the descriptors in the first are usually associated with anything other than the brain. Also, "hopes, dreams, and aspirations" are basically synonyms.
There is a point to be made that delving into the hypertransactional abyss in defining relationships wraps back around into meaningful compassionate connections when all factors are considered (e.g. A shareholder doesn't want Amazon to have a bad reputation, and a shareholder has a long-term perspective that would not encourage short-sighted "cost-savings")
Usually the zero-sum punchline of the "Sexual Empowerment" of women is the belittlement of male sexuality.
Let's take the Sexual Empowerment perspective and apply it to Male sexuality:
"Attraction to a woman's appearance regardless of her innerworkings is an undescriminating love of bodily-form akin to the unconditional love of Christ. Men love beautiful form regardless of what dwells within, opening themselves to become romantically-entangled with anytype of woman who attracts him in appearance."
And now for parody :
"It is a man's right to goon to anyone he wishes: Laws against public masturbation are a sexist anachronism meant to shame and restrict him while making women feel comfortable. The freedom of men is far more important than the comfort of women"
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Are prediction markets still culture war? I bring this up because there's been some... controversy surrounding Polymarket and its resolution of a bet earlier this week. The market in question is this one regarding whether Microstrategy will sell any Bitcoins by a certain date. In particular I want to draw your attention to the recently resolved sub-market for May 31st. If you expand the history of the market you'll notice some very odd behavior for the odds. On June 1st, after the deadline for the sale had passed, the odds briefly spike up over 56% before crashing to essentially 0. Why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin in the window? And then why did people become so convinced that Microstrategy hadn't?
They might have been convinced in the first place because on June 1st Microstrategy published their 8-K which said they had sold 32 Bitcoin between May 26th and May 31st. That seems like a good reason to believe that Microstrategy had sold bitcoin before May 31st! Unless you thought their 8-K was a lie. It seems like it was a mistake to let people trade after it was public information which way the bet would resolve, but that's what happened.
Then why did the odds crash back down to near 0? Well, on June 1st the market was updated to add this disclaimer:
It's true that in reality Microstrategy did sell bitcoin before May 31st. A bunch of people did correctly predict that. But the market pays out to people who made a false prediction because the evidence that Microstrategy sold bitcoin didn't come out until the day after the deadline!
This isn't the first time a prediction market has had some controversy over how they resolved a market. Kalshi had a similar scandal earlier this year concerning its resolution of a market on whether Ali Khamenei would remain in power in Iran. This ones feel pretty blatant as a resolution for certain polymarket insiders who control how markets resolve via crypto vote, though.
There's often an assumption that prediction market odds track some kind of real probability of an event (predicetion markets themselves certainly lean into this) and that therefore their resolutions will track reality. I think this is a reminder that this is less true than we might suppose.
I am neither a prediction market nor cryptocurrency expert, but this seems to be bad from the very start.
A good prediction market is one where no actor can unilaterally decide the outcome at zero costs to themselves. For example, you might ask if some politician would remain in power, because they can not unilaterally decide to stay in power if external factors (impeachment, assassination, etc) force them out, and while they are free to resign, this will typically come at high costs to themselves.
This one seems as bad as a mention market. It is like playing roulette when the rules are that after you have placed your bet, the croupier will just place the ball at the number they feel should win and announce it.
Even if MicroStrategy will not directly change their behavior to fix the prediction market ("On Tuesday, we sold 100 sat worth of bitcoin, so better pay up, sucker"), it seems still a bad market to compete in because another party will have a substantial information advantage. Like, if you bet on the outcome of some kind of competition, like an election, sports event or war, some people have some insider information (like 'Player X got injured in training'), but at least their edge will be limited.
So there is already plenty of excellent reasons not to play in this market even before one gets to the fact that the resolution criteria will be just changed ex post facto to benefit the investors of one side of the trade. (On the object level, it seems very simple. If MicroStrategy sold any BTC, that would involve transactions on the block chain. So the "on-chain data" will reflect that fact (once the transaction is made part of the block chain by a miner). The fact that it is not commonly known who owns each address is quite frankly just a skill issue. Also, there is obviously a difference between "cutoff date for the bet" and "determination on what the facts were at the cutoff date". If a runner wants to contest his second place on grounds that it took photographic evidence to determine that he was not first, and that this clearly indicates that at the time he crossed the finish line, there was no credible information that he was not first, he would be laughed out of any court.)
I am also a bit surprised at this failure mode. My understanding is that people who hold some kind of token get to vote on the resolution of disputed markets, but the Polymarket docs I found do not go into a lot of detail. Ideally, one would want the people who vote to be the people who own Polymarket. Betters would ideally judge the worth of the company against their trade volume and only deal with them if they are convinced that a rug pull will not be more lucrative for the company than keeping running honestly.
What is interesting is that the trading volume of that market was 400M$, which is high but still small compared to the worth of Polymarket (16G$ or so). The worth of Polymarket hinges almost entirely on the presumption that it will fairly resolve markets. Nobody is going to play in a Casino where the boss will simply tell the dealer that the ball did not come to rest at the red nine but at the black 22 next to it.
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Does polymarket no longer resolve markets through their secondary market mechanism?
