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I want to talk about game mods.
I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.
Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.
The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.
I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.
It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.
I think one of the big issues is the old core playerbase were nerds who approached fiction from the point of view of External Immersion.
"What is this world? what is it's culture? How would their people approach things? What has the universe made clear is normal and what is abnormal"
This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"
Or they'll play fantasy mods (Anbennar) of Europa Universalis and not think twice about how every primary human faction is European inspired and fantasy races take up the entire rest of the world, creating and effective all European humanity. All with in universe expalantion of Orc slavery explained as reparations to humans for former Orc invasions. Because "well that's just what this universe is"
And this older nerd playerbase thrives on this. The actual diversity of settings is what's appealing about fiction and then their internal logic is to be followed through on.
But that approach to fiction is actually really rare! Most people are Inserters, not Immersers. They play games in order to insert themselves into a universe. What interests them is the challenge of achieving their mindset in each new circumstance. (sidenote: it's a matter of degree. not an either or.) To these people the setting itself is significantly devalued. There's nothing 'there' about making the Forgotten Realms setting stay in character with previously established lore. No instinct of dissonance. In fact each shift in the setting to better align with their perception of the world around them (and remember, most people have an astoundingly poor sense of what the demographics of any given country are. along with a complete inability to distinguish between what's normal in their local area vs the country as a whole) only makes more sense to these people. It feels more immersive for their insertions because it's more intuitive. And it's more intuitive because it's now more familiar. And that's normal.
Even though, personally speaking, I don't find very interesting.
Man, that takes me back. Back to a time when I could have engaged with the lore of a fictional universe in good faith. When, at least it felt like, or I was naive enough to believe, the authors of these games were doing honest speculative fiction and not blatant agenda pushing.
The games have certainly changed. But so have I. The trust I had that these entertainment companies weren't pushing weird, fringe, hateful ideologies is broken. There have been enough overt examples, and enough anti-white racist tirades on Twitter by game devs, that I can't help but side eye every narrative choice through my knowledge of the overt racism that is on open display in the industry.
I mean, it's an oldie but a goodie. Manveer Heir.
Here he is making all the right mouth sounds about "inclusivity"
BioWare developer Manveer Heir challenges colleagues to combat prejudice with video games
BioWare's Heir On Sexism, Racism, Homophobia In Games
Mass Effect developer makes emotional plea to eliminate social injustice in games
And here he is just being a fucking anti-white racist.
And so it's just impossible to get around that obvious fact that all the mouth sounds he makes about inclusivity are just cover for his visceral hatred of white people. And, IMHO, this is really representative of the industry these days. It's representative of the entire "inclusivity" movement. Every forum I used to frequent that got taken over by the inclusivity police shifts from "Just trying to be inclusive" when they are the minority, to naked visceral hatred of white people when they get enough positions of power in the community.
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One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.
From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.
Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.
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"Most" people aren't. Women on average are. Also normies on average are. But that's not "most people".
I'm perfectly happy to describe 80%+ of the entire population (aka a large majority of women plus a sizeable majority of men) as "most people".
80%+ seems sufficient to be described as 'Most'
I also believe that women and normie men are 'People'.
this is why I distinguished in the beginning about old core playerbase demographics being a distinct population. They were a skewed population, where a minority approach to matters had a majority control over marketshare. Within that small population the majority culture was different.
is it really your contention that the best way to decribe "Most People" is to exclude the near entirety of one sex and the majority of the other sex?
Yes, he seems to be experiencing what has happened to many in the past: the Cool Thing went Mainstream.
It's always a wonderful experience when you find a corner of the art world that caters to people that think like you. It opens a realm of discussion, building on other's ideas, and just plain having fun that isn't otherwise possible.
But then the space gets invaded by "normies" and it stops being fun. The same rules that exist in the rest of society get implemented there as well, and the whole game is up.
The only solution I can see is to make things, and to join together with others who like to make similar things. You can't rely on others to do it for you.
I mean look at the furry community. It's full of people who self-taught drawn animation because they wanted animated furry content. Now it's a thriving art scene, and if that makes you go "eww" that's just proof of my point.
You want stories with old-school values? Make them. You want videogames with Nazis and hot women? Make them. You're gonna make the normies say "eww," and the only people who will appreciate what you've made are others like you, but that's okay because those people are who it's for.
And as a final note for all those who say "but I don't have an artistic bone in my body,": you can help in other ways. Anything more complex than a text-only work requires a lot of hands, and even text benefits from editors and the like. Provide funding, organize groups, bring in connections, manage projects, etc etc.
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To add some more context to this post, there is currently a huge flare up in the modding community with Nexusmods (one of the largest modding communities and hosting sites) banning 'anti-woke' mods for some of the recent AAA releases of Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3. Besides the example of the BG 3 mod above, a recently banned Starfield mod involved the removal of pronouns during character creation.
Based on the past banning of a mod for Spiderman Remastered (involving the replacement of LGBT pride flags with American flags), Nexusmods' justification for banning anti-woke mods is as follows:
Starfield Steam discussion forum is currently a raging dumpster fire of trolling, woke and anti-woke commentary.
/r/kotakuinaction, one of the residual anti-woke communities still around after gamergate, has a lot of discussion about the forced inclusion of diversity in gaming issue and seems to 'follow the money' of forced diversity in modern games into the prevalence of ESG scores attracting investors.
Edit: Large discussion thread of this issue in the Starfield Steam forum here.
The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.
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It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
I mean, I think I made my case clear. There is "inclusive" and then there is weird, demoralization propaganda where everyone who looks like me is evil and families that look like mine have been utterly extirpated or portrayed in a manner of existential horror. And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore. Because not unlike how there is a weird bundling of political positions that theoretically have nothing to do with one another, but are none the less all or none, and sorted (perhaps falsely) as being either Republican or Democrat, I've long been subjected to "inclusive" media that barely seems to be about being inclusive, and instead seems to be about promoting hatred of white people and all their works. So I want all of it gone from my household.
Is this really present in Baldur's Gate 3? Two of the most prominent party characters, Gale and Astarion, are white men (Astarion is, in fairness, a half-elf). Halsin is a white guy (another elf, though). Then there's Minsc and Volo, both white male humans.
I guess Wyll, the one black guy, is arguably the most "moral" character in the party.
The three main "bad guys" are Ketheric Thorm (white male elf), Gortash (white male human), and Orin (uh, I guess she's a white woman? She's visually an eldritch abomination). Ketheric, especially, is a pretty tragic character, though, and not portrayed as generically evil. Minor bad guys include Cazador, an Asian human vampire, and the Mother Superior, a female drow.
All of that to say, I feel like BG3 is definitely trying to be "diverse," and it's certainly very, very gay... but I don't get that it's "anti-white guys."
In fact, it seems like a really good example of "inclusive media" that isn't trying to promote "hatred of white people and their works." Maybe you could start trying to pick it apart, but then I think that would be pretty similar to the "woke" people who try to do that to other innocuous media.
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No, I don't think you have. In particular, it is unclear to me which of the following you would agree with.
Any depiction of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.
Some depictions of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.
People appeal to 2 quite a bit, but they never quite shake the impression that they actually agree with 1. In particular, when you cite all those kids' cartoons and say that they're just all too gay, you suggest to me that you actually have a problem with gay representation, period.
Full disclosure, I haven't watched those episodes of those shows. Maybe they're just actively trying to make political activists out of your kids. If so, I'll fully agree with you that those shows are not necessarily appropriate for children. But if they're just showing gay people existing like straight people, then yeah, I'm starting to think you at best just aren't differentiating as you say you do.
I see people say that all time. What media are you referring to? Because even in 2023, there is plenty of media that doesn't only demonize straight cis white people.
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Once again I'm torn, because I kind of agree with both of you. The biggest problem I have with woke propaganda is the reasoning behind it. If you* are the kind of person who thinks that representation is important, that children who grow up seeing blacks only portrayed as villains will be demoralised or think they can't be heroic, that they can't identify with Luke Skywalker because of the colour of his skin, and that only hateful race obsessed cunts would target a race and paint them as evil - well I can only really assume one thing when you lump every fair skinned ethnicity in together and then consistently paint them as evil. You already said that's how you think. Same with men and women.
I am happy to include others, and I think it's totally fucked to interfere with how someone else wants to mod his game even if it's in a way I find disgusting - I am a hajnalbrain cooperatebot after all - but as far as I am concerned the DIE crowd and the neo nazi crowd are two sides of the same coin. Except there's a shitload more of the DIE crowd.
I don't think that's hyperbole. Keep in mind that back when it was black people copping it it was generally out of ignorance at worst - vanishingly few actual racists have held positions of power in the media in the past few decades. Most people were just trying to tell their story the way they'd pictured it while writing, and in a white majority country that's going to consist mostly of white people. But the DIE people are actively malicious. They want to put racists and sexists and homophobes in their place, and the rest of us better cheer them on or they'll come for us next. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on.
*I am sure you will understand I'm using the royal you here, but reading it back I see the way I wrote it is ambiguous, and while you've made your position on the topic quite clear, if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd. But I am also not in the mood to rewrite this post, because I can't find a way to sit comfortably in this chair, so I am including this disclaimer instead.
Not really. I expect anyone reading my post to get to the part that says I don't have a problem with mods that don't flatter DEI.
Ultimately, I do not have a problem with someone wanting to discuss why the DEI messaging in media is offputting to them. I am sympathetic to the idea and think that creators of all sizes can do better with this. IF you want to say that the anti-men message in a piece of media makes you feel unwelcome, I'm totally onboard with that. But I often find that people don't cleanly cut away at what they find okay or don't, even when they have the tools to make this clear.
Yeah that's fair. The disclaimer was more for Quincy than for you - for a hypothetical centre left me who got it in the queue and thought it was a passive aggressive end run around the be kind rule. Especially since the last sentence is a statement directed at the royal you, which I should have fixed regardless of my discomfort.
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Why?
For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.
If you organically learned that the only media your coworker had consumed in the last year was hardcore mermaid hentai, then that might color your opinion of your coworker, even if you were totally okay with harcore mermaid hentai. Similarly, if you learned your female coworker only consumed reality television, trashy romance novels and fan fiction for series she had never read or watched, you might not look at her the same way afterwards.
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
This crystalized something for me I didn't really vocalize.
Nobody needed to be aware of how I modded Doom in 1994. There was no social media. There were no centralized modding repositories making executive decisions about what mods to allow or not. There were people at computer shows slinging floppies, random personal pages, sometimes CD-ROM compilations of just dumps of WADs scraped from god knows where.
I never needed to complain that the Kill Barney mod got taken down. There was never a pro shooting Barney and an anti shooting Barney faction arguing about it who you had to cast you lot in with. Nobody needed to set up a dissident host for Barney shooting mods. It was just... in the aether. It was out there. You knew some people liked it, and maybe some people didn't, but it was unquantifiable and frictionless, and totally nobody else's business.
It's this spirit of "nobody else's business" that has been lost. Because now it seems broadly accepted that media can be harmful, and so it's in everybody's interest to police all the media everyone else is consuming to make sure they aren't a harmful person. Shit, it's gotten to me too. My above screeds absolutely betray that I to believe the media you consume can be harmful. My bugbear is demoralization propaganda. I want it out of my house, away from my children. I refuse to patronize peddlers of it. I despair at how prevalent it is in our culture. I die a little inside when old friends I haven't seen in a while, who've been getting all the NPC updates, make casual disparaging remarks about how terrible white people are apropo of nothing. There is a sense of "Shit, they got to you too?"
There were actually a pretty big moral uproar about video games modding post-Columbine -- one of the shooters allegedly modded Doom! and this drove a whole bunch of activism -- though it's (thankfully) been mostly forgotten since.
Yeah, but that was people on the outside throwing an ignorant temper tantrum. Not people on the inside proactively instituting wide ranging systems of control to try to suppress illicit mods.
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I wouldn't particularly care about any of the examples you mentioned (my opinion, in as much as it might be "colored" would be forgotten immediately) unless I had a considerably more influential presence on the person (I e the person enamored of horny mermaids was my young son). This whole idea of "public scrutiny" of others in the way you're describing is foreign to me, though it's possible I haven't clearly understood you.
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Because only God himself could alter reality to the point that I wouldn't be capable of wondering why people do what they do, and that guy hasn't been seen in a while.
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Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.
Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.
Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.
Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.
In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.
The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
I will absolutely sign on that race bending established characters is a good sign you are racist. Are you sure you've thought fully through who the racist are as a result of that?
I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?
Depends. Does your context boil down to "It's only bad when white people do it to black characters"?
Edit: Not a rhetorical question BTW. I'm too used to people using ambiguous claims of "context" to justify blatant double standards. I'm not sure if this is what your invocation is, or if you are agreeing with me that the relentless racebending, genderbending and sexuality bending of established characters is a pretty solid sign of hatred.
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Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.
Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"
Seriously, what kind of argument even is this? How far do you take this idea that the only thing you can infer from what mods a person downloads is that they downloaded it? By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.
So great to hear you agree with me!
This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.
And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
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I do not see the relevance of that man to the point at issue, unless your point is that this man is some sort of Dalek against whom all games are zero-sum and existential and therefore both brushing off his complaints as trivial and also banning mods that cater to him are justified tactics to oppose and destroy him.
The relevance of that man is to explain why complaints of "WOKENESS IN GAMES REEEEE" is met with "it's not a big deal". The OP was arguing that he was being gaslit, I'm telling him that the gas lights are on because there's a gas leak.
I agree with him. Your argument would make sense if he complained about ANY game EVER catering to the pronouns crowd, it makes no sense in a context where mods that cater to him are censored.
Except the original post was the one to bring it up in games in general. I'm responding to that.
I'm sorry, I don't see how that changes anything. OP was talking about games in general. You made a point about the gaslighting being justified, because a lot of people seem to agree with the guy you linked to. I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.
It's not gaslighting if it's true.
