domain:themotte.org
Thanks, that's a fascinating bit of anthropology right there! Wish I could read a thorough firsthand account by a straight guy who's tried it: the male experience of unreciprocated male sexual attention is really intriguing to me.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners.
The tricky part there is that there's notoriously no reliable way to convert male sexual interest to male romantic attachment, and in fact the former sometimes seems to operate at the expense of the latter (see: madonna/whore, "she put out too soon," etc.). Very inexperienced girls often do have a pleasant few months of mistaking sexual demand for actual social capital, but there's inevitably a rude awakening, and I suspect most hot women could tell you the painful story of when it happened to them.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character. I think the average-demisexual woman, if surrounded by men who find her beautiful in that way, would indeed be in the enviable position you describe, where she has only to wait for the right candidate to close the bargain. But unless she's 15 or has serious daddy issues, the average woman surrounded by men ogling her tits knows that she's about 180 degrees from being in that position, and if anything is depressingly farther than ever from pair-bonding with anyone willing to "pay a fair price," as you put it.
No_one
26m ago
To get on the same page, you're okay with the way liberal democracy functions in practice- the sock-puppeting of civil society, the media manipulation of public opinion in the interest of stability ?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
29m ago
Very much the 2nd. My take as an Orthodox Christian is that fomenting fears and guesses about the apocalypse is strictly sinful, and mostly a Protestant thing. Christ Himself says:
“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.“
gattsuru
31m ago
It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.
Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
38m ago
Thanks, I'll adjust my priors. Hard to get a good sense of what may be happening "behind the scenes" when what's happening "on the surface" (mainly TikTok, indirectly) is so much more visible.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
40m ago
Can someone explain to me why these companies are open sourcing their models? Developing/training this stuff seems enormously costly, what’s the business case for just giving it away?
hydroacetylene
46m ago
Sûre, my point was men already know about this- there’s already a trope about some butch undesirable brunhilda who won’t take no for an answer in entertainment(usually played for laughs, admittedly).
hydroacetylene
52m ago
The religious right has always played second fiddle in the republican coalition; there were times it was more prominent, of course, but the moral majority in the eighties was not running the GOP theocratically.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way
No, we really are growing. There’s a real ‘there’ there.
A lot of the social media movement posters are at best loosely affiliated but normie rad trads are a thing with enough growth to be notable. As the boomers die and traditional forms continue to grow(both through natural increase and conversion) it will become a bigger and bigger part of the American Catholic experience. It’s already- even per secular pollsters- at a notable single digit percentage of Catholics in America.
felis-parenthesis
59m ago
I wonder if Q-anon causes difficulties for the Nicene Creed. The right wing spaces that I monitor, mostly patriots.win, mock posts trailing things that are "about to happen". News that prosecutions are coming gets mocked with a sarcastic chorus of "two more weeks" or "trust the plan".
Meanwhile the Nicene Creed tells us
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead
I've four guesses
- That looks to my eyes like the kind of "trust the plan" pitch that currently excites contempt, and this will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
- Q-anon is profane. The Nicene Creed is sacred. The profane cannot contaminate the sacred. There is no obstacle to Christian revival.
- Going to Methodist church as a child (England, 1965‐1970) the second coming did register at all. Later, when I learned that some branches of American Christianity centered on the second coming, I initially thought: I know about that. It features in the book Father and Son; it is a weird, Plymouth Brethren thing. It has been quietly dropped, and doubts about it will not be an obstacle to Christian revival
- The second coming is an important part of traditional Christianity. If people in 2025 find "about to happen, trust the plan" gives them the ick, then that will be an obstacle to Christian revival.
My guesses contradict each other. I'm really confused :-(
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1hr ago
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
That's not been what I've personally observed? I do recognize that Catholic churches have seen a very slight uptick in attendance over the past decade, though, after bottoming out during the Obama admin and the height of the scandals. If you're referencing the "TradCath" social media movement in some way, I've not been convinced that it's anything more than an aesthetic circlejerk of 1950s-1980s view on femininity and masculinity than an actual revival of Catholic belief systems.
My extended family is traditionally Catholic, in a way where we attend churches in America that still give services in our ancestors' language as well as English. There are portions of our family that have broken tradition and started attending "Evangelical" megachurches, and it's caused quite a rift that was only exacerbated by issues that aging elders bring to the table (think: kidnapping grandma while she's suffering from Alzheimer's). Notably, the Catholic portion of our extended family is relatively socially liberal (for Catholics), but the Evangelical portion has taken a hard right turn: lots of Facebook drama for the world to see. The family undoubtedly split votes for Harris / Trump according to religious views, based on my personal interactions and what they post on Facebook.
I see more of the same happening. The prosperity gospel is too enticing for many people, and I see megachurches as validation for the modern American vices that more traditional Christian religions would preach against. The guiding voice of the religious right in the US has never really been the Pope, but now it's undoubtedly the chorus of grifters and cheats who call themselves holy men while flying on private jets to their private islands. I will throw them a bone, in that they are succeeding in creating communities where communities have been hollowed out: some of the healthiest white, rural communities (in terms of networks) are organized around these Evangelical churches. But my praise stops abruptly there.
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.
There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Well, if anything I think we’ll see a lot more “orthodox” religious expression than anything else. The thing that seems to be happening is that people join churches with stronger dogmas and less ecumenical practices and a sort of “purity culture”. For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion. On the Protestant end, the number of things that are “demonic” are growing really fast. There are influencers who are convinced that fast food is demonic, or that relatively common symbols are demonic. Fast food is unhealthy, but I think most people would have laughed at the idea of McDonald’s being satanic (the teen spitting in your food might have been a “satanist” in the goth bug your parents sense when I was in high school, but nobody thought that McDonald’s itself was demonic. Catholics have always had sedavacantists and traditionalists.