Yes that's the UMA which is influenced by how much of their crypto token you hold and therefore skews insider
You're making it sound like it's some kind of cynical vote. You risk your tokens if you oppose consensus and anyone can buy the tokens. It's not like a shadowy council decides.
Yes but in practice the large holders of these tokens are a group of people who know each other well and are very active with size on Poly market.
If they aren't resolving markets at least somewhat accurately doesn't that threaten the value of the platform, and of their tokens if users stop trading?
In the long run sure yes and every time one of these situations happen a certain amount of people swear off them. It's a paradoxical situation with prediction markets where if anything you should be siding with the tourists over the regulars since the latter actually have a lot less leverage.
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It's very rare humans with power weild it well lol
One topic that absolutely CAPTIVATES me is historical figures who were able to wield power wisely, then set it aside willingly rather than cling to it desperately.
Cinncinatus, George Washington, Augusto Pinochet (I know, I know).
Another topic that captivates me is the design of systems such that you don't have to trust the people in 'power' since the system itself incentivizes 'good' behavior by its very structure, or makes it very difficult for bad actors to do damage before they're removed.
Augur was pretty close to achieving that, but alas DApps were a doomed concept.
So whenever I look at systems like this, I really do question the incentives of the ones who control them, and ask whether they TRULY have skin in the game
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This seems like a pretty easy fix - just require markets to clearly state the window during which they will consider information for resolution. The issue here was that it did not state one way or the other up front whether information after May 31st would count. This should be clear and explicit in the rules. Or maybe they will come up with a boilerplate formula and adopt that wording for most events, to avoid the confusion caused by the variance in rules and wordings.
There needs to be some sort of cutoff for practical reasons. Otherwise you'd have people coping and trying to delay resolution in the hopes that some new information would come to light any day now to flip the outcome.
At the very least you would think they would cut off trading in the market at the end date. The impression I get is a lot of people are mad because they traded after the 8-K came out and therefore regarded the bet as a sure thing. Same for the "clarification." Why allow people to continue to trade after either of these events?
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I think this is the case where polyarket will end up standardizing and tightening the rules around the timeframe that confirmation must take place. For example, this iran market https://polymarket.com/event/iran-ceasefire-continues-through says:
At least in this case the rules are clear that the proof of the event must happen by a cetain deadline. So even though the may 24th market stayed open for a week after, there are rules on what can be considered.
If there are no rules of course, then there's always the temptation to drag the market on in the hopes of new evidence coming to light. Maybe polymarket already has "default" rules for this but I don't know about it.
There's an infinite supply of edge cases and rules lawyerings. The long-term push for stuff will this (especially when an actual gambling and/or financial commission gets involved) will likely just be to cull as much of the niche markets as possible
And this isn't one of them. The terms of the market were:
This is unambiguously a statement that the sale will occur before 1159, not that the publicly available information confirming it will appear before 1159. MicroStrategy sold Bitcoin before the deadline, and this was confirmed by "information from MSTR" in the ordinary course of business, on the timetable you would expect for a sale shortly before the deadline.
This makes the LIBOR bros look honest.
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Obviously this is an insane rules lawyer stripout but it's reflective of why PMs will in the fullness of time slowly abandon all non-sports content as they are regulated and consider the novel real world stuff as too difficult to grade and manage
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Last night I watched Adum from Your Movie Sucks's review of Michael, the recent biopic of Michael Jackson starring his nephew Jaafar. I was not surprised to find that he abhorred the film, taking it to task for its hagiographic approach (not only to its principal, but also to certain members of his inner circle, some of whom acted as producers); the way it seems to encourage an unhealthy parasocial relationship between the late Jackson and his most devoted fans, and how it completely avoids mentioning the child abuse allegations which dogged Jackson in his later years. Adum, for his part, remains agnostic on whether Jackson was guilty of sexually interfering with children: he concedes that it's certainly possible that certain of the complainants' parents coerced them into accusing Jackson of misconduct in hopes of securing a generous settlement agreement, but also points out that even some of the behaviour Jackson admitted to (e.g. sharing a bed with underage boys) was certainly questionable at the minimum.
Near the end of the review (timestamped link), Adum argues that, whatever the truth of the abuse allegations launched against Jackson, it's impossible to talk about these and his other strange behaviour (the cosmetic surgery, the Neverland ranch, the time he dangled his child out of a fourth-floor window) without acknowledging that he suffered a uniquely awful upbringing which can only be described as abusive and exploitative. If indeed he was guilty of child abuse, his own difficult childhood would not excuse his conduct, but the former is inseparable from the latter. Adum muses on how odd it is that essentially every Western nation outlawed child labour decades ago – except for child labour in the entertainment industry, where child actors and singers pass without comment. Adum argues that the existence of this loophole actively incentivises abusive, exploitative child-rearing of the kind Jackson suffered, and that this behaviour will continue as long as the loophole is permitted to remain open. He ends the video with a call for it to be closed. No more child stars. No more prepubescent musicians. Cut it off at the root.
