site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2788 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Ryan Long posted this amusing sketch in which he portrays a therapist helping people to cope with anxiety about climate change.

At one point in the sketch he mentions that previous doomsaying predictions about the impact of climate change failed to materialise, accompanied by screenshots of newspaper archives. The screenshots go by so quick that it's hard for me to make them out or see which publications they originated from. Do any of you recognise them, and if so could you drop links below? Thanks.

Rich Men North of Richmond

I don't think I've seen this discussed here yet? I have to admit, the song has grown on me. It really feels authentic in a way that say, Try That in a Small Town doesn't.

Dude has good pipes, mediocre fingers, and no songwriting talent. Politics aside, if you are a dedicated listener to this style of music it sounds extremally trite and standard and played out, style of thing.

The genre is going through a bit of a Renaissance right now with Billy Strings and friends tearing it up, down and sideways; but most new talented artists in the field are either hard left or socially conservative but sympathetic to the homeless/criminal/welfare crowd (because they come from there; half the time. 90% of the population of Appalachia receives welfare of some sort, the vast majority of traditional bluegrass areas eat the government cheese. ) this dude wouldn't get any oxygen if it wasn't for the politics IMO.

Unlike most of the other responses, I love the song. I've had it on repeat for about as long as its been out.

I think the guy is from Farmville VA, which is the closest town South of Charlottesville VA where I grew up.

I'm not usually a fan of country or bluegrass, but there is a weird exception when its an accent I grew up around. His accent is very familiar to me, and I can fall into the same twang as I sing along.

I found a lot to like in the messages and when I watched his short video blog describing his background thoughts on the song I liked it a little more. If we were presented options in politics I'm not sure we'd agree with each other very often, but I feel like if he was my neighbor I'd get along with him well.

The song accomplishes the following:

  • Sympathy for the white lower and middle class, which may reach the ears of the near-damned rich men north of Jerusalem.

  • Focuses the cause of the complaints on the greedy.

  • Creates a rallying point around the artist.

Music is important for social and political movements, and in-groups are formed by complaining. This song may lead to concrete accomplishments through indirect influences down the road. Will other artists be inspired to make similar music? What about social organizers?

My family's background is roughly speaking confederate descendants who roamed around after the war with about three separate main branches settling between Appalachia and Texas.

As other comments have pointed out "whiny"-ness, let me double down that - this song continues a long tradition of folk/country/bluegrass fatalism that I have little tolerance for. "My daddy grew up here and lived as a poor man, and so did my grandaddy, and so did his daddy...but we all grew up right, and I'm gonna stay here and be just like them!" .... Why / how is inter-generational poverty a virtue? If it's the case that your in such an awful economic situation that you can't advance your lot in life more than several generations before you, you have all of my sympathy. And that same sympathy disappears the second you turn that situation into some sort of battle cry of authenticity or moral superiority.

There's something to be said here about crabs in a bucket, and how it seems like - for more than a few cultures inspired by Southern Clanish / Honor cultures - the only way to prove authenticity and adherence to "traditional" (and, therefore, right) cultural norms is through demonstrated poverty and dysfunction.

Why is that the goal? Sure, I have a deep appreciation for stories about the dust bowl I heard growing up, but I have more appreciation that my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?

The unfortunate fact is that your suffering alone yields no accolade or social currency. No one cares. The best you can do, as this song tries to, is whip up some strong emotionalism and try to trade-the-currency for moral deference. But that exchange rate is never strong and that commodity expiry is measured in hours.

In a country of 330 million, not everyone can pursue a STEM degree. There will be those with lower income, and the song is about their quality of life being worsened. Complaining is wildly effective at causing change when you look at LGBT or Jewish issues, so I’m not sure why we should presume a song like this is ineffective. Do you think the protest songs in the 60s were effective?

my Dad and Uncles used the G.I. bill to get STEM degrees and were also willing to move the family around for job opportunities. Law obeying, studious, industrious, and economically astute seems like a good rubric for "Rasied 'Em Right!" when compared with impulsive, prone to violence, substance abuse, obsessed with vague notions of honor but .... geographically consistent?

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come? It’s not the dirt that’s dumb in rural communities, and it’s not the water which makes addicts of the townsfolk.

As for geographic consistency, their kin died for that ground within two or three centuries of folk memory. It’s a far more precious price than a mortgage. (I can’t say I feel that same drive myself, as my parents’ families are from Ohio and Michigan, yet we live in a huge modern city in New Mexico. I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.)