I expect that these groups will basically push to create places where they can live in religious communities perhaps something on the order of the Mennonite or Amish communities where those religious values and interpretations are at least social expectations if not codified in local laws. Convinced that these groups want religion to play a very large role in how life is lived. They want to have I.e. orthodoxy and those rules inform every aspect of their lives.
Sunshine
1hr ago
Even if the overall population of Christians is going up due to population growth, there's a clear trend towards secularism in the countries at the end of their development cycles (high education, wealthy, etc). If current trends continue then all the currently-developing countries will eventually become developed countries and go through the same secularization process. If current trends don't continue then all bets are off anyway.
Also, it's pretty clear that political power has largely gone out of religion in the world's great powers. The Church of England used to spend its time trying to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, now it's a nearly-atheistic social club. The medieval Vatican waged wars against kings and emperors, now the Pope is just a celebrity ruling over a country the size of a park. If you're at all familiar with the power religion used to have, it should be self-evident that it doesn't have that anymore.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Source for this? It seems to me that Christianity is growing again as the more 'scientific' ideologies are on the decline.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
The quality of legal advice current LLMs give is miles better than what you could get in 2023. It's still not perfect but now it's at the point where you need to have a decent idea of the field to understand where it goes wrong compared to back then when an intelligent layman with Google would have been able to point out the errors.
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions. For example, you can't teach it in schools. Indoctrinating other people's children is one of the main reasons to have a religion in the first place, so it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Nowadays, if you have a metaphysical theory about the intangible nature of human essence with strong dictates about how humans should behave, you call it a new field of science and loudly insist that your priests are scientists. Since your "field of science" does not interact with any previously-existing field of science and all scientists within that field will be your priests, no one can prove your "science" wrong.
See: gender science.
I expect to see religions gradually replaced by a variety of woo-woo superstitions and mystery cults that loudly insist that they aren't religious in nature.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
deluxev2
1hr ago
Voting systems. I'm very against STV and would love to hear some counterarguments if you've got them so I can feel sane again. STV makes ballots unresolvable on a local level; local counting is no longer easily aggregated. Every ballot needs to be held onto to possibly be recounted, possibly multiple times depending on exactly how the global election is progressing. Local recounts can force global recounts, multiple times as who is eliminated changes. On top of that automated vote counting has to rely on OCR or heavier use of voting machines instead of scantron like devices.
STV doesn't even give you compromise candidates, it only prevents spoiler candidates. By example, if 50% want A > B > C and 50% want C > B > A, B is immediately eliminated and you have FPTP.
The fact that all the talk is about STV instead of approval voting (a better, simpler system) is either proof of a psy-op or proof that we don't deserve better government.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future? Up until recently, the religious right seemed to be a mainstay of at least American politics. In Europe of course, Christianity is mostly an irrelevant force (though theoretically Catholics should have some weight?).
However, the evangelical right has been losing quite a bit of power and cultural cachet, and we're seeing the rise of more traditional versions of Christianity such as Catholicism and to a lesser extent, Orthodoxy. Buddhism has also made inroads in a more serious way, as well as Islam mostly via immigration of Muslim peoples.
In the future, how will these religions impact politics? Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century. That being said, I feel it could shake out in many different areas on the political spectrum - ironically, many of the Orthodox priests I know personally are surprisingly liberal.
One area we could see a resurgence is in monasteries, and the potential downstream impact in local communities. Within the Catholic community (and Orthodoxy in the U.S.) there has been a groundswell lately of pushes for more monasteries, and revitalizing the monastic order in general. We'll see how it shakes out.
Tell me, what do you think religion will do to the modern political landscape?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
It's a piece of Web 1.0 lore: https://www.somethingawful.com/icq-pranks/icq-transcript-space/1/
faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men
I can agree he's wrong in that XAI is not even the first company that has developed AI GFs, and gooners have been working on it since day 0 of mildly competent LLMs. But you're wrong in calling it ridiculous. Qualitatively current technology is all that is required to have the impact he predicts, the rest is a question of training customized models, giving them access to your personal data, etc.
Do you think you'd be able to predict the exact inflection point for all the other technologies, as they were being developed? There was quite a few years between the first tittie I saw online, and the displacement of other forms of porn, for example.
jkf
2hr ago
that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender.
Fish... ah, pretty clearly don't have gender? It can be pretty hard to even tell what sex they are without cutting them open, nevermind enquiring as to their feelings as to the roles imposed upon them by fish society.
Maybe next time the Army Corp biologists will write their report using proper scientific language; serves them right if you ask me.
wingdingspringking
2hr ago
This touches on something I've been wondering about for a while: Do all of these qualitative updates to LLMs actually translate to new use cases? In my case, the only two updates that have had any significant impact on my LLM use were the jump from ChatGpt3.5 to 4, and the increase of the context window from small to essentially limitless (yes it still has limits, but in day to day use I rarely hit them). Both of those happened in 2023. Since then, LLM tooling has become vastly better. But I struggle to think of anything that I can do now with an LLM that I couldn't have done in 2023 based purely on the quality of the LLM output.
Trust the plan snark is directed at human plans. God is on a different level. If it discredits the eschatalogical Christians that will probably impact the popularity of Christianity I agree - because threats are a good way to bully the ignorant into line - but it can only be good for Christianity on the whole - and the world, since it reduces the number of people doing things like trying to breed special cows to bring about the end times.
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