The problem I have with this argument is that the OP called multiple popular kids shows "too damned gay". One of those was Peppa Pig, which the linked article literally just says had a lesbian couple with a child who was friends with the titular character. I assume OP is linking the part he finds problematic, but if so, then he finds it to be unacceptable that a kids show literally depicts a gay family. I even asked explicitly and didn't get a response on what exactly he found problematic about that. The other linked articles aren't much better for making his point.
It is true that one can have separate opinions on video games and kids shows. But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period. I don't place much confidence in WhiningCoil breaking this mold. But I leave it to him to at least offer the defense if he cares to do so.
How can it simultaneously be true that woke messaging is not a big deal, and that people should not be allowed any option to remove it?
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. You're saying that if he had his way, he'd just turn the tables on the woke, and censor them, including their mods? If not, I'm not sure I see where you're going with this argument.
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Like, even if you discount that episode, there's literally dozens of episodes without anything gay in them at all. I should know, I have two small children and have thus watched dozens of episodes of Peppa Pig. And Paw Patrol, similarly lacking in gay themes. Or Cocomelon. Or basically any of the Finnish kids' shows I've seen.
There is a Canadian series called Chip & Potato where some of the titular pug's neighbors are a pair of male zebras raising adopted twins who feature from time to time, but even there they don't actually draw attention to them being gay in any way that I've seen. If anything kids's shows that I've seen almost conspicuously seem to be treading very carefully with this theme.
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I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?
Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.
To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).
To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.
More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.
My future goals:
I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.
I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"
The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.
Children's Culture:
I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.
I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.
Daddy pig is portrayed as a doofus sufficiently consistently that both my wife and I found Peppa Pig problematic. We can't stop our kids watching it, but we don't seek it out for them.
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FFXIV's modding world is interesting in a lot of ways, starting with any mod usage technically being an account-bannable offense, and then a broadly progressive-leaning playerbase on top of that. As a result, there's a couple major redistribution sites (NexusMods, xivmodarchive, heliosphere) and then a ton of people who've moved into Discords. And then the more lasse faire mod redistribution sites, in addition the normal array of free speech witches, also had a bunch of things show up that I'm >95% sure were intentionally troll uploads made to highlight contradictions.
To some extent FFXIV Discord's started a philosophy similar to webrings, but it's gotten more of the bad drama parts (up to and including creepy bot-programming stalkers) than the nice community ones, so not impressed.
Vintage Story's modding community seems reasonably laid-back, but then again I just ran into the first furry drifter porn yesterday, so who knows if it'll mostly appeal to that sort of ethos or just be a matter of time before something stupid explodes. One would hope that Seraphs (or kobolds) being clay-colored would avoid some problems; I'm not optimistic.
On the flip side, BasedMods kinda looks pretty pathetic. Yes, it avoids the 'anatomically correct fat cat' problem, but whites-only Rimworld? "Sensible Demographics" for the X series doesn't look like it's even be banned from Steam yet, and it looks like it's just tweaking autogen npc race/genders with some fault lore assumptions (not that anyone /should/ read X-universe lore; it's a mess). Making Fallout New Vegas's two factions literal nazis is so on the nose it's funny, but it's also still the sorta thing that would be derided, rightfully, as shovelware asset flips.
There's some stuff with effort or some grander philosophy, here, but it's a small minority: Fire Emblem and Persona's respective translation controversies (and maybe Atomic Heart? for whatever Russian blackface cartoons count) are presumably the touchstone, perhaps followed by Minecraft's textures, but they're both pretty weak central examples. So ultimately it's kinda hard to make a serious assessment of whether these style of mods are getting ignored in mainstream discussion because they're being censored, or if it's just that no one outside of a few engagement bait farmers (and yes, the don't-force-me-to-pick-pronouns guy couldn't have targeted engagement bait better if he's spelled "morans"). I'd bet both, but I'd not be able to give hugely persuasive arguments.
There's a fairer counterargument that the same standard doesn't get turned the other direction, or even to internal development. P5R's original translation was genuinely garbage, and Spiderman doing the no-pride-flags bit on its for UAE own says a lot; that extra-Prideful Spider-man Remastered Mods don't even bother with the figleaf of the Real World Issues tag that was used to justify banning the no-pride mod is kinda overkill. Most of NexusMods isn't shovelware, but not a small amount is.
On the other hand, even if they're trying to make a political point, they're not exactly needing to do so, or talking to any but the already-converted.
What was wrong with P5R's translation to English? Do you have examples?
From a non-culture-war perspective, there are a number of places that are still stilted, messy, or misleading. This piece is written from a progressive perspective, but it highlights a couple "little goofs", and the game has no small number of them. To be fair, P5R's translation is a vast improvement over the original P5 translation, which had a variety of plain errors almost everywhere, either words being untranslated or entirely incorrectly translated, sometimes to random unrelated words or even opposites of their original meanings. And there's still some janky stuff that's more under the broader problem of localization, like being quizzed on shogi rules in ways that would be hard to English-speakers to even Google.
From a culture war one, P5R is a heavily political piece even compared to the typical Persona game, and a lot of those politics are complex when anyone tries to handle them in other cultures. Previous Persona games have sometimes had this issue: is Naoto Shirogane a trans male or tomboy, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after a thousand pages -- under Japanese cultural assumptions it's a lot easier to see her pronoun troubles are tied closer to how the often-serious problems Japanese authorities have taking women seriously, while under American (even pre-current trans snafu) this screams gender identity stuff.
((For a more consistently translated (albeit easier) example from the same game, P4's Kanji reads pretty similar, as far as I can tell, from either Japanese or American culture assumptions. His Shadow's very clearly gay, but the Jungian shadow is what a person represses, rather than the whole of what they are; Kanji might be gay or bisexual, but that's just a small portion of his fear of being seen as unmanly for his interests.))
But where P4 is more focused on finding the truth, P5 is about corruption, and aggressively about the interfaces of power between adults and minors, including related to suicide, parenting, and sexuality. So this meant that it touched on things that were far redder-hot. One particularly controversial scene occurs when the protagonist Joker and Ryuji running into and being hit on by a pair of gay guys, first when they visit a local gay district for unrelated reasons and then later at a normal beach.
This is incredibly creepy from a Western perspective, partly because the first scene depends on a lot of context that might not even be obvious to native Japanese speakers (the two are basically sneaking into the Folsom Street Fair for unrelated reasons) and partly because of different social norms and expectations about personal space. It's still meant to be weird in the original, but it's not an actual assault and that's kinda important: part of Ryuji's character arc is explicitly about separating attacks from self-defense from fair punishment and so on, in both directions. These guys are doing something that's outside of the normal and Ryuji doesn't want, but the real answer's that he needs to say no and Ryuji hasn't internalized that -- something that impacts everything from his backstory to some of his behaviors very late in the game.
But it came across as homophobic because these were the only 'real' clearly gay guys you run into through the whole game and they're trying to get into a high schooler's pants so it ... instead had the pair trying to give Ryuji a makeover? Which... doesn't really solve the problem either direction.
There's also a minor character that's probably intended as a transwoman in both translations, and probably was originally a crossdresser (or more accurately something like a Molly) by Western standards, but I don't know that the sorta people that use Based everywhere noticed that one.
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Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.
Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.
Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.
We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.
I just read an article where the UC system dropped 75% of faculty applicants for insufficient DEI commitment. Apparently it was a huge demerit to agree with the idea, "I try to treat everyone the same." It's not just kids today, it's being burned into institutions intentionally.
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I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.
To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.
They don't want a truce, and they don't see the necessity of one since they think (and not without reason) that they can sweep the board utterly. Before you can even think about truce, you have to win a bunch of battles.
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I'd argue that given the symbolism of the rainbow flag, "colorblind" works fine.
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I mean, sure, that's their take on it and the frame that they insist on using, but that's not generally the intent. The intent is "Orwellian editing is morally wrong and we will fight you if you do it". There's much, much less of this pushback against new properties that "represent" than there is against retconning established ones.
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That's the thing... If it's so harmful, why do it at all? Is this about justice and fairness? Or is it about revenge...
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I understand what you're saying, but I think that OP's point is that it means a different thing when the woke do it, as opposed to when us anti-woke folk. This is because the woke have stated exactly what it means to them, that they do think that this sort of representation can have a negative influence. So it speaks to them trying to have negative influence on certain people, that they hate white men, and they're not just trying to bring other people up through positive influence.
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ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames?This makes me feel old: these days browsers don't even support FTP.
I use filezilla for ftp. There are a smattering of ancient ftp repositories still out there hosting files that have otherwise totally vanished from the modern web.
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It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.
Now people younger than you and different from you are the cultural default, and you're enjoying that less.
I know how you feel, it happened to me too.
You enjoying one thing less than another makes it feel like the other thing is worse. But be reassured, the people it is catering to like it just as much as you liked the things that were catering to you. Things aren't getting worse, they're just moving on.
Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism. Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.
One day she'll discover her country hates her. But hopefully she can develop a stable sense of self that isn't totally self-loathing and demoralized by propaganda before that day comes. Because the kids around me I see immersed in "the culture" are not all right.
She will probably not 'discover' that unless her parents guide her into culture war foxhole where believing that is part of the price of admission. That is not in fact the conclusion that the majority of people come to when they are just allowed to explore their culture naturally.
Teen mental health certainly is at a bad point, pandemic is a pretty obvious recent factor and social media plus never going outside seems to account for a lot of it. That's not at all the same thing as the culture war argument being leveled here.
I think your first sentence is mostly true but entirely contingent on the word "she" as opposed to "he". I think that if you took a top-10 of movies and TV from each year you would definitely find at least a few "men suck lol" speeches in each of those lists, in a way that I don't think I've even seen for "whites suck lol" (though of course social media has quite a bit of the latter).
I mean yeah everyone is going to encounter some number of cultural artifacts saying that men suck, that women suck, that white people suck, that black people suck, etc. With varying levels of directness and specificity.
That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.
I think you would in fact have a much harder time finding "blacks suck" and "women suck" speeches; the rate's not zero, but in big-budget productions you will find those exclusively portrayed negatively (either in the mouth of a villain, or explicitly retracted by end of episode).
The two live-action Western 2022 things I've seen are Wednesday and The Batman. Wednesday has at least one time when the eponymous heroine accuses someone of "mansplaining" (despite how weird that word sounds coming out of the generally-old-fashioned Wednesday's mouth) and this is presented as correct (IIRC there are other examples of "men suck" in there, but it's been 9 months and I don't think I watched the whole thing); The Batman has Catwoman lay into Batman for his "privilege", although I forget exactly which attributes she picked on out of rich/white/male (Catwoman is black in that film), and we're clearly supposed to agree with her.
Now, technically I did watch one other 2022 Western thing in the form of one episode of Rick & Morty. But 2/3 chosen at complete random is enough for me to start seeing a pattern.
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You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).
On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").
You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.
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I do not believe this is the attitude you adopt when culture goes against you; it seems much more likely that it is a script you apply to other peoples' concerns, not your own. That is not a charitable or productive way to approach discussing these issues.
Alternatively, some things actually are bad, and demand action to limit the harm they cause.
I thank my parents for attempting to protect me from malign cultural influences, and believe that my life would have been significantly improved if they'd done a better job. Maybe my child will not feel this way. On the other hand, maybe my child will decide to be a junkie. I cannot control their decisions, but their ability to make meaningful decisions evolves slowly over time. All I can do is to try to raise them well and teach them to be wise.
I will admit, it's certainly amusing to see someone break out the dusty old "all media is totally fine, stop being a square" argument. Because of course media has no effect on our beliefs and actions, right? Anyone who cares about representation or diversity on the positive end, or racism or sexism or or heteronormativity or any of the million other problematic issues raised against media over the last decade was just a lame-o stick in the mud, right?
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I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.
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Some people grow up to be adults and do thank their parents for the limitations they had as children. My wife is one of them. Her parents stopped her from watching "vulgar" shows like the Simposons, and she still doesn't like those shows.
I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.
I do have a sense of self that is separate from the culture I inhabit. I got that by exploring a bunch of culture and realizing that it was not me. My wife got that sense of self by having walls and barriers placed in front of the "bad" parts of culture.
Different approaches work for different personalities. I'd suggest seeing the personalities of your kids and not taking a blanket approach. But things that worked for the parents are probably more likely to work for their kids.
I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.
Yep I grew up with the same 'parenting' approach. I regret it every day, and truly wish I had more discipline and was forced to do something other than spend 12-14 hours a day gaming during my youth. It has caused me no end of problems and issues to work around.
I'm glad a lack of limitations worked for you - I'd argue that it's a total abdication of parental responsibility, and while every now and then we get a gem like you cjet, the majority of kids that grow up with no guidance or limitations have an extremely difficult road to climb to become mature adults. @guesswho, I would caution you that it is possible to live in a sick culture. If a culture will teach your child to be weak, to never develop, to stew in anger and blame others constantly for their problems, it is absolutely better in every conceivable way to shield them and instill good values in them.
To be fair to my parents I think they just didn't know. They protected me from the dangers and bad decisions that they knew about. They saw me on the computer all the time and thought "well at least he isn't out doing drugs and drinking like we were at his age, or having sex and risking pregnancy".
I suspect we had similar exposures to the internet, and parents with similar caution towards it. Because my parents were also glad I wasn't out drinking, doing drugs, or getting girls pregnant. Although I'm sure my dad thought it wouldn't hurt if I showed at least a little more interest in girls, as opposed to being so intimidated by them.
On the one hand, the internet in the 90's wasn't as bad as it was now. The social networks you were exposed to were far more fractured, numerous, and heterogenous. I hung around a StarCraft forum, the Battle.net chatroom for it, and an enthusiast forum for Riva 128 users. Because back then a lot of video cards needed some aftermarket attention companies really didn't provide.
The pornography you could find sure was a lot different. It would take 5 nervous minutes of hoping nobody came home and saw me on the family computer slowly downloading a single grainy picture of boobs. It would have taken too many terrifying minutes to print it off to risk getting caught, so the best you could do was commit it to memory for later. If it even finished downloading, because it often froze somewhere between the neck and the row of pixels right above the nipple.