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?

That's a fair enough point for the current generation. I have no idea how you would mean to apply that to the generations that grew up in rural America (especially Appalachia) before .... 2000? "Go get an education and come back" was also not reasonable because local economies often lacked the professional infrastructure to support (let alone attract) degree holders.

As for geographic consistency, their kin died for that ground within two or three centuries of folk memory.

Quiet part out loud, bro. You emphasized "died" instead of "fought for." Fatalism.

And what's the salience of the piece of land on which the dying occurred? Before the Civil War, a lot of sons of Appalachia died in all kinds of strange spots west of the Ohio, South of the Rio Grande, and elsewhere. Grandpa lost friends in France and Germany ... not a whole lot of country songs about the Ardennes. World War 2 veterans are remembered for the dedication to American values and a conflict against evil, imperialism, subjugation. That promotes a more generative outlook on the possibilities post-combat than the immutable fact of location and time of death.

I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.

I don't know if this is an attempt at humor or not.

I have no idea how you would mean to apply that to the generations that grew up in rural America (especially Appalachia) before .... 2000?

Convenient, then, that we're focusing on a songwriter who was born nearly a decade before 2000, and whose hometown has a university and a college, each with the kind of Internet access which allows business to occur remotely from port cities.

Quiet part out loud, bro. You emphasized "died" instead of "fought for." Fatalism.

Don't QPOL me, bro, I'm a damyankee whose grandparents come from Ohio, Michigan, and parts further north and east. I'm saying a death is usually considered a higher price to pay for a plot of land than a successful battle, despite the PTSD, alcoholism, and generational child abuse from "fighting for". (Although to some degree, it shouldn't.) A death means a tombstone, and a tombstone often anchors a family to a locale.

And what's the salience of the piece of land on which the dying occurred? Before the Civil War, a lot of sons of Appalachia died in all kinds of strange spots west of the Ohio, South of the Rio Grande, and elsewhere. Grandpa lost friends in France and Germany ... not a whole lot of country songs about the Ardennes.

Facetious, almost farcically so. The salience is that their grandfathers and fathers built the towns and cities they died for; their names went into family bibles with generations in the same spot, while their brothers and cousins left for big cities or adventurism out west or across vast oceans. There's a very romantic, very human tendency to work to keep what previous generations paid costly prices for, even when the going gets tough and it looks like a depreciating asset.

The Americans in the Ardennes was an ideological battle, an estimation that if Hitler took the Bulge from a band of brothers, someday he might roll over the Appalachians.

I can, however, sympathize with Barney Google and Snuffy Smith over in the holler by the crick.

I don't know if this is an attempt at humor or not.

Why, I do dee-clare I believe my dislike of revenooers done come from ol' Snuffy Smif hisself.

Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?

They don't 'have' to move, but if they stay, complaining about a lack of jobs is questionable. The Amish stay in their small towns, but they 'make their own luck' and configure their economies to work for them. There is no reason why Appalachians could not theoretically pursue localized, autarkic economies that maintain their communities, but they don't, instead complaining when the large company in their town shuts down the factory or the mine and then refusing to leave.

And it has to be said that their ancestors, whom they venerate (eg. in the very song OP links) often moved for economic reasons. The Kevin Williamson argument is essentially that these small, economically unproductive communities can only survive because of welfare. Often in deprived communities, the main employers are the state (healthcare, government, schools) - all subsidized by state and federal government - and welfare, and that these are the only things keeping the economy going. Dollars only flow in through government. They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

I think it's that they see the giants astride the land (the corporations, the governments) and despair of how to make a living once they've trampled the earth and moved on.

Then too, the analogy of red and blue buttons which was the hot topic last week; these are the blue buttoners who depended on those who declared it would be forever safe to keep pushing the blue button, never realizing their fellows skipped town to China leaving them ever closer to the 50% mark of death.

To elaborate on this, a town has to have an economic raison d'etre: Something they produce to export in order to get money to buy imports. A mining town might export minerals, a factory town might export manufactured goods, a farming town food, a tourist destination might "export" hotel and restaurant services. Everyone else earns money by by providing services to people who produce the exports, or by providing services to those people, and so forth. In principle you could have a small town supported by exporting things like software, but I don't know whether any such towns actually exist.