I'm old enough to remember when "former child star" was a stock punchline, with tabloid magazines and edgy sitcoms making hay of the incongruity between adorable child actors later becoming burnt-out husks checking themselves into rehab for heroin addiction. After learning what a large proportion of these former child stars went through upbringings comparable to Jackson's in abusiveness and/or claimed to have been sexually exploited at the hands of adult producers, directors or co-stars, it's been many years since I found jokes at their expense funny. (Examples include Coreys Haim and Feldman, Drake Bell, Amanda Bynes, Jennette McCurdy and Joanna Levesque, among many others.) And that's not even getting into the rare instances of child actors being severely injured or even killed on film sets (e.g. the infamous Twilight Zone movie helicopter accident, which in fairness was in direct contravention of multiple child labour laws even at the time). Even leaving aside the most horrific cases of abuse and exploitation, many child actors and musicians cite their abnormal childhoods as underlying causes in their later mental health difficulties and problems with substance abuse. It's a bit unreasonable for, say, Chappell Roan to complain about the downsides of fame, given that she was an adult when she decided to pursue her career in music, and hence old enough to know that being famous is a package deal. I have a lot more sympathy when a child complains about never really having had a private life, often because of decisions made on their behalf by a domineering stage mom. I'm inclined to agree with Adum that I don't really understand why this loophole exists, and think closing it is a good idea.
What would a world without child actors look like? While child labour laws vary by jurisdiction, most allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to work part-time with the consent of their parents. If this law applied to film and TV sets, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who look young enough to pass for thirteen or fourteen would be highly prized, but films with major characters who have not yet hit puberty would be the exclusive preserve of animation. We might allow under-16 actors to make brief appearances in films, but place strict limitations on how large their role can be to prevent the emergence of newly minted child stars e.g. specifying that they can only work a maximum of eight hours every calendar month, or only have X minutes of screentime, or X lines of dialogue. This means that, for example, a short scene in which the adult protagonist of the film says goodbye to his wife and kids before leaving to blow the lid off the Brodsky case is fine; a live-action film in which the protagonist is a prepubescent child (e.g. Home Alone, the Harry Potter films) is not. This is an obvious application of photorealistic generative AI: have the adult characters played by adult actors, and the children played by mo-capped adult stand-ins (perhaps standing on their knees, like Gary Oldman in Tiptoes) who will be replaced by CGI children in post-production.
Directors and producers might complain about their creative freedom being unduly curtailed by regulations of this type. But this objection reeks of status quo bias to me. The famous "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer is barely fifty years old. I'm sure if the American Humane Society had existed at the time Ben-Hur was being made, the directors would have complained that their creative freedom was being compromised by the insistence that they not intentionally kill upwards of a hundred horses in order to produce suitably exciting cinema. Eventually, we collectively decided that no artistic statement justifies pointless animal cruelty on this scale: it's only a movie. Sufficiently talented directors managed to find creative solutions for how to film movies without being gratuitously cruel to our four-legged friends. In the future, the "no animals were harmed..." disclaimer might well be followed by another reading "no child labour was exploited...".
If outright banning child actors and musicians isn't yet a practical possibility, an interim solution might be to have all compensation they earn from their performances paid into a trust that they (and only they) can access, and only when they come of age. The only compensation their parents could receive directly would come in the form of reimbursements for e.g. travel expenses, acting classes, music classes, accommodation etc. Many film studios are understandably reluctant about paying children their acting fees directly, fearing that they might squander their earnings; on the other hand, there have been enough cases of parents financially exploiting their children (and the child consequently ending up empty-handed when they come of age) that I'm not convinced paying a child's fees into a bank account to which their parents have access is a viable solution. If parents were unable to directly financially profit from their children's labour, that would also work to disincentivise the most egregious forms of abuse and exploitation. (A Google informs me that similar legislation has been on the books in California since 1939.)
It's bizarre to react to child abuse by taking power away from the child and concentrating it in the hands of their abusers. Parents abuse some children who made a name for themselves and a lot of money, you take the childrens' ability to make money and fame away and leave them with their child abusing parents as a result? Why?
I'm guessing you blank slated it and assumed that Hollywood caused the abuse in the cases you cited, not the parents. That would be a red herring. Make no mistake, these families are mentally ill, parent and child. Jeanette McCurdy has inherited bipolar/borderline personality disorder. If she were instrinsically non-mentally ill, she would be enjoying being rich and famous. She dwells on the past not because her mom was a bitch, but because she's a bitch too, and she's in a protracted bitch-fight with her mom. Hollywood didn't do it to either of them. The same goes for when these Hollywood narcissists (tip: fame seekers tend to be narcissists) claim sexual abuse. Normal people just get over a sexual encounter they later regretted. They're in therapy 20 years later because they are mentally ill and would have arrived in therapy anyways, blaming something extrinsic is just a narcissistic coping mechanism they come up with, often with their therapist who is getting paid a lot to feed their egos. And in both cases people fall for their publicly stated copes and try to transform society to be an overall worse place based on the feverish delusions of mentally ill people. Witch-hunt high status men who had sex, take even more liberty away from children, yes that's the recipe for Utopia, sure.
Uhh, no? I literally have no idea where you got that impression. The post begins with a lengthy preamble talking about a child who was horrifically abused by his father, not by Hollywood.