Things today couldn't be more different. Activist run most communities, and love bomb vulnerable people to groom them into deviant lifestyles. Porn seems dominated by bizarre fetishes that I'm unsure even existed back when I was a kid. And parasocial relationships between content creators (adult or otherwise) have horribly stunted the socialization of the people trapped in their orbit. The sort of guy who participates in live camshows used to be universally derided, not necessarily because of the pornographic nature of it, but because of how creepy the unnatural parasocial relationship is. Now everything is a sort of camshow in that creepy way. From the earliest age kids are watching twitch streamers, tipping them to get a rote shoutout.
I just don't think the internet was as habit forming, or interfered with socialization, to the degree it does both now. Nor were the infohazards on it as potent. We tricked each other into going to goatse. We didn't lovebomb the lonely autistic kid into becoming goatse.
I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.
I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.
I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.
I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.
I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.
Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.
Proliferation of porn is probably one of the most underrated social changes... since the invention of the printing press? Repeating firearms? Who knows?
It seems to me that there's a serious disconnect between the popular narrative and the evident reality about porn and its mental impact on the individual. Sexuality seems a whole lot more malleable than people want to admit, with the "weirder and weirder stuff" slippery slope being only one aspect. from the inside, it seems pretty clear that brains have different hooks, specific things snag the hooks and pull the brain toward them. Porn's pure reward stimulus, but the brain's reward demand is so high that even when a piece is actively trying to max out all the sliders, gradients still appear in chaotic and unpredictable ways, and the brain is smart enough to latch on to these and then chase them endlessly. How much is innate propensity and how much is acculturated is probably unknowable, but you can in fact be altered, and even consciously steer the process.
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Looks like I predate you a bit more than I thought then. What a difference a few years makes. When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet. I'm not sure widespread consumer digital cameras were even a thing in the 90's. I know my family, and no family I knew, had one in the 90's.
In the 90s? GIF came out in 1987, and it wasn't the first graphics format. Consumer digital cameras were a bit later, but scanners were around. Slow and low-res and often not in color, but they existed. There were even high-res color images as far back as the 70s, though you couldn't reasonably create them at home.
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Sure, I won't argue that different people have different personalities and will benefit from different parenting styles.
And if you start from an in-depth examination of your child and their personality and consideration about what is best for them as an individual, maybe you can sometimes correctly find that things I find weird are teh best thing for your kid.
But if your starting point is 'I am on the opposite side of a culture war from the people that make almost all modern culture, so everything they produce must be harmful and I will forbid all of it' then the odds that your decisions will coincidentally coincide with what is actually best for your specific child are very low.
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Nobody was advertising Doom or rap to children, or if they did it was with the faintest of plausible deniabiltiy. Whenever there was some media firestorm over kids consuming 'inappropriate' content, the creators would perfunctorily gesture towards the ESRB rating system or parental advisory labels. The culture of days old was hidden from your parents, not championed as good medicine by media and its authority figures (official or otherwise). You hid the M-rated game from your Mom, and you didn't pop Eminem into your parents' car stereo on the way home from your school. If the opposite was the case, other families thought it was strange if they found out. There was - for lack of a better word - shame, feigned or otherwise, around letting your kids wildly consume subject matter above their intended age range.
I'm not sure what youth culture is into these days, partly because times do change, partly because it's hard to separate a clear signal from all the 'modern audience' astroturfing. But I find it hard to believe that the current environment - laid on thick by a PMC class of 30-somethings and older, still steeped in yesteryear's cultural battles - is a genuine, undistorted expression of the real thing. You had to overcome some barriers to reach the naturally-alluring experience of shotgunning demons to bloody ribbons in your favorite heavy metal album cover. Who today has to seek out or hide away woke content, as opposed to having it dumptrucked into their mouth by Disney or similar?
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FWIW this comes across as quite condescending. You're so sure you're right you don't to actually provide any evidence of it, or even an argument.
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I think we are all prone to nostalgia bias as we age, and move out of the prime time as it were. But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism, the idea that there can be no privileging of anything because everyone has their own view.
I think there's always been a lot of crap, and pop culture has generic things that appeal to different generations. For youth, it's enough probably that it's their thing, and not their parents. That it's new.
But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together. Because a lot of woke decisioning is political it's probably deteriorating the artistic product. Famous authors have been critiqued for introducing too much of a political slant in this or that novel and there's some consensus that these works are qualitatively 'less-good' as a result.
I think one could easily argue for the objective merits of yesteryear. That did not preclude the new generation from consuming the new stuff more. You can give some objective measure of why that stuff is worse, but it doesn't matter at all to those who consume it more. This repeats all the way back to whatever time you want.
Entertainment always has a form molded by those who make it. You can argue that the form we now see, with regards to 'woke' stuff and politics in media, is worse than something else. It's designed by committee, it's politically motivated, whatever. What people seem to be failing to see is that the point made by @guesswho encompasses all of that.
The people who mold media today are doing so because of the conditions they find themselves in today, just like the people who molded media back in the day were. And that's the funny thing about this whole thing. You could not be were you are today if the people you are complaining about were not excellent at what they were doing. You are the product of the exact same political media you complain about. You are being left behind just like every other cultural conservative got left behind. You support every single step of that process up until the point where you find yourself replaced.
Another response to the op in case you're interested-https://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/138982?context=8#context
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Yes, I largely agree with you. I know I am a tiny agent in a hugely complex network that periodically consolidates into swarms. I would say that because I can stand outside with perspective taking, I am not entirely the product of political media, though as you say that may make no difference as I'm replaced.
I've also sometimes fashioned an argument that media is qualitatively different in the level at which PR operates. I'm no scholar of it but my understanding of the 70s, 80s say was that foreign affairs/state Dept issues was entirely the realm of govt propaganda, distributed through the major media networks. But that there was still a mainstream concept, and application of, mainstream investigative journalism and a framing that understood the concept of balanced reporting. Obviously that may have been cynically applied at outlets for various political reasons. And the political things didn't extend as much into the personal domain as they do now. While it was perpetuating other myths, US exceptionalism etc, it also had a recognisable civic function. I'm not a US citizen so don't have as much a handle on it.
The problem that you allude to initially that culture is shaped as the zeitgeist of the times, is that it is question begging, or ambivalent about the problem of agency. I mean it's also manifest in the way that you say, but the question of whether we can influence it as individuals is high-stakes.
I may have misunderstood you though so just take it as a rant...
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I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.
Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.
But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.
Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.
I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.
Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.
But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.
Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.
This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.
And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.
(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)
I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.
Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.
These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.
For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.
I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.
This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.
Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?
This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.
But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.
I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?
If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?
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This comment makes an excellent point and the poor quality of replies and downvotes are telling of that.
"Old man yelling at clouds amirite? Afraid of change much?" is neither interesting or novel. Everybody here has heard it, nobody is ever persuaded by it. As somebody else mentioned in response, it's highly likely that tune would change if the OP (or anybody who says something so insipid) felt their ox was getting gored.
Your follow-up post is better than goodguy's.
Persuaded of what? I don't understand this disposition towards the topic.
People complain about the state of media and entertainment. It is pointed out to them that everything they have tacitly or fully supported for the last decades is the cause of their woes. They proceed to stick their head in the sand so their worldview can remain safe and sound whilst everything they held dear gets whisked away in a BIPOC LGBTQI+ friendly reiteration. Where every element of the creative process sees what you cared about as being a symptom of a problem that needs solving.
You can not have what once was because of what now is. The culture you like is dying a demographic death. You will never get it back. The final nail in its coffin being the culture makers themselves. Instead of writing a 'good' story, they write inserts that compliment modern victimary discourse. They do this because that is the dominant culture. It's the dominant culture because of the culture that came before it.
Once you start tracing the thread of the modern moral fabric back to its source you don't find what you are looking for, you find everything that the modern moral fabric has conditioned you to reject. Which is what a lot of people do, which makes their complaints sound extremely hollow.
Your first paragraph is the interesting bit. That many people who are negative on these newly-dominant strains of our culture may have inadvertently paved its way previously - and enjoyed the ride up until they didn't - is a thought I have reflected on a fair bit recently. I myself am torn between renouncing some of my previous sensibilities or arguing for their selective defense in contrast to 'wokeness'.
That's a neat thread to pull on, and also nowhere in goodguy's post, and so I am not sure what compels you to defend it against downvotes. It's like you're reading a superior argument they did not actually make, and then using that as an opportunity to dunk on some ignorant detractors for reasons I don't fully understand.
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It absolutely does not make an excellent point. Check history: if it's not darwin2500 it's his identical twin. The account alternates between manipulative negging and dogmatic consensus enforcement.
Which is irrelevant to the fact that they made an excellent point here that wasn't properly addressed.
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Where do you see the poor quality replies? WhiningCoil's is a bit short but he makes his point with supporting examples, The-WideningGyre is perhaps a bit low effort, but your's seems to be at about the same level.
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Is The Pope Catholic? No Really
Rumors are swirling that Pope Francis will demand the resignation of Joseph Strickland, the popular conservative bishop of Tyler, Texas. He is notable as the only bishop to personally attend the protest against the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Dodgers Stadium. Meanwhile, bishops in Germany are now openly blessing same-sex couples in direct violation of Catholic doctrine. A cursory search reveals no disciplinary action against any of these bishops in response. By their fruits you will know them. In rationalist terms, this is called revealed preference.
This would be less of a problem for religions like Mormonism that allow for continuing revelation. Contrary to popular belief, the Pope is not a prophet. He can not walk out onto the balcony of St. Peter's and say, "Sorry guys, just talked to Jesus. The second coming is canceled." He would be immediately recognized as a fraud. He is bound* both by the deposit of faith and the dogmatic pronouncements of the church.
This leads to an interesting Ship of Theseus problem. The Catholic Church has had it's parishioners, officials, and doctrine replaced. Is it still the Catholic Church? It's not even just the gender stuff. Here is Pope Francis participating in a literal pagan ritual. I have seen him apologize for the residential school system, but I have yet to see him apologize for violating the first commandment.
*in theory lol
Weren't there centuries of sexually active Machiavellian politician popes back in the day? It's pretty likely that the papacy is actually more pure in terms of living up to people's ideas of its purity nowadays than it has been on average during its overall history.
Sure, and then there was the Protestant Reformation and centuries of religious wars. Eventually 1/3rd of the population of Germany died in the Thirty Years War.
But it gets worse. The Protestant Reformation led to the Protestant work ethic and a large increase in surplus capital. That caused the Industrial Revolution which in turn triggered the unprecedented increase in material wealth we are enjoying now. With sufficient wealth, society was free to develop feminism and shortly afterwards came the demographic transition. Our species now awaits a barren childless heat death if AI doesn't kill us first. And all because some selfish Medieval popes didn't take their religion seriously.
So let's not have Francis head down the path of the Medieval popes. It saves us all lot of trouble in the long run.
I'm not sure if "wealth" per se is the reason we developed feminism. I'm more of a fan of the idea that we whittled away at the traditional role of women with labor-saving technologies in the house, and separated sex from most of its consequences with birth control, contraception and antibiotics, and these two facts combined at a certain point in history to create a class of upper class women trying to fill the traditional role with almost nothing meaningful or challenging to do day after day (which was thus incredibly unsatisfying), and little friction to them experimenting with very different roles that might actually meaningfully contribute to society in the day-to-day.
Feminism wasn't inevitable after those technological and medical developments, but it does seem like the vast majority of cultures which come into contact with them end up having an expanded role for women in the public sphere and lower birth rates.
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I would love to hear your thoughts on the College Football realignment.
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It should be noted that he is firing Bishop Strickland for insubordination -- Strickland accused Pope Francis of having a program to undermine the deposit of faith, Strickland signed on to a letter that called Pope Francis a heretic, and then when Strickland was initially subject to a disciplinary investigation he doubled-down rather than apologizing. Catholic bishops are not allowed to criticize the Pope that way, calling the Pope a heretic undermines people's faith. Any boss in the world would fire a subordinate for such a behavior.
It is true though, that the Pope does seem excessively lenient toward the German bishops. Part of this may be that German bishops have been a bit more subtle in not directly picking a fight with the Vatican.
Overall, Francis has not actually betrayed or revoked the deposit of faith or Church dogma. In his own writings, he has upheld Church teaching on the disordered nature of homosexual, the invalidity of "gay marriage", and the impossibility of changing one's sex/gender.
It is true that in more informal settings he has made ambiguous statements that seem to wink at a more progressive, or even heretical view on key issues. Also, I do agree that his choices of which disciplinary battles to fight do reveal a progressive bent. The most charitable explanation is that he is trying to put a spin on things that the progressive media will find palatable, and thus give the Church more cover. The least charitable explanation is that he wants to change the Church teaching, but doesn't want to boil the frog too quickly so he walks right up tot he line of heresy without crossing it. Or for believers, he walks up to the line but cannot cross it because the Holy Spirit is still protecting the office of the Pope.
On 'the gay stuff', he's orthodox. The whole "who am I to judge?" line was cherrypicked out of a discussion with the press on board the papal plane about a specific case.
He's much more lenient when it comes to things like divorce and remarriage, because he has a very strong view of the pastoral role (to find and bring back the lost sheep rather than banging the rule-book on the table).
Benedict was 'my' pope rather than Francis, I think he's made some ill-judged comments and has moved in some ways that are not great. But he's the pope.
He's a South American Jesuit, yeah he's going to lean 'progressive'.
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This one? The one that says the plain meaning of Francis’s statement in Desiderio Desideravi:
contradicts canon XI of session XIII of The Council of Trent:
because yeah, it does. Actually, forget “is the pope catholic?” Can the pope read? I’ve seen some bad interpretations of Revelation, but this one might take the cake. Here’s Revelation 19:9 in context:
It’s literally the opposite of what Pope Francis was saying. What the actual fuck?
The charitable interpretation of is that "wearing the wedding garment of faith" of course entails the things that faith in Christ and faith in the Catholic Church entails, that it entails righteous deeds, following Church discipline, purification, repentance, etc. It seems silly to require the Pope to explicitly say everything that faith entails every single time he talks of the importance of faith. Certainly Saint Paul did not so do. And yes, a bishop is required to interpret fellow Catholics charitably and only make accusations of heresy as a last recourse.
Now, in context, is this statement easy to misinterpret? Yes. Did Pope Francis purposely state things in an ambiguous way to try to nudge bishops into being less strict about denying communion? Perhaps. But as a bishop, Strickland needs to interpret the letter charitably and limit is criticism to warning about possible misinterpretations of the letter -- he should not straight accuse the Pope of teaching heresy. If you care, you can listen to a more thorough analysis of these letters from Michael Lofton.
That's more charity than the Salvation Army provides in a year, though.
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This is because the German bishops are unpopular among the faithful, and Strickland is very popular among the faithful. Pope Francis is a corrupt argentine with declining approval numbers and an increasing dependence on even more corrupt, incompetent, and unpopular figures, whose initiatives have largely failed and whose opponents have managed to convince the mid-rankers that putting fringe groups in charge would be a significant improvement.
It’s not a mystery why he lashes out at popular conservatives while ignoring elderly, out of touch liberals.
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I was about to make a comment about the pope because of recent politics and statements, apparently he warned against the "little adolphs" of the world, referring to a politician running for president in Argentina. He's more than winking progressive, he's a left-wing politician.
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The oldest institution was no match for the long march through the institutions. Of course, there's a millenium-old solution for those Catholics who care -- schism.
There's just hopping to the other side of the old schism.
With the pope losing legitimacy in the eyes of the conservative catholics, presumably papal primacy is out the window, what's separating them still?
The teachings on original sin are a little bit different?
filioque? I would be surprised if the average catholic was aware of that particular controversy.
There's precedent for western-rite orthodoxy, albeit limited.
Edit: And how much are those disagreements worth against direct apostolic succession connecting you to your savior? You really only have two options for that, and if you've already ruled out catholicism, you're kinda down to one.
Uberconservative Catholics see Eastern Orthodox moral teaching as excessively lax, for one thing.
Is this about divorce (the relevant difference here is not actually moral but ontological; the official Catholic line being that divorce is impossible)? About economia in general? Something else? I don't think there are any major differences in moral teaching, so this has got to be about how the teaching is applied, but that comparison doesn't seem to come out with Catholicism-as-actually-practiced (as opposed to in theory) being notably stricter.
So I am kind of confused by this and would like you to elaborate.
The general view of economia, divorce, and contraception(yes the Eastern Orthodox Church is officially more squishy than in favor, but the squishyness is actually more loathsome to very conservative Catholics than outright support and in practice the vast majority of orthodox clergy will allow married couples to use contraception for any reason).
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Moral teaching regarding what, if I may ask? I swear it's not a polemic question, I honestly know nothing about this matter.
The Orthodox are squishier than the Catholics about contraceptive use by married couples (although they are still basically against it). From an uberconservative Catholic perspective, married priests are evidence of lax sexual morality as well.
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As opposed to what the current pope is pushing?
Yes.
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The problem with that is that institutional strength is one of the things that lets you resist modernity. The Catholics have resisted much more effectively than smaller communions. The Church of England. The Evangelical Church in Germany. The various Lutheran churches in Scandinavia. The Presbyterians. The Methodists. I'm not denying that there are genuinely faithful people in all those churches, and those people are much to be honoured, but institutionally they have all put up measurably less of a fight than the Roman Catholic Church.
Of course, there are evangelical churches, and perhaps more importantly, churches in the Global South, but I think the former are more entrapped by a politics, and the latter... well, as time goes by the South becomes more and more like the North.
The advice I would give other Christians is to not put your faith in institutions or in politics. The institution won't save you, and schisming to found a new institution also won't save you. The logic of worldly power isn't going to help you here - on the contrary, that logic seems to be on the side of your enemies. But then, Christianity was always about believing in something hopeless and surprising, that amid all the failure and heresy and the domination of the Ruler of This World, God is doing something in secret, and he will draw impossible triumph out of the very moment of failure.
My advice to Christians is to pray more, and be right with God. Nothing else matters.
It’s not the large institution. It’s specifically the hierarchy and the ability to throw out heretics.
Hierarchy defines both Orthodox and Catholic Christian faith. You obey the person above you. A priest must follow the directions of his Bishop. The Bishop must obey the Archbishop. The Archbishop must obey the pope. The rank above chooses the ranks below more or less. This means that you’d have to obey your authorities for decades to get into a position to go rogue. A priest who teaches abortion is okay will be removed by the bishop and on up the line. So unless you’re willing to keep absolutely silent on a teaching for decades, you can’t rise up the ranks.
Most Protestants don’t really have this. If you want to be a Pastor in a denomination, go to the proper seminary and open a church. Then you can teach anything you please. And any doctrine that the church believes is voted on by pastors. Which offers no protection at all. If a woke pastor decided to vote for gay pastors, it’s only down to getting enough people to vote yes.
The other failsafe is excommunication and anathema. Which is to say that if you’re teaching or doing something bad enough, they’ll throw you out. You’re no longer a member until you repent, confess and then you must never do that again.
Protestantism lacks this. There’s no real procedure for dealing with open heresy. The only power that can be brought in force is the ordinary person leaving.
On the other side of things, the weakness of Catholicism is that if the hierarchy is captured, there is no recourse against that.
Protestantism doesn't have a massive organisation to crack down on dissidents, but this also means that Protestantism can't crack down on correct dissidents. It's hard to shut down open heresy, but it's also hard to shut down open orthodoxy, which is a very relevant concern if you expect institutions to be corrupted. That does not seem an unreasonable fear.
Yeah. Catholicism's failure mode is centralized hucksterism: selling indulgences. Protestantism's failure mode is distributed hucksterism: some dude opens up a Church of the Revered Huckster and starts fleecing the hell out of people.
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That’s not strictly true; the archbishop has a few powers over suffragan bishops, but only a few- he maintains a local appeals court and resolves a small number of calendar issues(from a set list of options) and has the right to be an acting successor to a suffragan bishop until the pope appoints one. But they don’t have the power to command their juniors, hence why this is coming from the Vatican and not the archdiocese of San Antonio.
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It is not like the church in Rome had any particular delay in their struggles with modernism compared with prots. While the prots in America were considering the super denomination, the Roman Catholics were dealing with liberation theology.
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Ah, I should have made the distinction more clear. I think they only contradict each other if you conflate sociological and theological concerns. Sociologically speaking, strong institutions are necessary to resist the pressure of modernity. Theologically speaking, the point I'm making is that the churches might all succumb to modernity - much as the prophets succumbed and were killed and persecuted - but that God might still draw victory out of it, much as he drew victory out of the death of his Son.
You need strong institutions in order to win a political or social battle, as it were. But I'd content that Christianity ought to recast the importance of winning such battles. The purpose of Christian life, as it were, is to be crucified with Christ. It is to share in his death so that we may share in his life. Romans 6:5-11. It is, in a way, to choose to be defeated along with Christ.
Certainly, the sacraments are essential. But - and perhaps this is somewhere I depart from Catholicism - I'm not convinced that you need the entire institutional hierarchy to have the sacraments. Even for the most high church Catholic, all you need is a priest, and even then, laypeople can perform sacraments in extremis, most notably baptism. Sacraments may imply some minimal level of organisation, but they don't take you all the way to the pope handing down decrees from the Vatican, and neither do they imply that should a heretic (God forbid) sit on Peter's throne, everything is doomed.
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So far I've resisted the urge to accuse people of being crypto-Protestants. But if some "Catholic" faction splits over this, I'm welcoming them to the Protestant brotherhood. Sedevacantists are Protestants in denial in my opinion.
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It’s worth noting that the oldest institution in the world is probably the Zoroastrian priesthood or the clan of Confucius. Nitpick, I know.
The oldest institution in the world might be the one who built Stonehenge.
You'll find that they matter about as much as the Zoroastrian priesthood.
If we are to reach for institutions that are lost to history (at least continuity-wise), surely we can reach farther back for the Sumerian city-states? We even have written history from this.
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Just look at the United Methodist Church.
I was thinking more the Great Schism.
Hence "millennium-old solution." I was just pointing out the United Methodist Church recently has had their own schism (Global Methodist Church) over similar issues the Catholic church currently has. Same-sex relationships is a common faultline in religion or even politics today.
Springs to mind because I'm confirmed in both churches (due to my parents).
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Per Paul in 1 Corinthians 8, Christians are allowed to eat meat that has been sacrificed as an offering to pagan idols, so I think there's more latitude than you would expect on engagement with pagans. The rationale being, "we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God" and so the pagan worship has no power, but it should not be indulged if it emboldens those with a "weak conscience."
Of course you can say that the Pope is emboldening those with a weak conscience, and of course that's a bigger deal than the actual pagan ceremony.
There are two contradictory interpretations of the pagan gods and animistic spirits in the Abrahamic religions. One interpretation sees them as inert wood and stone having no real existence. The other sees them as actual demons who have power in this world and have tricked men into worshipping them as gods.
I understand that official Catholic teaching is the former, rather than the latter. Demons can tempt people, but actual magic and witchcraft are just superstitions.
The Catholic Church teaches the existence of demons, of course. This includes the note that all demons were themselves created good, but by their own action became evil, and that it is outside the limits of doctrine to determine the number of demons or their power.
The relation of demons to so-called pagan gods is unclear. The idea that gods or spirits are all just demons (or potentially angels or other incorporeal beings created by God which may remain good, and if so are presumably greatly grieved by the folly of men worshipping them) is batted around sometimes.
There's that intriguing passage in Galatians 4 (see 4:3 and 4:9) where Paul describes the believers as having been previously enslaved by the 'elemental spirits of the universe' - the stoicheion tou kosmou - before being liberated by Christ. What are these? Demons? Spirits? Pagan gods? In Spe Salvi Benedict XVI spoke of them as if they're synonymous with 'the laws of matter and evolution', perhaps seeing them as a personification of physical law, or of what an atheistic cosmos would be like, but that seems a little tenuous for the original first century context.
At any rate, there are a range of plausible Christian views on demons or spirits. One traditional position, of course, has been that idols aren't real and don't do anything - that's in 1 Corinthians with food sacrificed to idols, that's the whole point of Bel and the Dragon, that's in Isaiah (41:29, 42:17, etc.). But of course the fact that an idol is just mute wood or metal does not rule out the possibility of other incorporeal beings, like demons.
Yes, but under Catholic teaching, can demons actually influence the physical world? Or do they just lead men astray?
Yes, within limits demons can influence the physical world within catholic teaching. Possession is taught to be real and demons can interact directly with physical objects just like unfallen angels.
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To give a charitable interpretation to what Pope Francis is doing at that "pagan ritual" (better Catholics here please correct me).
The Catholics basically believe that other religions of the world might be somewhat directionally correct, but imperfect. This is what allowed The Church to integrate so many "pagan" practices (like traditions around Christmas) into the religion, and was a major contributor to its spread. So a Catholic encountering some pagans in the 5th century or whatever might say "well, yes, I can see that you are trying to approach and understand God, but you haven't gotten in quite right. God revealed something to you here, maybe, but we've discovered or had revealed to us a lot more; you are in fact worshipping the same God, and there might be something useful here, but we're a lot further along in our understanding. You should convert to Catholicism and we'll share what we've learned with you."
Basically Pope Francis is watching this ceremony the way I might watch my child explain an idea about how to make a racecar. I'm happy that he's trying to think through the problem, and I don't want to discourage him, so I'll entertain it; but my actual hope is that someday he grows up.
I don't know I have my gripes with Pope Francis (leave the latin mass alone); him watching some native american dance thing is pretty low on the list.
Hell, he might grow up, earn a degree in mechanical engineering, and...build racecars.
Indeed! At least thats what the Irish did.
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The current papacy has certainly been a scandal and stumbling block, just as Peter was described in Matthew 16:23. For what it's worth, the death penalty has not been declared intrinsically evil, which would be a break with tradition. The pope is making a binding (on Catholics) prudential judgement, which is not considered free from error. I could advise you to read Ed Feser's blog posts on the topic, or read An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by St. John Henry Newman, but it's the perception of internal inconsistencies that is the problem.
I try to maintain the same attitude towards the Pope as a medieval peasant. I mostly ignore his existence save to pray for him in the abstract. He may be the worst scoundrel or the most pious saint. As long as he doesn't issue any papal bulls that affect me I don't care. My local bishop matters more in my day to day life (and yes, bishops are often terrible too. May God preserve His Church.)
What is your relationship with God like? What was it like when you were Catholic? Did you read the Bible, pray, read the spiritual classics? Were you prepared for a desolation, or is this totally surprising to you?
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I'm curious about what makes your life a living hell these days. I went through a similar "fun believing period" (not as intense as yours) that was very rich and rewarding. And losing that life was painful. But I guess now I see it partly as withdrawl from a "spiritual superstimulus".
I'm sure you've heard the arguments that God is perfectly shaped to fill the hole in our hearts because the memes evolved to. Kind of like how porn is optimized, now that I think of it. In any case, after a while I re-equilibriated emotionally, and now moral non-realism is just priced in, and doesn't depress me any more than say, being mortal and fallible does. Plus, I don't have to hear terrible philosophical arguments from people I otherwise respect as often.
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Sounds like the news of the death of god has finally reached you - I'd recommend giving Nietzsche a read if you're looking for a solution to that kind of problem.
I love Nietzsche, and maybe I missed the point, but on dealing with the death of god it seemed like he mostly said "Wouldn't it be awesome if someone came along and gave us new values?". Kind of like "my plan is to come up with a plan".
I'm not arrogant enough to claim a perfect understanding of Nietzsche, but my interpretation of his writing was that he was trying to encourage the creation of new values, not just waiting for God 2.0(with a new hat!) to show up.
Thanks for quoting, yes that's most of what I was referring to. But I maintain my characterization of what he said. I think it's pretty clear that he doesn't know how to create new values, and is just saying it would be great if we could.
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I just heard about this, I have no idea of the context, and I imagine there is a metric ton of insider politics going on.
But taking everything at surface level: the thing is, the pope is the boss of you - and that applies as much to the conservatives as the liberals. If the Germans are fucking around (sigh) they're in the wrong. But equally so is Bishop Strickland if he's saying the pope isn't the pope or something.
He can't walk off and set up his own alternate, traditional diocese. I don't know if that's what he is doing, or what is going on, but the pope - until the synod of bishops or somebody agrees that he's not - is the pope. The Lefebvrites are just as much in schism as the WomenPriests. And the thing with a lot of the 'we're the orthodox remnant' splinters is that they often go off the rails to be every bit as liberal, or even more so, than the original protest.
Look at the Dutch Old Catholics - split off over papal infallibility, over the centuries have moved to be functionally Protestant.
Why not? There have been multiple competing Popes at the same time before.
Antipope 2023.
Antibishops are just schismatics or indeed heretics. If he wants to be one more Protestant splinter, fine. But I don't get that impression of Strickland, and I hope this settles down. You can't just as good as call the pope a heretic and not expect to get a smack on the nose for it.
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Assuming you’re talking about the mainstream SSPX, this is not actually currently true although a minority opinion holds it to have been so from 1988-2009. Their excommunications have been explicitly revoked with no comment on initial validity(in other words, they got what they wanted), their priests have official permissions to operate, and their seminaries are inspected and accredited by the Vatican. ‘Not in full communion’ is Vatican bureaucrat-speak for ‘they’re mavericks but not currently causing a problem’, not an accusation of schism.
The SSPX were making moves towards a rapprochement in Benedict's time, but I thought that they got skittish and moved back again? I'd be very glad to hear that they came back into the fold, because I don't think the basic motivations are wrong - but it can't just be "we're doing it the old way because we like it like that", there has to be real reverence and understanding underpinning it.
I suppose I'm burned because I've seen too many of the liberal Protestant liturgical denominations quite happy to play 'dress-up' with traditional vestments and rubrics while the doctrine goes with the Zeitgeist every step of the way.
The SSPX are more reproached than they have been at any point since 1988. The rhetoric towards the person of the current pope does not actually change that.
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Meh, he's practically falling asleep in his chair. I invite any readers to watch the video and decide if it really is participation in a pagan ritual.
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Ah, Tyler. If there was any place I’d have expected to be in the news for this…no, I still wouldn’t expect Tyler.
Let’s see what Strickland actually said…
That second one is what makes me a little skeptical. Let’s try a site that isn’t quite so obviously partisan:
Now, I’m not an expert on Catholicism. It sounds like Strickland is making the kind of moves which would be untenable even in a secular workplace. If he’s so insistent that the Catholic Church has been invaded, undermined, and otherwise corrupted, perhaps he shouldn’t be calling himself a Catholic.
Pope Francis has a bit of a habit of replacing his critics as bishops of podunk.
Edit to add: The norm in the Roman Catholic Church is to almost never dismiss a bishop. Instead bishops are required by canon law to tender their resignations for retirement at 75 and the Vatican has ten years(not a typo) to accept it. How quickly they actually do so is a pretty good indicator of how badly the current pope wants the bishop in question to leave. Dismissing a bishop rather than accepting his retirement quickly is a rarest of rare scenario and doing it for criticism of a pope or his agenda was up until recently something unprecedented in living memory. Even archbishop Chaput and cardinal Sarah, prominent conservative critics of pope Francis who embarrassed him badly, were allowed to submit their resignation for retirement the normal way, albeit accepted extremely quickly.
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Contrary to popular belief, Catholics don't believe the Pope to be generally infallible, only when speaking Ex Cathedra, which hasn't happened since 1950. The hierarchy of the ordained also isn't quite military-like, there's quite a bit of independence even at the level of priests. Our archdiocese is going through a restructuring process over the next year and one administrative detail is that the archbishop has requested the resignation of every priest in advance to make moving them around easier. They could refuse to resign, at which point some kind of due process kicks in, the archbishop doesn't force their resignation unilaterally.
There's also the matter of quiet disobedience in a leftist direction going unaddressed, while the people who noisily point it out like Strickland wind up having their basic competence questioned. One of the most appalling cases of this happened just recently when an archibishop gave a prominent Muslim the Eucharist.
There is serious schism potential at the moment.
The Pope is only infallible when speaking Ex Cathedra. But in addition to that, a core Catholic doctrine is that the Pope is protected by from the Holy Spirit from teaching heresy, thus a Pope will not teach something that directly contradict holy scripture or established doctrines of faith. Michael Lofton has a good podcast on this issue.
Thus there is a big difference between accusing the Pope of "making imprudent statements that could be easily misinterpreted as heresy" and actually claiming the Pope taught heresy. The latter is a much worse charge for a Bishop to make, as it lays the groundwork for schism.
Pope Honorius was actually convicted of heresy and the Church kept going.
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This is a teaching of the church, but as far as I can tell it has never been infallibility defined. If a pope were to contradict a dogma, even in his magisterium, the dogma wins and the non-infallible teaching is falsified.
What I find particularly interesting is that until this happens, faithful Catholics are still bound to “adhere with religious submission of will and intellect” to the non-infallible teaching. Even if Michael Lofton secretly believes in his heart of hearts that it’s only a matter of time before Francis steps over the line, he’s not supposed to tell you that.
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Right, but there’s a lot of space between “is infallible” and “should not be publicly contradicted.”
Strickland is catapulting his own career by criticizing his superiors. That’s political suicide even before the theological questions come in.
A career in the priesthood where you stay silent about corruption in the Church isn't a career worth having.
He’s not a corruption whistleblower, he accused the pope of heresy.
Now the current pope has a lot of corruption scandals he could be accused of, but Strickland has not been a whistleblower in that regard(and is probably not much better informed in that matter than an interested layman; the Vatican leaks like a sieve but ordinary bishops of minor dioceses aren’t directly exposed to the majority of the shady stuff).
"Corruption in the church" is not a narrow legal term, and should not be interpreted that way. The church has a mission, and people intentionally compromising that mission for their own personal aggrandizement or satisfaction is a serious problem. The higher they are in the hierarchy, the worse the problem becomes.
The Pope promulgating heresy, if that is indeed what he is doing, is more than sufficiently shady to be worth denouncing.
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Political suicide, yes, but this kind of thing had happened before and it was generally understood what popes would do. Dismissing a bishop for criticism of a pope was not thought to be an option on the table.
It’s not?
A bishop directly challenging the pope—or claiming his office—is the kind of thing that led to excommunications.
The usual playbook for a bad/rogue bishop who is too young to just wait until retirement is to assign a coadjutor(bishop with equal rights). Removing a bishop from office is the sort of thing that under the previous two popes simply would not have happened without, like, being arrested for sex abuse or something. It wasn’t used for insubordination.
Strickland is being removed because he’s a popular American from podunk AND because the current pope is very much a norm violator with the use of the powers of office. Other more prominent bishops(Chaput, notably) who made harsh accusations against the pope were left in place until their mandatory retirement age.
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While above I defended the Pope in disciplining Strickland for insubordination, it seems a bit cowardly to pretend that the real issue they care about is the investigation of his governance of his diocese. (Unless his governance really is substandard compared to other dioceses, but that claim seems suspect).
Strickland is one of the most popular bishops among the faithful in the USA(and his conservatism is probably an asset here- Tyler is one of if not the most conservative locale in the country big enough to host a diocese of its own, Greg Abbott holds the signing ceremonies for bills he expects to attract protestors there because of the atmosphere of social conservatism), but every bishop has pissed off someone enough to complain about it. These complaints might be ridiculous or wrong, but I have no doubt that someone went to the Vatican upset about something Strickland did.
In general Strickland seems to have done very well on the sorts of metrics a bishop would have been judged by under JPII. It’s a major tone shift under pope Francis that overseeing a growing diocese with a vocations boom and a collection plate that’s actually rising doesn’t buy a bishop goodwill to burn- certainly this had been the previous rule, and you can expect both unpopular but effective bishops like Olson(Ft Worth) and highly competent bishops of smaller dioceses like Lafayette or Wichita to take notice.
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"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
Classic PUA theory states that women want the appearance of danger without personal risk (eg an emotional rollercoaster). They want an intrinsically safe bad boy. Romance novels feed into this by creating a similar 'on rails' 'dangerous' experience.
I don't think women want real danger. They (and this is a very very broad brushstroke here; by 'they' we are probably only talking about a certain type of thrill-seeking girl commonly found in nightlife venues) want the appearance of 'danger' right up to the edge of the cliff where there are actual consequences.
For myself I've got quite a few sexual fantasies that I would never want to attempt in real life. I'm pretty sure that rape fantasies have no impact or subconscious influence on girls actually wanting real life rape.
This is generally how I frame this issue. I eventually learned my lesson but early on I was aghast at how many women I dated were enthusiastically into being choked, slapped, thrown around, hair pulled, called degrading names, etc etc but usually only after enough comfort and safety is established. At that point they basically get the best of both worlds: the male aggression and violence they find so alluring, but without any actual danger.
Yep. Human sexuality - IMO - is pretty disgusting. That goes for both men and women. To deal with it is to endure this disgust for bonding or for the glory of the next generation. This is admirable.
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Do you have any source re: rape in romance novels? I know it’s a stereotype, I know it’s popular; they’re called “bodice rippers” for a reason. But I’d be interested in seeing any stats on the matter. I’m sure someone has done a detailed survey of erotica.
Anyway, I remain skeptical that “wanting safe men” would be a prophylactic. Out of the stereotypical risky decisions—provocative dress, heavy drinking, walking home alone—which would you say are calculated to attract dangerous men? From where I’m standing, they’re not so targeted. The desire for fun and attention is not very specific. Hence why men choose very similar things, despite not generally trying to bait in strong, threatening dudes.
I would not defend the original claim without some considerable caveats, but my wife is a romance novel enjoyer, and the male love interests really, really do not practice affirmative consent, in a way that has heavy overlap with the definitional games that are commonly played, ie equivocating "sexual assault" with "rape", where the former covers "unwanted" touching, kissing etc. A lot of what happens would be grounds for criminal charges, not to speak of cancelation.
Eh.
There really ought to be some sort of large-scale survey, but romance novels have often seemed like a notable blind spot in the general discourse of feminism. It wouldn't surprise me if no one ever has bothered to look.
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They ain't called "bodice unlacers".
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I don't have anything handy, no, and I'm packing for a fishing trip early tomorrow morning, so I won't be looking for one any time soon. If anyone can show that rape is rare in by female for female erotic fiction, I'll withdraw my assertion based on nothing more than the dozen or so that I've read.
Fair enough. Enjoy the trip.
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St. Paul was basically right about human sexuality.
Also, more straight guys should dispassionately and stoically accept that they may get stabbed by crazy girlfriends. If they die, they were weak or something and basically take the crazy GFs out of circulation for at least a while. If they live, they've learned valuable lessons. Their suffering was not in vain: it was arguably for the greater good.
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It is absurd to infer that women want a thing to be done to them because they read fiction about it being done to other people.
That statement is totally true, but it isn't just "reading fiction about it being done to other people". Is it absurd to infer that men want to have sex because they frequently masturbate to videos of other men having sex? Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public! The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).
I feel like it is important to note that "it" here is still fiction! I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?
I encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.
I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality. Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference. It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.
I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.
This is a real thing, but there is context to this. I myself have had a few women attempt to provoke me into.. lets call it encouraged non-consensual behaviour. Even then, they are choosing the man they are doing it with and when they are doing it. They are looking for an 'on rails' experience and at worst the verisimilitude of rape, but not actual rape. Not walk down an alley and get your clothes torn off by gangbangers rape. Not 'guy I don't know who enters the room while I'm high or passed out' rape. Even the borderline girls.
I could see some women choose poorly or encourage/flirt/provoke clumsily, leading to a 'date rape' situation by someone without self control, social sense or who ranks too high in the dark triad, but that would be a rare exception and still wouldn't be a 'I want rape'. I'm not excusing 'regret rape' or buyers remorse either. Just saying girls don't want real rape.
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Addendum to this - I would wager that the games @Gillitrut enjoys involve killing people that damned well have it coming, or at least are legitimate targets for violence within the context of whatever character is being played. The gameified version will probably be amped up and more extreme than plausible real-life situations, but at the core of the game is a fantasy that a lot of men really do find pretty cool and would find satisfaction in accomplishing in real-life. I'm going to play some XCOM at some point today, and while I don't actually want aliens to invade Earth so I can lead a rebel group and kick their ass, I have to confess that I think it would be pretty badass if I led a rebel group kicking alien ass. Likewise for actions taken in Cyberpunk, RDR2, and others.
Perhaps the correct inference is more directional than literal. In games and fantasies, we can amp up something that we feel a bit of an urge for to a comically high level, tearing apart corpo mercenaries with cybernetic gorilla arms, which probably isn't something that many of us would want in real-life, but the basic urge to do violence against evildoers is actually quite common.
Your inference is incorrect. In fact, sometimes in these games I'll make a quicksave and just go on a rampage murdering innocent people. Do you think I'm some aspiring mass murderer now? What does this fact tell you about my proclivity to killing actually innocent people?
This is one of the strangest things my wife and I disagree about. When I play a sandbox computer game, one of the things I will try fairly early on is going on a violent spree and seeing what happens (normally along the lines of "the city guards come and beat your puny low-level arse"). My wife is horrified by this. My son is getting into minecraft, and when he said "I spawned all these villagers so I could throw them into the lava" my wife came to me and said we needed to do something about his developing violent streak, and I insisted that violence against computer sprites didn't count.
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Your boyfriend being sexually aggressive in bed is obviously absurdly different to being raped by a stranger you’ve never met. The latter involves a core component of fear that the former doesn’t. There are a handful of Bay Area weirdos who arrange polyamorous orgies for programmers, yes.
The average woman would find it pretty easy to have aggressive, anonymous (and therefore zero blowback) sex with a large number of male strangers on an extremely regular basis and yet the vast, vast majority don’t.
If you say “they want it without the risk and fear and horror” [which are inherent to violent rape] then you have literally ceased to describe violent rape. So the point is void either way.
The military is always looking for recruits, and for those with a more lethal view of blood sport there’s always Ukraine. Again, the obvious difference between Call of Duty and real life is that in the former, there is no real fear. That makes it a useful analogy. By contrast, the male porn analogy is not useful because we know that most men would fuck anything. The same isn’t true for women.
And for those of a more introverted or solitary bent...or for those that don't have the stomach for the moral injury of war...there's always the trackless wilderness of Alaska in late winter.
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Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.
Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.
I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape. Rape is not bad because rapists are rough or sexually aggressive. Plenty of women enjoy those things in a consensual setting. Rape is bad because of the lack of consent, the loss of control, and uncertainty about what is going to happen. Even in CNC scenarios the parties have generally agreed in advance what is going to happen, who is going to be involved (and how), and should have a safeword to call the whole thing off if it gets too intense.
Making a reasonable judgement in line with pre-existing knowledge and information. If I know that you're male, I can infer that you have higher grip strength than the median woman. Of course there's a chance you lost both of your hands in a tragic boating accident and had them replaced with hooks and hence have zero grip strength at all, but absent that information the prior inference is still understandable.
I think that this depends on the circumstances, in the same sense as "I like to eat food" does not mean that I would enjoy being forced to eat a giant bowl of virgin boy eggs with a side of gutter oil. There are absolutely women who would actually enjoy being raped if it matched up to their fantasies. Again, maybe the women I've encountered are non-representative outliers, but it matches up with the studies I've seen on the topic. And more than the studies...ever had a look at AO3 or what's popular on there?
I'm not trying to claim that rape is a good thing or that it isn't bad - but people want and enjoy things that are bad and bad for them all the time. But more importantly, I don't really care about answering the question "is rape bad" - I'm fairly certain that question has been settled already. The question at hand is whether or not some women would enjoy rape, and I responded because I've had several women tell me that yes, they would. I think heroin is a terrible drug that has awful consequences, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend that nobody would ever want to do it when plenty of people make it clear that actually they would seek out and use it.
That said, if seriously challenged on this topic I'm going to retreat to the feminist definition of rape (all heterosexual sex under "patriarchy") and wave a victory flag from high atop the motte.
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You are being uncharitable, and what is more, you are incredulous. The number, of course, is 57%*
*on the high end. 31% is the lower bound.
and that is the first link I found for 'women rape fantasy percentage'. Do you... not look up public studies on the internet for things you would like to know, or do you prefer to remain blissfully unaware?
“Rape fantasy” if you go by the actual associated smut that women read is:
‘Some extremely handsome, rich, single (very important) and charming man falls for me in seconds and is so obsessed by how incredibly beautiful I am compared to any other woman that he has to have me, takes me by surprise, attends to my pleasure and falls instantly in obsessive love with me afterwards while begging me to forgive him for his transgression, showering me in affection and gifts, worshipping at my feet and being utterly loyal to me until I give in and marry him’.
Please describe (tagging @JTarrou to answer too) where this corresponds to anything more than, well, pretty much zero actual cases of rape in the real world?
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I can't believe this needs to be said but people fantasizing about something and people actually wanting that thing to happen are different. Incest porn is a very common genre of porn, for example, but I am skeptical the people who watch it would actually want to fuck their family members (I certainly don't). People have fantasies about all kinds of things they don't actually want to do.
If you give someone a holodeck card their fantasies give you probabilities about what they're going to do with it. The fantasy is different from reality in that you can choose which parts of the scenario you want and can explore them safely.
At the end of the day, what they actually find out they want probably remains aesthetically horrifying to naïve sensibilities.
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Incest Porn's a weird one, since arguably a lot of the stepcest stuff has come out of it being exceedingly affordable and practical to create versus other content of a similar level of taboo. A standard porn shoot can become an incest shoot with the addition of 5 lines of dialogue, without requiring sourcing actors who are either physically outliers or willing to do dangerous and/or weird acts.
Sure, but my point is that inferring that people wanted to fuck their step siblings by their consumption of such porn would be a bad inference. Feel free to exclude stepcest porn. What fraction of women who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their fathers? What fraction of men who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their daughters? I think the percentage is very low in both cases.
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Yeah. I corresponded online with /u/rhirhirolls from Reddit during the spring and summer of 2017. She'd had sex with her father after lengthy family discussion with her parents; at the time she maintained she was fine. She wrote the most eloquent and most revolting defense of incest I ever read. Not an unintelligent individual.
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I must ask: how the hell does one look up public studies for these things, then, whatever the topic? I don't think going to Google (or even DuckDuckGo) and asking "how many women have rape fantasies" would be such a hot place to start.
I ask because I'm starting to suspect that, despite my education, I was never really taught how to research anything.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=rape+sexual+fantasy+statistics&btnG=
You just have to use the right search engine and look up the sources of what you find.
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The "other people" it happens to is always an audience surrogate for the female reader to self-insert into, in the same way the ordinary high school student at the center of a harem anime exists for male viewers to relate to.
Sure, in a fantasy where they are in control and can stop at any time. Actual rape is not like that!
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The old Feminist trope of 'just teach men not to rape' has been around for years and is a clear non-starter. I used to get really wound up about this (along with lots of other feminist arguments), but now I see it as potentially anchoring a negotiation for additional resources to be spent on women's safety. Not that I find the argument fair or compelling in any way shape or form.
It's another example of feminism exploiting hyperagency/hypoagency when it suits their needs. In this case the argument is that women have no agency around whether they are victims of crime or not and men (as a group) are 100% responsible for the rapes that happen in the world. Men are presumed to have so much agency here that they are responsible for the crimes of other men. You can see this with statements like 'its up to men to stop rape' and dedicated organisations built around this concept.
I'm libertarian leaning and have a strong valuation of agency and an internal locus of control. I despise those that are emotionally manipulative and try to get others to shoulder their personal responsibilities (including the responsibility for personal security). It's probably a large part of why I despise Feminism as an ideology.
As always, motte/bailey... you can absolutely go to a highschool and describe 20 different borderline scenarios to 16 year old boys and ask 'which of these are rape/assault and which are not' and you may be shocked and alarmed at the answers that 5% of them give. Not because they are evil or cruel but from genuine ignorance or misunderstandings or cultural baggage. Education can absolutely fix a lot of that.
And the bailey is stupider than that, sure, it always is. But the things that seem obvious to us aren't always obvious to people until they've been taught, especially in a culture where we obsessively shield young people from all sexual topics so they have no idea what they're doing. There really is a role for education there, as one among many avenues.
Why don't we teach young women 'please never send mixed signals to men about your sexual interest as ambiguous coquettishness muddies the water around consent'? Why is it 'No means no and if you don't have a yes, it's a no' in the face of all observed human mating practices? All the responsibility for miscommunication around consent is placed onto the shoulders of men by the groups advocating 'education'.
To be fair, I do think there should be some education about consent in the basic Sex Ed taught in schools, but it shouldn't be the ideologically captured garbage that is pushed now (eg 'enthusiastic consent' or its rape). There are consequences to not having any nuance around this delicate subject. As it stands there are a certain amount of sensitive empathic young boys who will take the narrative at face value, twisting their sexuality into a pretzel in order to never violate a girls consent, or even make her uncomfortable by making a pass. This is a recipe for involuntary celibacy and dissatisfaction on both sides.
A lot of female sexuality operates around plausible deniability and genuinely being a lot more 100-0 with potential romantic partners than the male mind can really conceive. I've got a lot of female friends, and the amount of times a prospective paramour has gone from 'I think he's my soulmate' to 'it icks me to even be somewhat near them, they are physically and spiritually repulsive' off a single tiny moment/misplay is way too high. Being a proactive communicator of sexual intent doesn't work when you're wired like that, as the light switch can flip at any moment
I mean that’s obviously true, but that just means that we’re better off telling boys that then what we’re doing now!
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Because a small but influential portion of society decided that while marriage norms solve this problem nearly entirely, they are the enemy to their political goals.
You’ll have to be more specific. I don’t believe for a minute that rape, in general, was “solved” in marriage-heavy societies.
Notice the specific question. There used to be a fairly clear way to have an unambiguous socially-recognized signal. The neat thing about this socially-recognized signal is that, in its absence, there is zero leeway for a man to claim any sort of defense like, "But I thought she was giving me signals!" Her signal was something other than putting a ring on your finger? Sorry dude; not allowed, and you clearly and obviously know it.
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It's cold outside...
It is extremely common for a woman to put up a small amount of resistance before sex. It allows her to tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband) that the sex "just happened", thus giving her plausible deniability, and allows her to weed out any man who would be so weak and spineless as to back off at the first sign of friction. It is a normal part of the human mating ritual, and part of becoming a romantically successful man is learning how to identify and power through these token protests. If you believe the feminist crap about how "no means no" and back off the second she fails to demonstrate enthusiastic consent, then you will never get laid, because that is simply not how women work. See "anti-slut defense" and "last minute resistance".
The modern definition of rape as "sex without consent" is an anti-concept. Women are simply not logical and coherent enough to have or lack such a thing as consent. She says no, but if she really meant no, she could easily stand up and leave or call the police, so she means yes, but when she gets discovered by her family she will not only say that she tried to get away and that she was pressured into sex, but she will sincerely believe it, so she retroactively meant no.
The original definition of rape, the one that actually made sense, was when a man who was not allowed to have sex with a woman, that is to say, a man who was not her husband, had sex with her, thus transgressing against the man who owned her, be that her father, her oldest brother, or her husband. If he was married to her, the sex was not rape, and if he was not married to her, then the sex was rape, regardless of her consent, to the extent that a woman can even have such a thing. Of course, in such a society a woman would never have been left alone with a man who she was not married to in the first place, because in such a society everyone knows what happens when a man and a woman who are not first degree relatives are behind locked doors for thirty seconds.
Yes, that's my point: OP claimed that traditional marriage norms used to make these situation never ambiguous, I'm pointing out that's never been true.
You seem to be implying that basically in fundamentalist Muslim or other strict religious societies where women are essentially not allowed to be alone with a man outside there family, there's no ambiguity and therefore 100% of cases of sex outside of marriage are publicly known to be rape and punished as such. Is that correct?
Because I think that claim is just massively wrong empirically. Women in those types of society are punished or executed for adultery when they get raped, or the man is forced to marry them meaning they have to live with their rapist for life and be subject ot their demands, or etc.
We've tried this system, it doesn't work, afaik.
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Freedom of speech, I guess?
We have a general principle that you can say really annoying things and not get assaulted for it, that physical violence is qualitatively different from verbal/emotional violence and gets treated more seriously.
Anyway, I do agree with what I think is underlying your position here, which is that popular culture has deconstructed the old norms around sex and dating because of all the problems they had and tragedies they led to, but hasn't actually created a coherent new system for young people to use instead.
I don't think it makes sense to frame that as boys vs girls, I think it's much more old people who make culture failing young people who have to live in it. Everyone is being hurt by this cultural failure.
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I feel the other side of this analogy too.
A few years ago, I bought a nice electric mountain bike. Fast, fun, capable (you can ride MTB trails uphill!) - I love it to bits. If I could, I'd ride it everywhere. So what's the problem?
It's that my city has a rampant bike-theft-culture. Within a few weeks of locking it unattended outside, some fucking junkie would try and steal it, and even if they didn't fully succeed, they'd loot it for parts, jamming a screwdriver through the flimsy battery lock and prying it out. They'd go for the wheels, or try and take the seat. They would still end up causing damage. It's enough to dissuade me from riding it, and I feel it's a legitimate frustration with the state of the city that that is just accepted as normal and expected.
I feel this hard. I have a really nice bike that I haven't been able to find compatible locking skewers for the wheels and so I never ride it downtown out of caution because I don't know how motivated the local bike thieves are with snatching a wheel held on with just a common hex bolt. Probably not that motivated, but it doesn't seem worth the risk. I felt the same when contemplating an electric bike and assumed the components would be far more of a thief-magnet and I didn't want to bother with the headache of researching ways to keep things protected (or even if it's possible). I mount my bike lights on my helmet so I don't forget to take them off when I get places, but then if I don't want to carry my helmet around I have to take off the lights & camera before I can lock it up through the strap (but what if someone cuts the strap to steal my helmet??). It's annoying. I'm so envious of (hypothetical?) scenes of bucolic European villages where folks ride a cruiser without a helmet and then just hop off and lean it against a wall when they get to their destinations.
I'm not sure if there ever will be a solution so long as drug addicts exists. They'll continue to be motivated and enterprising in their quest to steal whatever isn't nailed down to feed their habit.
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What city?
Vancouver, Canada
Interesting. I nodded along thinking "yes, I've also been a bike owner in California". Sorry to hear the rot has spread.
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If your dad or friend tells you to cover your drink at parties to avoid being raped, they are looking out for you and are a good ally.
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
The difference, as often happens in culture war issues, is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies.
The types of accusations of 'victim blaming' that you are talking about here, tend to happen when one person thinks it's their responsibility to give individual-level advice, and someone else thinks they had a duty to make societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) instead.
That doesn't answer the core contradiction. Why is sexual assault the only topic that "victim blaming" is used for?
Over the years, my local police (and a few nearby and/or related organizations) have put out information on protecting yourself from break-and enter, carjacking, bike theft, scams, mugging, and incidental gang violence. None (or at most a few) of those were paired with substantive actions, and none drew serious accusations of victim blaming.
Given that the organizations in charge of societal-level policy proposals (or implementations) routinely give individual-level advice with negligible pushback, what makes sexual assault so special?
The question almost answers itself.
Part of the problem is the lack of division of forcible or similarly clear rape from things as different as "we both got drunk and had drunk sex I didn't like in the morning" or even "we had sex and I didn't like it after we broke up three weeks later". The only ways to provide advice against the second things are "don't have sex at all", "watch your alcohol consumption", "be more discerning in who you date" or "you're responsible for you're own decisions, regret isn't rape" and all of those are anathema. Advice to avoid surreptitious drugging isn't taken nearly as badly. So the difference is that advice which puts significant responsibility on women when there's a supposedly decent man who could be held responsible is verboten. You can sometimes get away with it for forcible/drugging because in that case the man is a faceless criminal rather than someone she would date.
This is a good distinction I hadn't thought of before. It seems to track with my bike theft analogy. If someone's unlocked bike was stolen and we know who did it because the thief is riding it around the neighborhood, it does seem gauche to excoriate the victim for not locking it up.
That's not the point and you know it. The difference between that and "bike theft" is that in the case I'm describing, the harm to the woman was in fact partially to wholly her own fault; the guy's error was either mutual (he got drunk with her) or non-existent (she decided she didn't like him later).
I didn't know I misunderstood your post, I apologize for that.
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It's because feminists have framed the question of rape as something "men" as a group do to "women". Not a highly contemptible subset men, but men in general.
If you could have a societal debate about how to stop bike theft WITH bike thieves and their solution was "lock your bike better", you would rightly answer them "no, if we're all on the same page about stopping bike theft here, then the solution is that you JUST STOP STEALING BIKES!". But of course, bike thieves are not interested in these societal debates, they don't show up to them. So it's okay to assume they will keep stealing and it's appropriate to suggest solutions that work around that.
But as I've mentionned feminists have framed the question of rape as being something "men" perpetrate, so when men show up to societal debates and helpfully suggest mitigation strategies they get the same treatment as our hypothetical bike thief who shows up at a how to avoid bike theft debate. And the contemptible subset of men who commit those rapes are not interested in the debate and obviously don't show up.
*EDIT: And I think it's important to note here that feminists aren't necessarily completely wrong here. Think of the prevalence through history of armies "raping and pillaging" after conquest. Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives. There's a lot of men throughout history who we probably would think of as normal for their time, not a particular small subset of them, who would consider doing what you want with a conquered people's women or forcing a wife to "her duty" as normal behavior.
Sort of serious question: Is this actually true? It seems to me that we have a long history of looking at other groups, and our own people in semi-recent history and repeatedly saying, "look how they treated their women! Appalling!", regardless of the truth of it. I always hear leftists saying things like "just 100 years ago, women were treated like chattel", and the like, but to be honest, those claims don't really hold up. Yes, legal rights have changed. But that means nothing unless we understand the context around which prior people had understood and thought about (or simply not thought about) those legal rights.
A little more than 100 years ago, women couldn't legally cast a vote. But that doesn't mean they were chattel. People didn't necessarily think about being unable to vote as being chattel. Women throughout all of history have had the strong ability to get what they want, despite being unable to vote, even dating back to ancient Rome, when women successfully did things like protest austerity taxes they didn't like. Men generally listen to women, because men are actually really close with women. They're not two competing groups. Men generally define themselves first and foremost by their relationship with their most significant others in their lives, which are their wives. Do you really think that men would treat women like they owned them and be completely happy? The phrase "happy wife, happy life" is well over a century old!
So now we come back to marital rape. I don't know the true answer. I do know that marital rape was outlawed fairly recently, like within the past 50 years, in the US. But does that mean that it was socially acceptable to force yourself on your wife? Does that mean that it was common to do that? I'm skeptical, myself. It might just be a part of the repeated cascade of "look how bad people used to treat women" of our modern world.
I see no reason to believe it is any more true then than it is now. Spousal abuse has doubtless always existed. Our current system is observably quite bad at handling it, and despite attempting to engineer specific solutions to the problems, the basic failure mode is generally the person being abused. It is at least plausible that more tight-knit communities were better at handling the problem than atomized ones, given the observed failure modes with the current system.
More generally, fictionalization and demonization of the past are absolutely rampant and actively encouraged by the current dominant ideology.
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The difference between sexual assault and the other crimes you list is that unlike with sexual assault, people generally don't recognize any temptation to get victimized, tempt criminals to victimize you, or falsely claim victimization. When someone claims mugging, no one wonders "Are you sure you didn't just regret giving them your wallet?". People rarely wonder "Are you sure that guy who broke into your house and attacked you wasn't someone you invited in?" -- but you do see people using the term "victim blaming" in the Pelosi case.
If someone gets sexually assaulted, or beat by their spouse, or gets caught with their pants down drinking wine with their assailant, some people are going to wonder "Are you sure you aren't more responsible for this than you're admitting?", and some people are going to get offended at the implication. "Fat shaming" and "alcoholism is a disease" are similar in structure, though you don't hear the phrase "victim blaming" because they're one person affairs.
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Feminists object to the existence of sexual assault, not to individual advice, and they frame it this way because they are professional activists. There is no body of professional anti-bike theft activists, hence there isn’t an epidemic of utopian thinking about bike theft.
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Oh, sorry, I thought that was taken as read: it's because of the other type pf victim blaming, where people actually literally blame the victim for what happened to them explicitly and directly, which happens all the time in cases of sexual assault (and used to happen even much much more in the recent past).
That's why there is such a visceral and powerful narrative around victim blaming in cases of sexual assault. It's correct and justified in most cases, which are just straightforwardly shaming victims for being slutty or leading people on or w/e.
What I was talking about is why that same narrative gets extended to many of the cases that OP is referring to, which are very unlike those cases.
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What does it mean to "do nothing else to address the problem"? What if the police is already doing (or is in the process of starting to do) everything they believe they can reasonably do given the available resources? Should they just sit it out to avoid "victim blaming" when they could give useful advice that helps them do their job and solve the problem? I mean, isn't educating people about safety part of the police's job?
Unless he's facing specific criticism and trying to deflect blame, "here's what you can do to help/protect yourself" doesn't strike me as unreasonable.
If he believes he is already doing everything he possibly can through his office, he can say that (and describe what those efforts are, what limitations they face, why they're not trying the various things people are suggesting they do, etc), and the public can decide whether they believe him or not.
The problem is framing the issue as something that is the victim's job to prevent, rather than a problem that society should be trying to fix.
But that only serves the purpose of covering his ass, whereas giving advice to potential victims helps solve the problem, which is his actual job.
The victims are part of society, and they have the biggest interest in preventing the crime. Excluding them from being part of the solution only makes sense if you're playing the blame game and want to make sure the "right"* people get the blame, not if your priority is solving the problem.
*IMHO, the people who actually deserve the blame are the rapists.
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Returning to bikes, the chief of police really is apt to say, "buy a good U-lock that isn't easily defeated without an angle grinder, there are simply too many bikes stolen for us to reliably track down the thieves and recover the bike". The police can do their best to track down the most egregious offenders and can include patrols that decrease the likelihood of theft, but carelessness and villainy can't reliably be thwarted by good detective work.
I wonder if the Chief of Police is better off creating a Civic Security Chief sub-position to make these sorts of statements and take the heat from the police as a whole to divorce the role of police with personal responsibility.
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There is a whole range of responses that range from "modern women are sluts that first jump into men's beds and then sober up and cry rape" to "while we do our best to investigate every reported case of sexual assault and put the perpetrators behind bars, there are still first-time offenders. Knowing what situations are more likely to lead to sexual assault and what actions or behaviors can identify a rapist preparing to commit his vile deed can help you protect yourself and people close to you" that all can be called "blaming the victim" and yet this range is huuge.
I am also getting strong "red button vs blue button" vibe from this discourse. Teaching women how to avoid sexual assault is teaching them to press the red button. "Don't do this, and your chances of being sexually assaulted are minuscule." And yet there will still remain some women whose literal job is wearing skimpy clothes in front of horny men and flirting with them to get them to buy them a drink. Some of these women will also have no choice but to walk home through sketchy alleys at 1am after their shift. They get raped, everyone says, "well, what did she expect".
Team blue button thinks that if they can get the majority of women to stop self-policing their behavior, we can just clog the meatgrinder. Sexual assault happens to median women, they go to the police, the perpetrator is convicted, everyone is horrified, the moral barometer inevitably edges towards the new equilibrium, soon everyone is watching out for someone trying to sneak a roofie into their date's drink and bros don't let other bros be rapey creeps. Yes, there's still a chance you might get sexually assaulted, but it's shared equitably by everyone.
Do strippers have a notably high rate of getting raped in alleys? They probably have a high rate of being sexually assaulted while actually working(either as a side gig or while on the clock), but it would surprise me if the rate of getting raped in alleys was elevated(I mean it would also surprise me if they were recognizably the same person both on and off the clock).
I mean I agree with your point, we can tell young women ‘don’t go get drunk at his place if you’re not going to sleep with him’ and some idiot teenager will do it anyways. Just seems like a dumb example.
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Or more to the point - does an individual woman following all the advice decrease the total number of sexual assaults by one, or does it just drive their potential assailant to find a different victim that night?
My strongman for the blue button take is that telling women to police their behavior will push the assaults down the chain towards the most vulnerable targets, but does nothing to decrease the overall number of assaults, because it doesn't decrease the number or incentives of potential assailants and it will never be sufficient to actually make it impossible for them to find any victim at all.
If you are a concerned father and actually would prefer that someone else get raped instead of your daughter, give her that advice for sure. But if you're in a position that has a responsibility to society in general, you should be pursuing avenues that decrease teh total number of assaults, and telling women to police their behavior doesn't accomplish that.
Of course, that take can't be 100% true, there is some marginal effect where if a large enough percentage of women police all of their behavior strictly enough at all times it would actually leave few enough opportunities that rates would go down. But the question is whether that means 'everyone has to war burkas all the time and can never be in public unless escorted by a male relative', or if you get meaningful effects at very mild levels of self-policing.
My intuition is no, until you get to really debilitating and universal self-policing the criminals will still find plenty of opportunities and overall rates won't be affected much. And requiring that level of restrictions on women's behavior is holding them responsible for preventing their own victimization (instead of trying to solve it with like law enforcement or w/e), which is semi-reasonably labeled 'victim blaming'.
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I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
To many, the fact the problem is happening is proof enough of that. If preventing rape at a societal level is a responsibility of the police, then rape increasing at a societal level is evidence of the police not solving it
The usual point of disagreement is, I expect, at the very start of that chain of logic.
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Considering that I have no idea why anyone would document that activity in a way that I'd be able to find a permanent record of, I agree.
My point was, in case you actually missed it (which I doubt), was that
is an entirely post-hoc justification, invented to excuse the activists who just want to attack anyone who ascribed any degree of agency to a victim of one particular kind of crime. Your whole post makes an argument that’s simply entirely irrelevant in any instance of alleged victim blaming and their denouncing.
That's a bold assertion.
I disagree.
I would agree that few rank-and-file social media posters who talk about victim blaming could articulate that sentiment in the way I have.
That's not saying much, though; that's true for almost any well-considered/principled/nuanced political position.
I still think that the nuanced versions of those ideas have an effect on the rank-and-file behavior, though. Partially just by filtering down from the pundits to the masses as an attitude rather than a position, but also just because a lot of people can sense and recognize things that they can't clearly articulate.
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Except, there is little police can do to address this problem other than take reports and hope the half life of the pills hasn't run. There are some crimes police pretense deters, and others where its impractical. Police can really deter DUI's by placing a checkpoint right outside the parking lot of a bar, or near a string of bars and making that checkpoint well known well in advance. People will just Uber. They aren't well positioned to stop date rape and roofie-rape. Those activities occur inside of private property and, frankly, the behavior is subtle. The people best positioned to address this problem are the women themselves and their friends/chaperones. Police can attempt to pick up the pieces for you afterwards, but rape is a very hard crime to investigate and prove in court compared to murder, assault, and other major felonies.
Well, I disagree, but my standard position here is that neither of us are going to be actual experts on this topic, and what I'm advocating for is for the people who are to be given all the resources they need to do as much as they can. If they say they can do nothing then I'll be very surprised, but ok.
However, impressions I have on this topic as a non-expert:
-There's always stories going around about such-and-such a city has a bajillion untested rape kits, and whenever someone tests a bunch they find matches indicating serial offenders that the cops could have looked for.
-Ad absurdum argument, if you enhance the penalty for any crime to being slowly tortured to death in the public square over a series of months, that will shift the incentives for that crime enough to reduce its prevalence. I don't think we should do the ad absurdum case, but yes, on the margins the police can do things to disincentivize crimes through threat of punishment.
-Very many women report being reluctant to go to police out of fear that they will be dismissed or treated with suspicion. Police departments do not always make it clear how to get a rape kit or optimize procedures to get one immediately or even educate the public enough about their existence. There is much the police could do to encourage reporting and evidence collection.
-Do tester strips for teh relevant drugs exist? Could police distribute them to bars? If not, they could at least run public outreach programs to educate bartenders on the signs of those drugs being used, how to confirm/deescalate those situations or get police involved quickly, etc.
-I actually care about sexual assaults against sex workers, something that police are notoriously uninterested or unhelpful in prosecuting.
-Etc.
I don't think police can stop all crime from happening, but I do think that even for difficult cases like this they can have reasonably powerful effects on the margins.
What exactly are you disagreeing with? My information comes from working with police as a states attorney for a period of time and working as clerk for a judge. Sex crime is very hard to investigate because a lot of it looks like normal courtship just a little on steroids. Which also is often non-criminal. Also, testing strips exist, but mass distribution wouldn't work, they'd expire just like PH strips do.
The reluctance thing is probably real, but most police I've interacted with say this is victim led. The police, unfortunately, are very resource constrained, so complaining witnesses need to be on their game, or the police don't have the resources to extract info from them and follow up. People look at prosecutors having 99% conviction records and don't look any further, they have that because they reject 90% of their cases that aren't simple possession. I've seen people blow 3x the legal limit and get off on a DUI simply by being persistent and thus only 3 of the 4 necessary witnesses are in court on the day of trial.
Imagine the work needed to prosecute these kind of cases. First, our victim needs to come in quickly to report to preserve the evidence. Often they do not. Second we need techs actually capable of doing so. Often they are not on hand. Third we need to test that. Often that is not available. Fourth they need to be confident in their story. In almost all cases, they are not. Fifth we need to get corroborating witnesses or a confession. The former are rare, as are the latter. Sixth we need to assemble all this into a coherent case. Often it falls apart. One easy fail is the verification of physical evidence fails. Or the girl herself collapses under cross.
What is the solution? IMO it is that consent is not a good mediator for sexual encounters, never has been, and likely never will be. Instead we should use a visible public acts standard. Things like marriage, shutting a door, etc are should be what is important in sexual offense law, not subjective things like consent and intoxication.
The claim that there's not much police could do, even in principle, to fight sex crimes.
And it feels like your response here points out about a half a dozen ways in which we could give the police more funding, change the priorities o prosecutors, and do public outreach to help victims come forward sooner with better evidence, which would let the police do more.
Those are the kinds of things I'm advocating.
What exactly would be those half dozen ways? All those steps that are hard to do will cost a LOT to improve the situation at each step by even 5%.
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I agree, and if the accusations of victim blaming I saw on this topic were directed at officials like the Chief of Police I would agree that it's victim blaming. But the overwhelming majority of times I've seen someone accused of victim blaming they were just other regular joes and jos on twitter or reddit or some forum. And in those cases, the way I see it, the very fact someone is talking and thinking about this in terms of policy proposals is how we can tell they are the mistaken party.
Policies apply to populations, and populations are abstracts. It's terrible when any% of women are sexually assaulted for sure, but there are much better ways to affect policy than arguing with strangers on the internet. What really matters to people is when women they know get sexually assaulted - thanks to Dunbar's number that is pretty much the only time we really care. So of course people offer individual level advice, why would they offer more?
Well, I sort of precisely disagree about the purpose of publicly visible social media, which probably demonstrates why people react so differently to these types of posts.
To my mind, there's little point in a random individual posting safety tips on their social media. Anyone who wants those tips can get an actual guide from an expert source with a 3 second google, and it's much more likely to be accurate and helpful. And women get bombarded with those sentiments all the time, it's not like they aren't already aware.
To me, public-facing social media is much more a process of expressing/creating the public cultural consensus on topics of interest.
If every social media post in existence says that Trump is a corrupt criminal, his political career is probably over. If half the posts say he's a corrupt criminal and half say he's a saintly god-emperor, he probably has a good chance of being president again.
And, yes, those posts are in large sense a reflection of what people already believe. But they also get read by people and pundits and aggregated into stats and that affect what everyone else believes, both about Trump and about how to report on and talk about him and whether it's worthwhile to contribute to his campaign and etc. No individual post has a huge influence on the realty of the culture, but they have a massive determinative influence in aggregate.
Same thing here.
If 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are saying to teach men not to rape and to reform and enhance police interventions and etc., then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where men are scrutinized and given the burden of responsibility to address this issue rather than women, where police and politicians are held responsible for addressing the problem materially rather than rhetorically, and where victims are not criticized for their legal behaviors before an assault and there complaints are much harder to dismiss as 'regrets' or 'asking for it' or w/e.
Alternately, if 100% of posts on social media about sexual assault are telling women how to protect themselves and what precautions to take, then that's going to strongly influence us towards a world where women are constantly scrutinized for all their legal reasonable behaviors that are deemed incautious or slutty or w/e, where there is very little scrutiny or pressure on men to police each other or be good allies in these situations, where victims are blamed for their behaviors in ways that make it easier for criminals to stay unprosecuted, that applies no pressure on politicians or police to materially address the problem with the powers of their office, etc.
And then in between those two extremes there's a sliding continuum that influences how much of each of those categories of things happen, and an eternal battle for the soul of the culture between people who prefer one world over the other.
And unfortunately, that battle is fought through the medium of flame wars on social media, because we live in a hell world where recommendation engines and trending topics and the articles written about them influence much of what people believe about reality, and for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality.
(Also, disclaimer- I made the two sides there sound very uneven there to show one side's perspective, but obviously there are strong arguments on both sides or it wouldn't be a divisive issue.)
The thing is though, that this -
Is because of this -
This hell world of algorithms and trending topics didn't exist before social media because it was caused by social media, and more specifically it came about when people discovered they could use social media to influence public consensus and affect policy. Fortunately the tool for dismantling your hell world is in everyone's hands - stop putting any faith in social media, stop allowing it to influence you. While you might only be a drop in the bucket, so is everyone else - the more people who opt out, the less influence it has. Conversely if you refuse to stop playing the social media game, this hell world is your choice.
Also "for social/cultural norms what people believe about reality often becomes reality" is true, but if objective reality disagrees it always wins out. That's why teaching men not to rape doesn't work - men already know not to rape, those who do anyway don't care what twitter says.
Also also this is kind of nuts -
People aren't Schroedinger's rapists based on how many tweets there are saying don't dress like a slut vs keep your dick in your pants. There is also zero evidence that people saying teach men not to rape on Facebook have any influence at all on the rate of sexual assault. This is exactly the kind of unrealistic expectation that I was talking about. If complaining about it on social media was an effective strategy, the number of perpetrators of sexual assault wouldn't have climbed every year since 2012.
If there is a correlation between social media and policy decisions, it flows the other way. People in positions of power and influence determine how they would like the world to look, that seeps out into social media and then social media is used to justify what the influential wanted.
I strongly disagree about the order of events here. I've somewhat followed the development of these algorithms casually and my strong impression is that they were just made by corporate interests to maximize their profits by keeping people on their platform longer, not with any social engineering in mind. There are cases of trying to use them for social engineering but this generally happens like a decade or two after they're put into place, after everyone notices how much influence they're having.
I think if you looked at the expected impact of your actions by fighting for your side in the currently most influential arena, vs ignoring that arena entirely in an effort to make it go away, the individual activist has much higher EI by fighting. This is one of those coordination problems, everyone would be happier without the hellworld but no individual can voluntarily leave it alone without hurting their interests. Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work, that's why they're such big problems, and it's why we form governments to solve them.
Tricking people into doing something that makes them miserable is social engineering. But it isn't the algorithms or platforms themselves that are to blame, their social engineering is relatively tame compared to the kind humans inflict on other humans when given this potemkin community and influence. It was humans who did the Arab spring, who did gamergate and metoo, who turn the internet into a war zone every four years during campaign season - deploying sock puppets and playing double agents, spreading malicious rumours and photoshopping evidence, these are the kinds of social engineering I am talking about. Back before social media these things happened pretty frequently, but without the outsized influence people ascribe to events on social media there was no sense of the arms race, and no reason to get so worked up (well, for most people).
Here's how the timeline goes imo -
1.) First there were forums, nobody gave a shit.
2.) Then came social media, and everyone wanted in.
3.) But then some shitty arguer got into an argument with a person who was better at arguing than them and they got upset, but couldn't admit they'd lost the argument for one reason or another, and they said "people shouldn't be allowed to argue things I don't like." Old internet still outweighed the new internet at this point though, so he was thoroughly mocked into silence.
4.) After time passes however, the shitty arguers who want to ban arguments they don't like outnumber the other people. Internet policies are changed to reflect this change in values from 'people should be responsible for themselves' to 'we have to save everybody from themselves!' But the only thing that unites the shitty arguers is their fragile egos, they don't have a coherent platform. So there's no logic to the way they censor arguments except who whom.
5.) Hell world.
So it's not about making it go away - I agree that is a futile waste of time. What I am saying is that the hell world you live in - your hell world - is one of your own design, and one you can leave by dropping social media. This will have the effect of lessening social media's influence, but that is ancillary to the point, which is making you less miserable. If you decide you would rather be more meat for the great political machine to grind into paste, that's your choice. Because that's the choice here, it's not a coordination problem, it's a duplicity problem - you won't hurt your interests by opting out, you will hurt the interests of Bidens and Trumps and Clintons of the world. You have been tricked into thinking you are fighting for your life when in reality they are just stealing your happiness to fuel their ambitions.
It gets worse though, because of course it does, that's the social media slogan: "It gets worse!" Because while they have harnessed the language of war - everything is a battle, there are two sides duking it out and if you miss a tweet you are letting your side down, how dare you put your happiness before your people, people's lives are at stake here! - the stakes are actually significantly diminished. Don't get me wrong - it is an utter travesty when someone commits suicide or loses their livelihood over social media bullshit, but it's a different category of fucked up to actually killing each other.
And the influence goes the other way too - we talk in these grandiose cataclysmic terms, and it affects the way we think about the issues too, so when you said "Tellingi ndividuals to hurt themselves to influence coordination problems generally doesn't work" I nodded in agreement, but actually when I think about it, that's not right is it? Martyrs have had huge impacts all throughout history, and rightly so - they can reset prisoner's dilemmas. It's never easy being a martyr, because nobody wants to suffer and there's no guarantee you'll even have an effect, but there is no denying they can have an effect. But we are conditioned to think there's no escaping social media so that we continue to sacrifice our happiness to it.
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The elephant in the room when comparing sexual assault to other crime -- like say, bike theft -- is that there is a well known, 100% reliable way to legally acquire a bike. Walk into a bike shop and buy one. There is no reason (outside of emergencies) why a normal person should have to engage in any action that could ever be confused with bike theft.
It's actually worse than this. With sexual assault, often times the only difference between "a beautiful night to remember" and "the worst thing that can happen to a woman" is the physical appearance of the person.
I'm not sure exactly how this affects the framework you've chosen, but I do know that any discussion of sexual assault (or sex in general) that doesn't explicitly address these two points has a tendency to go off the rails into La La Land, where nothing said has any correspondence to reality.
There used to be a really phenomenal social technology that took centuries to develop which mostly solved this problem - marriage.
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Are you saying that women don’t think it’s rape if he’s physically handsome?
No, I’m saying consider the subset of women who go to frat parties, bars, and on Tinder dates.
Assertion 1: It is a frequent experience of these women that they get touched, kissed, and more without giving affirmative consent.
Assertion 2: If you were to sort men into bins by attractiveness and plot ”attractiveness” on the X-axis, and “proportion of men in each bin whom a given woman would be okay being touched/kissed by at a party,” there would be a substantial correlation.
That sounds like a rather filter bubbled case. Also, you need to know what each person is ready for.
I think you're overlooking other important things handsome people do because you're only looking at like, the front cover of one of their G-factor proxies.
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I had the same question, it's a confusing and ambiguous statement
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This seems to be missing part of the feminist argument which is that the advice they complain is "victim blaming" is often tied to claims that the advice doesn't actually affect the chance of rape. Which is also related to redirecting the discussion to claims that stranger rape is rare, so advice geared towards avoiding it is a useless distraction.
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I agree with you and Stock that, ideally, there is no moral judgement or condemnation but, as Stock's article points out, there are a lot of people who think otherwise. I view the backlash to Giambruno as less about his particular intent and more an attempt to create social pressure against the moral condemnation interpretation on the belief that some observers would interpret his comments that way. I think such advice also often comes across as condescending to the recipient, especially if it's something they already know.
I agree the concern over misinterpretation exists, and that's likely what prompts this "over-correction". I wonder if there is a name for this phenomenon, where a hardline (no matter how incoherent) is seen as a necessary safeguard against the risk of misinterpretation.
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i don't think the calculus is so straight forward. imagine that there is a fixed amount of raping that men want to commit. then basically any kind of defence is a defection because the defence is a cost and the same number of rapes is going to happen no matter what. i'm not saying that this is the actual reality but it is a possibility and if you advise defending against rape then you should also be prepared to defend against this. the reality is probably defence is part defection and part reduction but then it is much more complicated question. of course also there is the question of whether the cost of defence justifies the risk reduction. you could not walk across the badly lit field for a x% reduction in rape but is that actually worth the cost of pursuing the alternative route. i fear there is trap where people will sacrifice anything to avoid some kind of negative -EV event but i don't think this is rational.
i think a lot of these decisions are very complicated but unfortunately they are reduced to soundbites like 'i shouldn't have to change my behaviour because some dickheads will fuck with me' or 'you need to take preventive actions so dickheads won't fuck with you'.
I don't agree with this framing. This could be applied to smear any and all defensive actions as "defecting".
This means that a gazelle fleeing a cheetah is "defecting" against the group since that cheetah is going to eat something today and it is merely a question of which gazelle is unusually slow and unlucky.
An all purpose argument against self preservation proves too much. But as you mentioned, the rate of victimization being a conserved quantity is not necessarily true. If we advocate running away from cheetahs, we could hope that it eventually starves to death. Or whatever incredibly strained analogy applies to real life human predators.
Indeed. For example, if all women avoid badly-lit routes, potential rapists will be forced to either stay home or attack on a well-lit route, which increases the chance of bystanders interfering, thwarting the crime as well as potentially leading to arrest. In the long-term, this leads to a situation where a large number of potential rapists are either in jail or law-abiding to avoid the risk, reducing total rape.
If all women cover their drinks and drink responsibly, rapist will have no opportunities to prey on unconscious victims. Potential victims will be aware and in control, able to fight back or scream for help. Same result.
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There is no evidence for this sort of assertion. There are lots of men out their with differing dedications to getting laid on any given night. Some are so dedicated they will sit in a bush to kidnap any woman they see passing alone (still this guy is deterred by a group, only the truly truly truly dedicated man kidnaps a women from the bushes in front of a group of people). Others are dedicated enough to buy some drinks and an illegal pill, and use some tactics to separate said woman from a group (if applicable). Others are dedicated enough to target an already drunk AF woman. Others are just tryin to get some. And others are begrudgingly at a shit place for courtship like a bar because they don't know what else to do.
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1/Victim blaming is not exclusive to blaming sexual assault victim, it is normal, at least in circles of tough keyboard warriors, to blame victims of non-sexual assault too.
"Serves you well, liberal soiboi! If you were real manly man like me, if you were spending all your free time in gym, if you practiced martial arts and carried gun, it would not happen to you!"
2/Victim blaming is not for benefit of the victim, it is to assuage the blamer that nothing bad can happen to him, that he has nothing to fear as long as he follows the checklist and does everything right.
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