When a town no longer produces things to export, it no longer has a reason to exist. The sole service it provides to the outside world in exchange for money to buy imports with is qualifying for welfare.

People blame the government for not giving it a reason to exist, but if the government subsidizes unprofitable industries for the sake of propping up a town with no economic reason to exist, the residents are just LARPing at being productive. Maybe it's cheaper than just giving them straight-up welfare and getting nothing at all in exchange, but in the long run, this isn't good for anyone involved.

This has been eating at me since reading the ACX guest review of Jane Jacobs.

To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located.

Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants.

By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities.

That review was incredible, and I've wanted to write a post on it since I read it. It suggests a lot of pointed questions about the nature of economics as a discipline.

It's been posted a few times. I'm not a big fan. It's okay I guess, but it feels whiny and weepy to me. The Irish war songs referenced in a sibling comment are mostly boastful and cheery, which I find more enjoyable, even if they're rather generous with the truth about how well Irish Republican forces actually performed.

Authentic, sure. Something I'd want to listen to more than once? Less so. In any case, I don't think we'll ever get political music quite like the Irish do.

"Where all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad..."

I dunno, Keep Your Rifle By Your Side is a legitimate classic.

Someone posted it last week. The man’s got talent, but there’s something about overly political music that just rubs me the wrong way.

Overspecificity of complaints and issuance of blame. Oversimplification of complex, societal issues. Strikes me as ignorant, impotent whining in song form.

Will watch the fights tomorrow, that is about the extant of what I will be doing lol. I cannot enjoy anything else in life as everything is so dependent on me getting the research position I want and shipping these two products in the next 6 months. Still, will watch the fights, spent last week with a fellow clan member who studies in the US, we went around town, saw all the tourist attractions. Dude makes close to 6 figures whilst working a day job, going to uni and shipping his own stuff at his startup whilst being 4 years or so younger than me. We went out to a watering hole at night too and it was amazing. Learnt a ton from him, cannot wait to watch the fights tomorrow and start work.

Also has anyone seen the movies that came out recently? Modern movies seem to be quite political so I tend to just avoid them as much as I can, latest Mission Impossible was a disappointment, Oppenheimer was great, recommend that to everyone, I do not think anyone here would much like barbie (I did not even see it given the juvenile plotline).

I saw Barbie and DC’s Blue Beetle on the same day.

One film is a pile of communist propaganda which uses cultural signifiers as shorthand for the class divide, interspersing high drama and cheap comedy to bad effect, pretending to be saying something insightful about the patriarchy while having women in charge throughout the film, and relying on color-coded flashy cinematography to cover blatant plot holes and tone-deaf absurdity.

The other film is Barbie.

Every movie has similar themes simply because that is how the world is now, you cannot have a movie that does not bow down to cultural forces of the day as movie production is such a complicated task. It took one man to write faust but something as good or as insightful can never be made again because of the process of creation being in the hands of so many with monetary and opportunity costs that no one will ever cover. Not watching movies, TV, music or even news, social media and videos made in the modern day as much as you can is the correct path forward, everything today feels the same, sterile and replaceable.

Ayyyyy

What's the best way to learn another language these days, e.g. Spanish? Are there any good AI-aided offerings?

From my very imperfect experience, I think that Spanish is a language where early on you can get away with focusing heavily on drilling vocabulary and grammer as the pronunciation is fairly simple (it's hard to sound like a native of course but it's easy to be understood). They do talk very quickly though so you'll want to add some listening practice in also.

French on the other hand, you won't understand anything and you won't be understood if you haven't had a lot of exposure to how it sounds. I'm at a pretty good reading level for French but, unlike Spanish, improvements in reading and writing aren't helping my conversation get any more fluid, it only gets better with direct practice.

The best way is immerse yourself with native speakers.

It's worth noting that there's still a lot of effort and study required if you go down this path. Simply living in a country is no guarantee that you'll be forced to use the language, or that you won't settle at a comfortable level of fluency that lets you get by even if it's very imperfect.

I'm a big supporter of Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis. Essentially, he argues that the way infants acquire language is by understanding messages in that language, and that adults have the capacity to do this as well. Instead of practicing grammar or memorising vocabulary, the adult learner's focus should be on getting as much input as possible that is at or slightly above their level of understanding. This YouTube video gives a good overview of the principle.