Jennette McCurdy specifically alleges that Dan Schneider, the creator of iCarly, engaged in some deeply suspect behaviour on-set. She is far from the only child actor who worked with Schneider to make similar claims. I don't know what, specifically, you're claiming Hollywood "didn't do" to McCurdy, but Hollywood did do something to her.
It's meaningless to talk about children "regretting" sexual encounters, because children cannot consent to sex and every sexual act between an adult and a prepubescent child is statutory rape.
In that part I was referencing the Weinstein scandal for the most part. AFAIK non of those women claimed to be underage when they allegedly had sex with him.
However, it would fit Epstein too, as I think those women were all old enough to scientifically consent and then regret. McCurdy was around that age during her iCarly career so, I guess it would apply to her too.
That guy was creepy, not the part where she got rich and famous.
I have absolutely no idea why you're bringing up adult women who claimed to be the victims of sexual misconduct when my post was specifically (and very explicitly) about child actors of both sexes.
The pilot was filmed in January of 2007, when she was fourteen. I have no idea what "scientifically consent" is supposed to mean, but it sounds extremely noncey. California's legal age of consent is eighteen.
They have something in common which I discussed above. If you can't figure it out, I recommend this book. Hint: it's somewhere in this block of text
...
Whether or not someone is smart enough to consent to sex, independent of the legal fiction of their present country. A useful distinction for speaking to someone based in the 21st century Earth region of space time, since various factors unknown to them have causes many of their governments to make legal ages of consent above their populations median scientific age of consent.
Stop that. It's like saying using the word noncey sounds extremely British-prole.
This is literally not even a grammatical sentence. If you're going to go full what-if-the-child-consents-tho, you could at least do me the courtesy of doing so in a semantically accurate fashion.
So you've never heard „it's giving cringe” before? And your big retort is to go primary school English teacher / grammar Nazi on me? For real?
I don't see the point in debating the ethics of child labour with an admitted nonce. The inferential distance is just too wide. Best of luck to you.
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I feel like whatever issue there is with child actors will just be part of a larger trend with actors in general with AI. We may look back at the 20th-early 21st centuries with their actors performing in front of a camera to be displayed on a screen with quaint curiosity and a bit of horror like how we today look back at Buster Keaton hanging off a train for films in the early 20th century. I.e. we just no longer need to place real humans in such dangerous or effortful situations anymore, thanks to being able to show the same thing using computers.
I think the bigger thing may be social media celebrities, which will also be easy to fake, but which will naturally draw people - including children - in who are attracted to fame. The photos and videos might be computer-generated, but the faces and voices will be that of real, likely fame-hunting, humans, again including children. I don't know how we would or could protect children from early fame from such things. As someone else alluded to here, they'll most likely be "groomed" by the "algorithm" to creating and even enjoying creating certain types of content that I personally don't think would be good for there to be more of for society or for the children in question.
A reign of terror a la
Scott AlexanderChina that just dictates how the algorithms work might work, but I can't see that being likely in the United States or even particularly desirable, as the cure may be worse than the disease. Age limits on social media are being tried in various places, but I'm skeptical that they can work without some massive cultural shift, which also seems unlikely. When the "winners" of social media are, almost by definition, high status, it's going to be hard to get people in general not to want to ape them, especially given the far lower costs of attempting compared to e.g. trying to become an actor, musician, or professional athlete.Maybe the only way out is through, by sticking each of us in our own personal Matrix.
I feel like whatever issue there is with child
actorswill just be part of a larger trend withactorshumans in general with AI, i.e. we just no longer needto placereal humansin such dangerous or effortful situations anymore, thanks to being able to show the same thing using computers.After all, life is dangerous and risky, and humans are no longer working animals.
As such, some consider it on par with animal cruelty the notion that someone would ever consider having kids.
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A sufficiently creative director could probably make a movie in which legal adults played the role of children and still have it be "believeable" within the confines of the world he is creating. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this type of stuff is not uncommon in theater. If the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief a man can play a woman, the guy wearing all white does not exist, and putting on a crown and speaking in an accent makes you a king. In a world where child actors were never normalized this does not seem unrealistic.
In our world however, modern movies go for maximum immersion. Everything must look as true to life as possible. So the more realistic scenario is that children's movies without child actors would make heavy use of animaton, puppets, or full-body costumes that make the features of the adult actors invisible.
Contrary to your suggested complaints, I believe this is the exact kind of restriction that breeds creativity. Using child actors is the easy way out. Forbid that, and now the directors and producers are forced to think outside the box, which will lead to more creative ideas.
Oh I agree, absolutely. I think the hypothetical directors who would complain about no longer being permitted to use child actors will eventually sound as ridiculous to us as directors from previous generations who would complain about not being allowed to endanger, maim or kill animals to get the shot. Photorealistic generative AI is one example of how a creative director could get around this restriction.
That being said
I'm not sure if I really agree with this. Modern Hollywood movies don't really look anything like real life. Even when they aren't primarily filmed on a green screen, they tend to use much more aggressive colour grading than the films of earlier decades did. Actors tend to be perfectly made up: it is rare to see a character in a tropical climate who is dripping with sweat (as was done in, for example, Sorcerer). Modern Hollywood films tend to be stylised to within an inch of their lives and drained of weight and tactility.
