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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I like the works of both Scotts, Aaronson and Alexander, but they both viscerally.. piss me off, they are such massive dweebs they are begging me to throw paper planes at them or knock their books out of their hands.

I understand this is a low rung form of thinking and thus compartmentalize "respect".

I can see that with Aaronson because he almost wants to be persecuted, so his paranoia will be justified - see the airport incidence where he's nearly luxuriating in his description of being handcuffed and manhandled before his weeping family.

Other Scott is not that type, and I think he's settled down a lot more since getting married. What, you think picking names for his future kids warrants throwing paper planes at him? 😁

Surely it depends upon the names.

For Scott Alexander, I think it was the point where he completely let the curtain slip on how utterly fucked his sexual (asexual? pseudo-sexual?) relationships were

How so? Isn't he happily married?

He is now, and planning on having kids, but he has identified as asexual. So I presume real red-blooded he-men think that "not fucking a passel of bitches the good old-fashioned way" is dweeby or something. As a fellow asexual, I don't see anything out of the ordinary about "not that interested in having sex" but then again, I'm not setting up to be a real red-blooded he-man.

The poly stuff? Yeah that makes me eye-roll, but it's the Bay Area, forget it, Jake. At least he's not a furry.

Funnily enough, the last guy who I met online who self-identified as an asexual was developing a hentai game revolving around sexualising loss of self.

Somehow, I don't think he was really asexual.

My ex wife spent all her time writing erotic lesbian fanfiction with her asexual friends.

Did these asexual friends happen to be women?

I would say so.

Well, that's what the "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" tag is for 😈

I have brainstormed stuff with a writing partner and I won't even begin to describe what our last story was about because it was set in a dark AU of a particular show but we had great fun putting everyone through the wringer, also kinky sex in the service of putting everyone through the wringer.

Just 'cos we're up on the theory doesn't mean we want to put it into practice 😁

In fairness, it's not necessarily their fault that any preference you want to be taken seriously has to be expressed as an identity nowadays.

Polyromantic and asexual. Taking a girl out on a date, holding hands, cuddling with her and and then letting another dude take her upstairs to bang the living hell out of her doesn't exactly scream "masculinity!"

Being accepting of polyamory is one of those cases of being so open-minded that your brain fell off.

I don't even know if they understand that when they put out their whole spiel about polyamory being the best util generating arrangement and all it requires is supressing/abandoning your jealousy response; that they are telling on themselves in 30 different ways.

Like sure eating broccoli might be more "rational" than burgers and fries, but I'm not going to pretend to like it and abandon my "taste response". Or conform my brain to become as such, there are just too many psychological fences you have to knock over.

This is the feeling that “Rationalism” gives me in general, but I make an exception for Scott Alexander. His writing is a lot more tolerable and often quite enjoyable.

good writing does not mean an enjoyable person or personality. I don't have any problem with either of them though . I cannot think of anything either Scott has done to piss me off besides max trump dergement in the case of the other Scott. TDS comes from having very strong moral convictions about disliking trump. It does not mean being a shitty person.

It does not mean being a shitty person.

That's true. A lot of the general online Orange Man Bad stuff does go along with other indicators that the person is shitty, but the names I recognise generally aren't that type of person. It's just a shame it took over so many people's brains. For instance, I think Hillary would have been a terrible president because she was going for the war-hawk image to show she was Tough Enough to be president, and I think she might have imitated some kind of incident a la Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. I don't, though, think that Hillary is Pantsuit Woman Bad in the same way as TDS.

That being said, today I've read a story about the US and Iranian drones in Syria, and huh. Funny how that turned out, eh? War mongering Donnie Trump was too dangerous to re-elect, but what about Biden now?

My exceedingly cynical reaction to that story was (1) goodness, I wonder from whom the Iranians learned to send drones off to do the killing for them? (2) The US is just mad they used drones to kill US citizens, that's a job for America!

I'm not going to argue against the importance of the (reversed) halo effect. How many people would openly say they didn't want him to win because he was an asshole? How many felt it, but justified such a base sentiment with political commentary?

I do think there is merit to the argument that Trump was unusually dangerous for a President. Not uniquely, but unusually. The diplomatic posture, the disdain for existing channels. Livestreaming his brand over Twitter. Not coincidentally, these were all big parts of his outsider appeal.

The probability that America kept doing garden-variety Bad Things was pretty similar between Trump and Hillary. The probability that it did something dramatic seemed higher under Trump.

I agree that Scott Alexander writes in a pretty enjoyable way. He mostly avoids the typical writing flaws of many rationalists, Motteizens, and maybe just highly online hyper-intellectuals in general: 1) verbosity unjustified by either its information density or its entertainment value, 2) egotistical showing off in the form of unnecessary intellectual references and theatrical writing style, and 3) overuse of jargon like "-adjacent" and "priors".

Although his titles beginning with "Contra [whoever]" come off as affected (and always remind me of Iran-Contra).

his last essay was all of those but it got tons of votes and praise, so evidently readers do like verbosity and showing off even if everyone likes to claim otherwise

I think I see some of that too. Maybe substack inflates certain metrics but this not the same as popularity

I suspect that many who do not like it simply do not read in the first place, and thus do not comment on it.

but then if it was bad it would not have gotten as many votes

Wait, what? He avoids none of those, his writing is just good enough that he makes up for it.

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