In practical terms, this means watching lots of easy videos, listening to podcasts etc in your target language. Then gradually increasing the difficulty as you understand more. Crucially, in order to avoid your mother tongue's sounds and grammar 'getting in the way' and cementing bad habits, speaking should be left very late. You want to get a good model of the language in your head before you try producing it. Reading should also come quite late to avoid the learner subvocalising incorrect pronunciation.

Fortunately, for Spanish this is very easy. I've been subscribed to Dreaming Spanish for a few months now and it's amazing how quickly my comprehension is improving. I've been combining this with some easy podcasts (Cuentame, Chill Spanish Listening Practice, Un Dia en Espanol). I was considering writing a post about language acquisition so I may do this later on, but for now I'd recommend looking at Dreaming Spanish's method page to get an idea of what it entails. There's also an active subreddit for it.

Dreaming Spanish is amazing, it's like Muzzy for adults. Thank you for this.

Very much interested in a write up for Spanish, as there are several approaches and I'm not looking forward to subscribe to a glorified flash card service and be vendor-locked into language acquisition.

I take it you are not a fan of "Language Transfer" which is all about producing from the very start.

I actually did start with Language Transfer myself. The Spanish course is very good and the guy who runs it is impressive. I stopped halfway through when I discovered Dreaming Spanish but will probably finish the course one day.

I won't necessarily say that I'm opposed to it, but I think it works better if that kind of formal grammar explanation comes after you've had significant input. I've found that explanations like he offers 'stick' more if you can apply them to things you've already heard many times from input.

Fascinating. Are there similar resources for other languages that you're aware of?

There's no dedicated site like Dreaming Spanish for other languages yet (although they do plan to branch out in the future). There is the Comprehensible Input Wiki for lists of YouTube channels etc. You could also try searching Reddit as I'm sure the question has been asked a lot for your target language.

Very interesting point about accent. It seems in part to be effort and the 'fun' of it; it's always been true that the people who are best at accent impressions in English are the best at adopting native accents in foreign languages. But there's also status to avoiding accents, a lot of wealthy English seem to almost deliberately speak (often near-perfect) French in a strong English accent, just because they can, they don't want to be mistaken for natives.

By contrast, some accents are low status. If you move to Switzerland you are often better off speaking English than high-German, which is often low status in German Switzerland because they dislike a lot of the better jobs being taken by German immigrants. You could try learning Schwiizerdütsch, but that's a tough nut to crack because of the much faster speed than regular German and German-speakers who try it and aren't perfect are often made fun of.

I'm curious if listening to an audiobook while silently reading/following along with the physical book would lead to subvocalizing incorrect pronunciation.

So I guess that's equivalent to watching Spanish videos with subtitles, which is fine. That said, Dreaming Spanish advises against doing it too much as it can cause your listening to lag behind your reading.

This seems promising. Thank you! The theory makes sense to me. I'm not very good at remembering the spoken word though.

One of the counter intuitive things about this method is that it's subconscious. You don't need to actively try to remember anything, only to understand the meaning of what's being said. Your brain then builds a model of the language in the background.

Schools should probably take note of this... Acquisition of meanings instead of hearing + repeating back meaningless bits and pieces to a teacher.

I'm sure they'll stop hamstringing kids' potentials any day now. Let's just wait. o:)

Hello! Have you played Cultist Simulator? It is a cool roguelite digital board game about building your own cult. I'm just going to copy the Wikipedia synopsis and link a trailer, because I don't play a lot of board games and don't really know how to describe it.

In a 1920s Lovecraftian horror setting, the player amasses and expends human and nonhuman followers alongside occult texts and tools, in discovering and then pursuing any of a number of wildly differing paths to immortality, while carefully avoiding deaths arising from starvation, despair, madness, or the attention of powerful adversaries. The game is experienced through an array of playing cards moved about on a tabletop, with cards occasionally pulled from a map representing a transcendent reality accessible in dreams.

Success requires partial familiarization with an intricate "Secret Histories" mythology invented for this game

Cultist Simulator Trailer

Anyway, it's been out for about 5 years now (and it's on every major platform, including android and ios, although if you go that route you will want a tablet or ipad, it requires a good chunk of screen real estate) and while it has a steep learning curve, it is very tense, a lot of fun, and very well written - if you haven't played it, check it out.