My point was that watchers of modern movies and TV-series don't expect the to suspense their disbelief to the same extent as people who go to the theater. Thus, the same tricks that work in a physical theater are unlikely to achieve the same effect on a screen. But thinking about my phrasing, yeah you are right that "true to life" does not hold up to scrutiny.
Yeah, that's true.
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I’d take this post as an opportunity to bring up the suicide victim and late British celeb Lil’ Chris, although strictly speaking he was not a child actor but a reality TV star, someone I never heard of until coming across his story in one of those ‘ list of people who could not get over it that their 15 minutes of fame was over’ Youtube compilations. I think it was kind of a shitty move on the part of Gene Simmons and the TV producers involved to take a teenage boy from an English prole family with obvious unresolved psychological tendencies of attention-seeking and other mental health issues, sell him the fake fantasy that he’ll become some huge rock star and then throw him on the scrap heap when no more money could be milked from him.
What a sad story. Simmons and co. should be ashamed.
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What was so scummy about what Simmons and the show producers did? It doesn't look like either Chris or his family blamed them for anything. It looks to me like Gene Simmons promised some troubled teen he'd make him a rock star, then... did? The guy had a number 3 hit single, opened for huge bands on international tours, hosted his own tv show. His career fizzled out after 7-8 years, and then he killed himself 9 years after appearing on Rock School.
While I'm sure the life of a low-tier rock star/reality tv personality is not necessarily the healthiest or most spiritually fulfilling, do we have any indication his likely alternative life paths would have ended any happier? He was the 4' 11" tall son of a slaughterhouse worker with a history of mental health problems, who grew up in a dying town with an 18% unemployment rate. L'il Chris wasn't exactly on the path to success before Gene Simmons came along, and there are no allegations I'm aware of that he was mistreated by the industry in any way. He was promised a big break, received it, then took his own life 9 years later once his time in the spotlight was over (probably along with several other personal reasons we're unaware of that likely have nothing to do with the entertainment industry). It's tragic, but I don't see any villains in this story.
No. He probably would have been a teenage suicide on account of being 4'11" if not for the fame opium.
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Chris envied adult rock stars, as it was made clear in one segment of Rock School I saw on YT, and wanted to become one of them. Obviously neither Simmons nor the producers, nor anyone in his social circle was enough of an asshole to point out to him that, as far as I know, not one rock icon started out at age 15 as a reality TV contestant, and in general they never start out as kids, so it was not like his chosen path offered real chances of making his dream true. It also seems obvious to me that both Simmons and the producers were more or less aware that he had no real staying power because there was no originality to whatever talents he had (I suppose). The novelty aspect of it all was bound to peter out eventually, and he was going to fade away. I doubt anyone explained all this to him.
It was also clear as day by this time that fame can be a heavy burden that not all people are mentally equipped to handle. If you’re convinced that fame is what you want and you end up getting it, you also lose what you had i.e. an ordinary life, which will not seem like a loss at first, but you’ll likely end up feeling lost later. Your entire social circle, everything and everyone you’ve known, will dissolve, and you’ll no longer know whom to trust. And if you also lose the limelight in the end because the audience becomes bored with you, you end up with nothing, staring into an empty abyss. Again, probably none of this was explained to Chris.
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I think Adum is a bit confused about the genre of this movie, they wanted to write a myth not a historical inquest. And it's hard to make the latter into a movie that's interesting, you have to be especially dry, so a lot of biographies end up falling into one of two categories: the mythology and the character assassination.
Leaving neverland was the other side of the equation, possibly even more dishonest since it's (IMO) more likely than not that the accusations are fabricated and it was done to someone that can no longer defend himself, on account of having been dead for over 10 years.
Imagine trying to portray the accusations of pedophilia in a way that doesn't make them come off as either indisputably true or slander, but rather something that's likely not true but maybe? How do you do it? Who is the point of view character? You have to put some third party character into the movie that sees the event as we, the general public, saw it. It's a different genre.
As for the child actors, is there even a problem? We all know of the cases where things go bad because they are reported on by journalists (Jake Lloyd podracing in real life amiright?) but when the child actor goes on to become an electrician who's going to inform you?
Andrew Jarecki gave it his best shot.
Couldn't one make the same argument about any kind of child labour?
I wouldn't be entirely opposed to it. Those laws were created at a different time.
Guess we've got ourselves a modus ponens.
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Was? The Boys mocked this just seven years ago in their first season (damn, time does fly!) by getting the former kid from The Sixth Sense to play a parody of himself.
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On one hand, I disagree with nothing you've written: child actors have it uniquely rough in some ways, and we really should do better by them.
On the other, I feel like the (legal/ethical/practical) difficulty in working with them makes it difficult to tell stories that include children, which I feel are a bit lacking these days. The modern Western canon just isn't very kid friendly, nor are characters even shown playing good parent role models: how many of The Avengers have kids? Even those that do seem to play parents as an afterthought.
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Absolutely. Fuck any real representation and wish-fulfillment for ~10% of the population. Self-actualization should be confined to grownups only.
(Ironically, most kids and teens in animation are usually voice-acted by grown women; the few notable exceptions to that off the top of my head being TAWOG, Chowder, and the Iron Giant.)
