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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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From a redditor:

When you try and make the hips bigger, it makes the hands massive.

More just dumb than clearly some ideology. Unless the ideology is merely that ugliness is desirable.

They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it. They are the ~1% approve at the end of any poll about do you prefer building A or building B.

People like Ozy really exist. They really do have actual disdain for things a statistically normal person finds beautiful. From Ozy's own self-description:

"One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures"

"However, art of this sort leaves me cold"

"The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. "

This is Joan Miro's The Birth of the World

To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.

In Malcolm & Simone Collins "A Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality" they model sexuality with two polarities, one for intensity and one for Yes/No. So most people have an inborn strong intensity towards Bloated Corpses and that is often paired with a disgust reaction. Makes sense evolutionarily. But evolution is a blind idiot god without context. So sometimes the intensity meter stays the same but for the Yes/No marker the 1 becomes a 0, and they become sexually attracted to Bloated Corpses with all the intensity that most people are repulsed.

As always posts like this that equivocate "attraction to bloated corpses" and "making vidya game characters a bit more aggressively bland" leave me thinking that the gamergaters are not the ones with a normal scale of beauty.

The kind of people who unironically claim Zendaya is a 3/10 are the 1%ers.

  • -12

https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg

80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.

High. The chances were high.

I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.

Zendaya

Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.

just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.

Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests

Show me those AD-AS curves, baby...

Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?

She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.

I hate it when my clever jokes turn out be me dumbly not getting a reference. But I learned something today, so thanks for that!