But before you do that, you should check out the newly released sequel - Book of Hours - which is why I have gathered you all here today. One of the big stumbling blocks people have with Cultist Simulator is the aforementioned tension - you really have to be on the ball when playing it, it moves at a breakneck speed and doesn't hold your hand at all. You basically figure everything out through trial and error and then memorising the numerous elements making up the game, until eventually you know how to handle anything thrown at you.

The Book of Hours takes the Cultist Simulator formula, but eliminates a lot of the non-diegetic tension. In it you play the new librarian of Hush House, a massive, sprawling estate on the English coast in the 30s that was considered a new library of Alexandria before a fire took the life of the last librarian. Your job is to restore it to its former glory by researching and cataloguing the books it contains - and the secrets they contain.

But whereas in CS you had a very strict timetable and the threat of doom constantly breathing down your neck, in BOH things are a lot calmer (what you might call cozy if you wanted me to hate you). You can take as long as you like to figure out what you are doing, and you don't have to worry about other cults coming for you. Which is excellent news, because BOH demands you figure shit out for yourself. It has even less of a tutorial than CS did, but it is also much more tolerant of experimenting - the idea is for you to try everything and learn from the consequences, piecing together how the world works as you go. But while a mistake in CS is usually very costly, if not fatal, a mistake in BOH rarely costs you anything (although money is a bit of an exception).

I have been having a lot of fun playing it these past two days, and I think it would be up a lot of motters' alleys. And if it sounds like it might be up yours, there is no better time to buy it than now, as everyone who purchases it before August 24th gets the Perpetual edition, which includes the base game plus every piece of dlc that gets released in the future. They did the same for CS when that was released, and released 4 dlc packs, so it's probably not a gimmick. Or just a gimmick.

Book of Hours trailer

Steam

GOG

I had a lot of fun with Cultist Simulator. The main thing I liked was how failed runs would continue into a narrative, which made the learning curve become thematic instead of frustrating. My first character find an eldritch book, tries to study it, goes mad (going mad being my first failure state). My second character works at the madhouse and learns some eldritch secrets from my first character, becomes a painter with a cult following (ha), a then goes mad. My third character, a layabout son of a gentryman, learns about the painter from his dying father who was a big fan of his paintings. He investigates and discovers the eldritch book and by this point I had learned enough to prevent him from going mad. He gathered a real cult, stole some artifacts, summoned monsters to attempt to kill plucky detectives, escaped conviction in the courts, and managed to transform himself into an immortal being of twisted flesh. Great success!

The game clearly expects you to fail a few times before you get your feet under you, and that really works. Delving into the secrets that men were not meant to know should be dangerous, with a high casualty rate.

I'll have to check out BOH. Thanks for the recommendation.

I think /u/Southkraut or someone else on this forum said this game is pretentious so now I’m afraid to play it.

Pretense is just the hater's word for atmospheric.

Maybe? That still implies I found something hate-able about those game's attempts at atmosphere. It's not like I dislike atmosphere in general.

I won't spend too much effort trying to explain myself there, but I think what bothers me is that those games touch upon a lot of interesting topics, and use a lot of grandiloquent language to do so, but ultimately treat their ostensible subject matter as a thin layer of aesthetics seemingly meant to make very simple games look deeper than thy are. It feels disappointingly superficial.

If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. The gameplay is a thin layer to make the subject matter feel more earned/discovered. It is supposed to be esoteric, after all, so simply giving you a textbook on the world would be counterproductive to the feeling the author is trying to cultivate. I suppose that you could describe much of the writing as thin. But that isn't because the subject matter is thin. That is because the writing is meant to obliquely reference things you have to cobble together for yourself. Again, this adds to the esoteric atmosphere.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't like that sort of thing, but let's be accurate about just what it is. Kennedy does a very good job at what he wants to do, but it certainly isn't for everyone.

So I did.

I've played Cultist Simulator, and it's great. It fills a niche I didn't even know existed.

There are a lot of games (and other stories) that present something mysterious and ask you to find the answers. Cultist Simulator is part of the rare breed that makes you find the questions first. Some of the (gameplay-related) questions I discovered quite late are:

  • Are the different lore types (moth, lantern, forge, etc.) sorted, or unsorted?
  • Do the available rewards from dreaming in Mansus change based on your choices?
  • How about challenges in expeditions?

The friend who recommended CS to me shared a screenshot of his recent playthrough, and he still hasn't asked that first question, and therefore can't take advantage of what the answer reveals.

I just checked Janitor Duty and got three posts from the same user in the same sub thread. Not a new one, either.