You can fix most of the other issues with payment later or with some other contrivance, but I'm firmly in the 'stay in Omelas' camp here; the ideal number of burnt-out child stars in a healthy society is not 0 specifically for that reason.
"But muh creative freedom" is a nonsense complaint here, because what you're suggesting would completely destroy the ability to have sitcoms that feature families (alongside, uh, most of the Spielberg catalogue). Erasing portrayals of that from TV and film because it's Unsafe will surely help TFR.
Bluey somewhat famously uses an anonymous pair of actual kids as voice actors for at least the two main child characters. Perhaps that's a reasonable balance?
Actually, MLP G4 does this as well for 3 characters in particular, come to think of it.
No, it really isn't.
I get that nobody really watches sitcoms any more, but I'm really not interested in making The Cosby Show or Home Improvement (or Two and a Half Men) illegal to produce simply because there's significant value in retaining an environment that can produce them.
I think removing the conditions that make filming Stranger Things or Terminator 2 (or IT, Super 8, ET, etc.) possible/practical would be harm to broader culture that far outweighs the higher variance in outcomes the child actors in them have as-is. You're not picking an adult up off the back of a dirtbike they're too big for and then CGI-ing it into something else.
I mean, there are plenty of points in T2 where Edward Furlong is pretty obviously replaced by a stunt double. Arnie too, for that matter.
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This leaves out the major complication- the kids want to act.
Yes, you can terrorize a child into obedience, you can train them to want different things. But the desire to participate in acting just keeps resurfacing in kids whose parents would much rather have something other than plays to go to- sort of like music. I have no difficulty believing that 100% of child stars originally had a strong desire to act, to dance, to do music. Obviously, stronger limits are needed, but there seems to me no obvious reason that kids can’t be paid for doing something that they want to do.
There are many things that children want to do which we deny them because it's not in their best interests. I don't claim that acting is a categorical example of that, but it seems heavily correlated/associated with lots of things which unambiguously are (e.g. sexual exploitation by adults working in the industry).
You could also apply this argument to other kinds of child labour. I have it on good authority that the children yearn for the mines, but we don't make an exemption for child labour laws just because a given child claims that he really does want to work in a coalmine.
Yes there are many things that we do not let children do despite their desire to do so- but acting in contexts where they aren't getting paid is largely uncontroversial. I don't see why paying them to do so is categorically worse, even if stronger limits are necessary.
But again, I think this argument proves too much. Having sex with someone where no money changes hands is uncontroversial, therefore there should be no controversy about having sex with someone when money does change hands?
The fact that money changes hands fundamentally alters the nature of the arrangement, creating opportunities for abuse and exploitation that wouldn't otherwise exist. It's true that no child could stand to have his earnings appropriated from him by his greedy parents because he landed the lead role in his school's Christmas play. That's (one reason) why I don't have a problem with children acting in school Christmas plays.
I mean, de-stigmatizing sex work is a pretty mainstream online-left opinion.
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what about kids making content on social media, ie youtube?
I'm against it. God knows people like Rebecca Black were bullied horrifically by people she'd never met on the other side of the globe because of a silly music video that should never have been shared publicly. See also parents who've faced legal repercussions for playing "pranks" on their children in order to create YouTube content, and these "pranks" functionally amounted to physical and emotional abuse.
Whenever I walk past a pair of preteen girls filming themselves doing a TikTok dance to post on the social network in question (happens about once a week), I have the same thought: do they know that pederasts are watching these videos and masturbating to them? And then they notice that some videos are performing better than others, so they try to optimise their videos by showing more skin. A generation of prepubescent girls is falling victim to audience capture, in which the audience is made up of nonces and the content they're creating amounts to unwitting softcore CP. I don't even know if we have a term for this – algorithmic grooming? I can't fathom why any sensible parent would want their preteen child to own a smartphone.
If you are concerned about young people unwittingly being lured into (willingly) making increasingly sexual videos for likes, that seems a reasonable concern that can be addressed by hiding the likes on social media for kids. This has the handy benefit of removing lots of other incentives to present a false face to the world.
If you are concerned about the existence of people who might watch these videos and think unsavoury thoughts, thus defiling innocents with their nasty brain-waves, then that sounds like a classic moral panic. The haunting fear that somewhere a nonce is happy. If there is a depiction of a pretty girl in the world, someone has masturbated to it, that’s simply a fact of life, and getting upset about it is the kind of impulse that ends up leading to the removal of all images of the female form and hiding girls in burkas. Look at the vast online collections of images that happen to show women’s feet. There is no point troubling yourself (or everyone else) over such things, it’s almost certainly healthier overall than the alternative.
Yes, masturbating to online photos of underage kids is a harmless thing and doesn't lead to activities like raping babies! Why shouldn't nonces be happy (instead of, for example, inserted head-downwards into a barrel of treacle)?
Yes
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I believe that heavy social media use is extremely damaging for everyone, but particularly for young children and adolescents. Some of the reasons social media is bad for teenagers and pre-teens include the fact that it facilitates child grooming, how it tacitly encourages members of this demographic to dress and behave in sexually provocative ways and how it encourages members of this generation to obsess over their appearances in unhealthy ways. Before TikTok, did you ever hear of an eight-year-old being asked what she wanted for Christmas and her replying "skincare"? No eight-year-old should want skincare products for Christmas, and it's obscene that social media has made her think she needs them.
