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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25973 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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It really is crazy comparing 2014 Discourse (TM) to current.

I can’t imagine Scott wading into that kind of beef today. Not because he’s unwilling, but it’s so…earnest. I’m struggling to put it to words.

Maybe everyone learned something from the last ten years. Now the battle lines are drawn, the witty rejoinders are prepared, and the epistemic helplessness is learned. There’s no alpha in an earnest chat about the philosophical grounding of tribal affiliation. Which isn’t to say there’s no value—just that it’s harder to stand out in a field of cynics. No one leaves home without his umbrella and his casual disdain for Twitter randos. Delivered, of course, on the same site.

I dunno. Surely I’m overthinking the issue.

I think it is indeed because Scott is unwilling. Simply put, he doesn't write like he used to back then. Some of that is probably because he figures he said everything useful he can say. Some of that is certainly because he doesn't want to deal with the social blowback from writing posts like that. There may well be other reasons as well. But at the end of the day, Scott has long since made the switch from "insightful criticism of social justice" to "anodyne pieces about medicine and science", and the Clymer piece doesn't fit into his current MO.

Multiheaded:

we need access to this kind of violence. We need to present a credible threat. We need to be able to hurt people. We need to illuminate the everyday experience of humiliation and suppression – by temporarily reversing it if that’s the only way to make people see. The necessity of wielding force, of having some destructive option in the struggle is not overridden by the problem of its abuse and corruption.

What's changed, other than the people resisting this behavior being even more marginalized than they were in 2014? The tactics haven't changed, the vain last stands on hills of civility haven't changed, and nor have the fellow travelers telling the defenders to surrender yet another hill "because it's just the nice thing to do."

Nothing substantive has changed. It's still late for talking and early for fighting, and in this place, the latter is still off-limits.

It was never off-limits for the Multiheadeds, was it? They always got to do this. They always got to frame every discussion as "prove to us that you shouldn't be silenced and banned," because it was a useful tactic to waste people's time in fruitless discussions while they took over mod teams and organized NYT hitpieces and violent street gangs.

The name "multiheaded" sounds familiar, but I have no idea from where. I honestly wondered if you were quoting me. In any case, I'm entirely, one might even say notoriously aware of the double-standard and the general nature of the problem. I am not confused about where this is all going. What is your point?

I was quoting from the "Living By The Sword" thread that Netstack said was very different than current year discourse. My point was that it wasn't actually different: the Multiheads were always there in the SSC-sphere, always being assisted by fellow travelers, and the only thing about the discourse that's changed is that they now run the entire country instead of the discourse on tumblr dot com.
The tactics they use haven't changed, the defenses against them are still futile, and the same people still make excuses for them. We're just going through all the same motions with the same meaningless arguments as the overton window slams left even faster.

(Edit: just found out I can link SSC blog comments directly)

To be fair, Scott was an outlier at that time. I didn't and don't have his way with words, but I'd had similar drive to overtures of earnest engagement and disarmament, and then had them burned out of me in around 2010-2011. I hope that there's something more or deeper, and in a way I'm reminded of Chuubo's, where :

So, there's two ways to look at wish-fulfillment. One is "wishes are immature: they're all about wanting gratification without consequence." It's like when a cynical realist scoffs at an idealist: "yeah," they say, "your ideals are great and all, but this is the real world."

The other way is "wishes are about building something better."

Like when the idealist scoffs at the realist: "yeah," they might say. "Just accepting the way things are and lowering your standards might be 'realistic,' but it's also what KEEPS things the way they are."

And the truth of dreams, love, hope, hearts, wishes, ideals, fantasies, ambitions, purposes, striving, and even creative chaos is—-

It's both. It's always, always both.

We learn realism. Then we learn idealism. Then we have to learn realism again. Then we have to learn idealism again. If you're an idealist, there will always be realists out there whose narrow-minded embrace of the status-quo is something you've grown past, and there will always be realists out there whose wisdom see through your nonsense and overambition. And if you're a realist, there will always be goofy airheaded idealists out there whose starry eyes you've grown past, and there will always be idealists out there who've accepted and seen everything you've accepted and seen but also gone beyond it.

Wishes are bleak when they're bleak. That's all it is. Wishes are bleak when they cut away the sense in the world. They're bleak when they're the idealism that the realist looks down on. They're bleak when the principal lesson you can learn from them is "possibly you need to do less wishing."

And they're Imperial when they're fundamentally reaching for something better—-when maybe they cause a lot of trouble, when maybe "do less wishing" is a big lesson you can learn from them, but when there's a hint of them of the idealism that's grown past realism.

But there's reasons I can't post on rpgnet, anymore, and reasons why they never responded to my appeal, and why I only bothered to send one because one of their moderators demanded it. There's a reason I don't have discussions like those here, on a wide variety of other locations and nyms that are tots open to serious debates, fingers crossed. There's a reason Scott knows that there are things that put his practice or license or career at risk, or whatever is left of his friendships.

There's a reason Moran finished her otherwise-excellent piece about the horrors of a Bleak worldview with

And there are worse things, of course. I mean, a little bit of substanceless fantasy can be better than, like, having the world drown in nothingness, or, say, letting someone suffer from a harsh reality to too great a degree. In fact, really, it should be good in exactly the same circumstances that our cynical realist would be OK with a spot of idealism. You know. To entertain kids. To keep things from breaking down further. To organize volunteer labor. To comfort someone in grief.

Jenna Moran remains a design treasure.

Lord of Light level RPG

Ah. This puts a few things into focus about her other projects.

Still, it isn't as it was when we knew less and laughed more, and we miss what we once had. And so we try to adjust things, we try to put in more effort, we change rules and adapt approaches. And the evidence continues to accumulate, three thousand comments and maybe two or three hundred headlines and articles and studies a week, steadily, monotonously burning the charity away, belching out whatever soot is generated by burning the milk of human kindness. No one wants it to be that way. No one wants the thing we love to be its own annihilation. But it is that way, and it will be no other.

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