I can’t tell if someone was just mass-reporting or if I’m in the control group for a new feature.

I spent much of this week touching grass.

Camped overnight at a national park, and the wife, the three old, and I did some short hikes to some waterfalls. Then we came back a few days later before our 7 day vehicle pass expired and did another short loop. The kid was an absolute champ, and made it probably about 80% through each hike before she got too hot and tired and needed to go up on my shoulders for the remainder.

Touching grass is great. I would highly recommend it.

Yeah.

I'm spending the next ~10 days at the family dacha that's also in a national park. We won't be doing too much hiking as we've been hiking in the are for at least 90 weeks over my lifetime, but we ll be doing some rather intimate grass-touching in the form of cutting down surplus firs in a leisurely manner, clearing the brush, chainsawing it into meter logs so there's something to burn during winter.

It's right next to a gorge, the tall forest starts right on our property, the place is shady, reasonably quiet and very pleasant to be at. Part of a small hamlet of maybe 40 permanent residents in a shady forest valley six miles from the nearest towns. Tourists drive here to go for a hike. There's a lot of them - you see 60-80 cars parked here daily, but they're generally well-behaved.

Everyone sleeps an hour longer here, and just sitting on the porch in the sun, drinking coffee while gazing at the tall conifers swaying in the wind is sublime. We all feel at peace here.

What’s your favorite holiday? I’m especially curious about non American ones. Doesn’t even have to be an extant holiday.

Saturnalia is mine, for instance. Having servants and masters switch place for a day is just such a wild concept, sounds like a blast.

That's an interesting question. I guess it's Forgiveness Sunday, the last day of Maslenica and the last day before Lent. Simply because the ritual is so simple: ask everyone you know to forgive everything you've done or said that upset them and be ready to forgive them in return. Bearing grudges, like you're some Warhammer dwarf, is for losers.

Christmas cuz Santa 🎅🏻 and his reindeer 🦌 and all the presents 🎁 and Christmas tree 🎄 and candy canes 😋

Halloween.

As a millennial, I have to say this is not because I'm some suburban goth with a weird Nightmare Before Christmas fetish (have never actually seen that movie). It's for two (groups of) reasons.

  1. Autumn, where I grew up, was just fucking phenomenally beautiful. Explosive oranges and reds across the forest. The crispness of the air - not chillingly cold and definitely beyond the sloth inducing slow humidity of summer. Finally, my High School had a weird location / situation where our football team was good and fun to watch, but without the generational fanaticism of Texas / Alabama / Georgia / whatever other Southeastern state often has that makes a game between literal children into something one step removed from Presidential Politics / Sunni-Shia schismatics.

  2. Chicks dig Halloween. I'm not referring to the cliche about "dressing up like sluts" or whatever was in (I think) Mean Girls. I mean the (far more effective) woo-woo witchy vibes that seem to work wonders for setting the mood. The harvest season, and themes of agricultural abundance have always had some strang association with fertility and sexual activity. The VVitch has this featured prominently. For some reason, even very modern and post-modern raised women seem to sense this. I'm not going to speculate on the psychology in a Friday Fun thread. All I know is that I first caught wind of that many years ago. I had a friend who was a horror movie connoisseur and introduced me to Dario Argento's original Suspiria. The "gore" is fairly tame for current standards, and it's mostly very moody / atmospheric film making. But part of that atmosphere is taking off your clothes, I guess. If there was ever a fantastic wingman in film form, it's Suspiria.

Another Suspiria fan! Have you seen the remake? Very different, but also excellent. I flip flop constantly on which has the better score though.

I haven't. I'm scared too because I'm worried it will ruin the original for me. That's very ... silly thing to say, but it's also the truth.

Plus, I'm a sucker for Jessica Harper from the original as well as her doppelganger Karen Allen (Marion in Raiders of The Lost Ark)

No favorite holiday. I do not care for any of them.

I feel a bit sad that I'm almost entirely isolated from 'society' on this. The only thing I have in common with plurality of population is that I appreciate law & order and being polite. I deeply value groups and friendships, but I have no tribal feelings, it's like that instinctual part of humanity is missing from me entirely.

As I love fireworks, close-hitting thunder and artillery fire. Holidays don't feature these. I consider every great storm directly overhead a minor holiday and always enjoy listening to it.