This is an extremely obnoxious misrepresentation of what I said. Children are not being magically defiled by the nasty brain-waves of pederasts thinking impure thoughts about them. I explained quite clearly that a major component of the audience for tweens dancing on TikTok is nonces; that tween girls (like everyone else) respond to social media incentives and engagement metrics; and that in attempting to attract as many nonces' eyeballs as possible, these tween girls end up dressing and behaving in more sexually provocative fashions than they otherwise would have. Sexualisation of children is bad, and to the extent that social media incentivises (or algorithmically encourages, or whatever term you prefer) children to dress and behave in sexually provocative fashions prematurely, social media is bad.
I do not believe that our world, in which most teenagers in the West own smartphones and use social media, is healthier overall than the counterfactual world in which most teenagers do not own smartphones and use social media. As I recently pointed out, the year 2014 (the year the iPhone achieved market penetration with a critical mass of American users) was the beginning of an enormous spike in teen suicide, self-poisoning, diagnoses of depression (and, less politically correctly, corresponding spikes in gender dysphoria and trans identification, and probably various things that are harder to quantify like loneliness, friendlessness and the ability to concentrate in class). We don't have to go way back into the mists of time to imagine a world where most Western teenagers don't own smartphones: I don't think it's remotely controversial to suggest that the average teenager was happier in 2013 than they are now. And what, exactly, are the benefits of widespread smartphone adoption among young people? This really does seem like a case of extreme costs and marginal (if any) benefits.
FWIW that was a genuine 'if'. I didn't know where you were coming from, and there are certainly many people who do think like that. That's why I put two 'if's: if you are concerned about A which I think is sensible, here is my proposal, if you are concerned primarily about A as it pertains to B which I think is less sensible, I think you should let it go. I apologise if you found my reply obnoxious.
Honestly, it's my strong impression that young girls have always been obsessed over the things that women do, including cosmetics. My mother went to an all-girl's school and they discussed this kind of thing constantly. The difference was that it was hidden from adults to protect their idea of childhood (and feminine) innocence.
That wasn't my counterfactual. My counterfactual was (in response to a potential position you don't in fact possess) that I don't think it's healthy for society to obsess over protecting the purity of women or the spread of images of women.
To go to your point, though, I am very skeptical of movements that take away something people like and do because they ought not to like and do it*. I'm all for giving people tools to control smartphone usage, and for attempting to cut down on network effects that drive people to smartphones whether they wish so or nay. But the fact is that text can be a lighter, easier way of communicating with people more like oneself (viz, this forum) and I'm reluctant to say "no! only in-person communications!". The real world can be harsh in many ways, and some of those ways are needful, but 'go and suffer' isn't necessarily always the right response. I can't say I remember my pre-smartphone childhood to be much happier or less anxious making - playground cliques are just as isolating as social media ones, and playground bullying is worse than cyberbullying. People treat smartphones as a refuge for a reason.
* Yes, I know there are surveys showing that lots of teens don’t like social media and smartphones. I look forward to more work on this being done, and would prefer to address those teens and their needs specifically rather than reach first for the ban hammer.
With regards to anxiety and depression, I don't think it's the phones, although the phones don't help. I think it's the pressure and the constantly raised standards, which is mostly downstream of globalisation.
At the age of eight?
I'm not obsessing over protecting the purity of women. Women are adults, and can do as they please. (I in fact get very annoyed at the infantilisation of adults, such as women who accuse men of having "groomed" them when the women in question were already old enough to drink.) I am, however, very invested in protecting the purity of girls, especially young girls. That's kind of the whole point of this discussion.
Some and some. Past generations of teenagers did not have to contend with embarrassing footage of them being uploaded to YouTube etc. for the entire world to see without their knowledge or consent, or having their nudes leaked. Playground bullying by definition ends outside the playground: the current generation of bullies can torment their victims morning, noon and night, even after they've changed schools if it pleases them.
Well, I don't agree with you. Indeed, I'm not even persuaded that teenagers face higher pressure to succeed than they used to, if the proportion of obese teenagers and Harvard undergraduates taking remedial maths classes is anything to go by.
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Nobody on the other side of the globe that Rebecca Black did not know bullied her "horrifically". They may have said bad things about her, but that's not the same thing.
Also, Rebecca Black seems to be doing just fine. Getting bullied as a teenager isn't the end of the world. And now she's an adult minor celebrity who gets to make music and play celebrity jeopardy and get invited to cool parties. She's actively touring. I don't think anybody needs to feel sorry for Rebecca Black, and I expect she'd agree.
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What do you call complete strangers sending death threats to a thirteen-year-old?
Were there actual death threats, and how much more than the background default amount? I didn't see any actual examples of any of the "hate" directed her way in that Teen Vogue article, and my past experience with checking what are claimed as "death threats" tells me that I should presume that they're almost all death wishes rather than death threats.
At least two of them were considered serious enough to warrant investigation by the Anaheim police department. @The_Nybbler
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A slow Tuesday on Xbox Live?
I put trash-talking in a different mental category.
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You are correct that having child actors is out-of-step with how moderns treat their children, which is to bubble-wrap them.
Do you think modern children should be bubble-wrapped more?
Yes: that's a false dichotomy, on its own. One can certainly believe that modern children should, in total, be infantilized less while still thinking that Hollywood is no good for them.
But I still look askance on adding yet another delay to adulthood compared to how things were before. I think we are expecting too little of our youth, like "being able to read in order to get a high school diploma" or "being toilet-trained upon entering school." I think letting people stay infants until "their brains have finished developing (at age twenty-five, of course)" is worse for them than letting them grow up, even though sweeping all adversity out of their way feels kinder in every moment.
Partly since said adversity is required to make those brains develop properly!
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I agree, and part of the reason I object to child actors is because in many ways it's an extension (or intensification) of some of the worst parts of bubble-wrap parenting: it's yet another instance of children being kept indoors under the direct supervision of adults, rarely interacting with their peers directly, optimising their appearances and mannerisms for how they'll look in a camera lens. It used to be that only a tiny minority of children would ever even consider pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, but now "YouTuber", "influencer" and "streamer" are among the most popular career aspirations for Gen Alpha, and they spend hours every day using devices with which they could in theory pursue these careers.
LetMake them go outside and ride their bikes, for Christ's sake.More options
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This is an oft-repeated but probably untrue way of describing the motivation of most ambitious parents of child stars. Sure, a lot of them - the Jacksons, the Biebers, whatever - live large off their kids. But that doesn’t mean that drove their ambitions in the first place. If you’ve ever watched the kind of lowbrow reality shows that capture a much earlier stage of the process, stuff like Dance Moms, or shows about boy basketball and football players with ambitious fathers, they often spend huge amounts of money with very little return on their kids, push them beyond reason. In many sports and activities (think a lot of niche sports, or spelling bees, ballet, equestrian stuff, various other competitions) these parents know they’re almost guaranteed never to make a financial return.
“They’re using their kids to get rich” is a bad framework for this. Even if some are gamblers, Vegas odds are better, and most are smart enough to know it. I think the actual motivation is often either living through their children, a chance at another life, with better choices, and a strong whip hand ‘directing’ the child to strive for greatness, or it’s a form of competition with other parents. Adulthood offers fewer avenues for the kind of simple victory that a competition in youth does. You can play in an over-40s league in tennis or whatever, but that’s going to be full of ex-semi-pros who’ve been playing since they were 4. You can try to get rich - the primary marker of status in adult American life - but that’s both difficult and, for almost everyone, an interminably slow process. You can can try to get hot, but that’s hard and gets harder as time goes on. Or you can make something of your kid, and reap the rewards in smugness.
I think if you ask the average parent of a child actor “if you could live your whole life over again, would you do it?”, every single one would say yes (even caveated so you can’t become a bitcoin nvidia trillionaire president astronaut). Whereas in the general population many people would still say yes, but not 100%.
This status-and-love-seeking behavior from full grown adults seems increasingly cringe to me the older I get. I can't help but imagine it's downstream of feeling unloved by the parent as a child and they are desperate to seek love from the world instead. This hit me so hard a few years ago when I met up with a few friends while I was in another country and they insisted that everywhere we eat was statusmaxxing or whatever, the type of place you could brag about going, even to the extent that they wanted to walk out of a place run by a sweet old man when they deemed the food subpar. This stems from insecurity and once you grow out of it it's horrible to see in other people. The full grown adult who wants a golden child actor or a star is doing something so horrible and so tacky and I really doubt most of them are happy at the end of it. Britney's parents raised a global superstar and they probably spend every night wishing she was bringing in more money instead of dancing half naked on instagram. I don't sympathize with the parents.
I think that comes from the quantification and gamification of a particular kind of status (having the time and money to afford Instagrammable experiences) on social media and the resulting intensification of competition.
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I'm not necessarily saying that parents push their children into acting with the expectation that the child will make it big, and they (the parents) will personally profit. The odds of a given child actor making it big are only somewhat better than those for a given adult actor. But there do seem to be a number of cases in which a child actor's career unexpectedly took off and their parents immediately began spending money which rightfully belonged to the child, not the parents, sometimes to the point that the child was left without a penny when they came of age (e.g. Gary Coleman successfully sued his parents for misappropriating his assets). This strikes me as obviously unfair, and should not be allowed to happen.
I think it’s usually the reverse. The kids starts it, then they start making money and the parents push the kid to continue even if they don’t want to.
Yeah, I think that's a fairly typical route by which children end up being financially exploited.
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I understand that California passed the Jackie Coogan Act because the parents of the aforementioned child star spent all the money he earned on hookers and blow.
Yes, I learned that after making the original post and edited it to mention it at the very end.
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Yeah, the stage mother has long been a stock figure. If you look at the career of Gypsy Rose Lee, for example, who wants to put their daughter on stage as a stripper? Even a high-class one? Well, a mom who had stars in her eyes about a theatre career, couldn't make it on her own, and is living vicariously through her kids, for one, as well as using them to support the family financially:
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