So I care for no holidays, I have no religion, I feel little kinship with my fellow Slovaks, even less for Czechs among whom I hide, there are no communities I could work to join. Were I to get a stroke and find God I'd probably end up in some serious orthodox church as I'm in a 95% agreement with them on behavioral norms. Very much enjoyed talking to a priest from such a group while signing a petition against the Istanbul treaty. He seemed a lot like me. Mindful of the gravity of the problem, serious yet also had a sense of humor. But, Christians aren't my people. God doesn't know me, I don't know God. ....

There is no God but Evolution and she cares nothing at all for us and ťhat is how it is and probably must be for our own good, for we are imperfect rationalising, not rational animals and can't function without getting periodically brutalised by reality. I know I can't, I observe empires can't do, companies can't manage either. Seems like a law of nature, no?

We always fight against the cold cruelty of nature and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.

What holidays could someone like me appreciate?

I've examined my soul and found out I'd not care at all had Germans won the war and replaced Slovak with German, or had Hungarians succeeded in extirpating Slovak language. Why should I feel anything there? Tribal identity is an essentially meaningless marker here, the cultural differences between Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks are rather small. Would the world be worse off for missing one tiny slavic language 90% of whose speakers were usually alcoholic, frequently wife-beating and typically petty subsistence farmers ?

Can you explain more of what you mean in this section? [We always fight against its cold cruelty and every victory of ours leaves us weaker and worse off. Few seem to understand this at the meta level, so in modernity we go from blunder to blunder and become ever more cringe with each generation.]

Are you talking about a 'fight' against evolution? Can you explain what you mean by 'cringe'? I understand this word to mean social awkwardness but it is always viewed relatively.

We are animals whose sense of drive fulfillment evolved to be derived from sustaining our material needs, war, tribal belonging and pursuing power. Yet now we perform abstruse specialist tasks which are usually far less satisfying, we are exposed to too little violence, commercial services allow us to eschew community and the judgement of others, to our own detriment.

Pursuit of agency and power typically involves people selling their soul and time to some corporate shoggoth. The traditional way of having a war band and stabbing more or less distant neighbors or maybe even tearing off some territory to claim your own is now a distant memory echoing only in certain computer games.

Pretty much every historically basically inevitable societal advance has removed us further away from direct fulfilment of most of those goals and having to resort to replacement activities.

E.g. So I'm exposed to the spectacle of my highly paid (for the region, $5k a month is chump change in the US) specialist ancestor spending a lot of her scant free time at desultory attempts at growing some salad and beans. People cheer and care for absurd sports, it forms their identities. And so on.

Eliminative materialism is a false path my friend. It’s not too late to turn back.

I'm not an eliminative materialist. I believe mental phenomena are, however, arising from the processes in the underlying physical matter. Maybe the thought processes themselves matter, and aren't purely an 'experience', maybe not, but they of course exist.

Going to school in the American north, that first early beautiful week of good weather after winter, students would move their futons and couches onto the quads everything with a wonderful atmosphere of sports and studying on lawn blankets.

Rouketopolemos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouketopolemos). Every year for Easter, two church congregations in a small Greek town have a firework war where they try to ring the other church's bell. I love it, it's like someone asked a drunk 10-year-old to design their Easter celebrations

Credit for living up to the user name. ;-)

That’s as collegiate as it gets. Amazing!

I think it's interesting that the UK still celebrates burning Catholics at the stake once a year. Guy Fawkes Night is pretty fun actually, and I like the ritual of it - starting with the bonfire in the late afternoon/early evening as it's getting dark, watching the effigy burn, warming up by the fire, then watching the fireworks. I'm always surprised at just how warm it is, even when it's cold out, near the fire. I guess that sounds stupid, but it still feels a little like magic. That it takes place during what is probably the UK's rainiest, most depressing month (yes, even over January) in terms of weather is also nice, and it seems to be the main holiday (other than New Year's Eve) where people throw big parties, like the 4th of July in the US.

It isn't a public holiday though, which is a shame. Instead, the UK stacks up almost all its public holidays between April and May (two for Easter, two in May), with one extra one in late August. Thanksgiving is really situated perfectly as a holiday IMHO, late November demands it.

I've been considering attempting to start a ritual centered around burning the effigy of the head of the EC to remind ourselves of the liberties and independence we foolishly gave away in our swinish interested in material well-being so now we are subjects to dictates from an idiotic, unaccountable bureaucratic shoggoth festering in Brussels.

Pascha

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats