domain:parrhesia.co
HereAndGone
1d ago
I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.
That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I guess I have some experience here. Starting back in 2021 I was the heaviest I had ever been (260 lbs) and decided I wanted to lose weight. I saw a nutritionist, we worked on a meal plan and routine. I changed a whole bunch of my habits and about 18 months later I was down to 185 lbs. Over the two-ish years since then I've gained most of it back and am about 220 lbs as of this morning.
Losing weight this way required changing a lot of daily habits. Counting calories. Keeping regular track of my weight. Paying attention to portion sizes. I would venture to say most people don't do any of this. They eat in a very intuitive way that likely matches the way they grew up eating or their social environment. I think likening it to drug addiction makes sense. Not necessarily because people become physically addicted to food, but because the scope of changes to one's life can be similar. I'd liken it to mild alcoholism, which is also something I struggle with. Losing weight was much harder than controlling that!
In terms of why I gained the weight back, the habits necessary to maintain that lower weight require active upkeep, at least for me. If I fall out of the habit of counting my calories or macros, of weighing myself every day, it's easy to get back in bad habits that involve eating a lot more.
But what makes someone — who for months now has been eating much less — be unable to maintain the amount they've been eating for months but instead be compelled to keep eating more even though it's actively physically hurting them (and costing them in other ways, like socially).
This part is weird, to me. I was significantly weaker at my primary form of exercise (powerlifting) after my weight loss. And no one I had ever interacted with had commented on my weight in a negative way socially. The reasons I started losing weight were definitely internal to me, not anything I felt pushed on by anyone else.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The Sting
Redford and Newman, couldn't go wrong with that combo at that time. That's characters + plot meshing well.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The only thing better than Darwin and Jussie Smollett was Impassionata betting the house on Trump going to jail, for sure, this time, definitely, just we all wait and see, by this time next week he'd be locked up for real.
How many years ago was that, does anyone remember? Ah, good times, good times!
HereAndGone
1d ago
Problem is, if you were one of the people who engaged regularly with Darwin, you soon got to know his tricks (and yes, he did engage in tricks). As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
It's more of a "whole body of work" thing rather than "this specific post here, this one, this one" because ain't nobody got the time to make a list and checking it twice over arguments from years back (I know, somebody will pop up with just such a list). It's like somebody new coming in to a pub and hearing about Billy 'BabyEater' McGee getting barred, and asking why, and going on about how "but all you're telling me is that he got into a fight, and the other guy was the one who threw the first punch anyway!"
Yeah, that was the last straw which gave the ostensible reason for barring him, how do you think he got the name "BabyEater" in the first place?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
But seriously, this autoformatting. Why is it designed around a use case where someone starts a numbered list with a number other than 1 but actually wants 1? When would that ever possibly happen? And what can one do to get around it?
IIRC, I'm not a programmer, it's been brought up before but it's part of the inherited codebase and apparently difficult to fix. Looking around it may be an issue with Markdown formatting, that both the motte and reddit use?
The easiest way around it is to just use lettered lists instead of numbered, and do nested lettering as you go. Maybe that spacing thing at the link will work? Let's try
- one
- two
three - four
Ah ha! It still won't do nested labeling correctly, but to get your 1, 2, 3 to number right, put four spaces in front of your 1a and 1b paragraphs. Or any other paragraphs that don't start with a list number.
HereAndGone
1d ago
At this point, I'm starting to lean towards you being either Impassionata (hi, guy!) or even Darwin himself. You're doing the same darn thing of repeating the same point over and over ("Darwin had AAQCs!") and ignoring every other point being presented.
AAQCs mean nothing. I've gotten some myself, and I certainly never put any effort into the ones that got recommended. I've also gotten some bans, and I have to admit I did flounce off once myself, and those are more meaningful.
oats_son
1d ago
my government did a surprise attack on Iran
Are you the first Israeli that's posted here? I'm not aiming to make any policy suggestions based on this but I think Israel is really cool. The resurrection of Hebrew is super interesting to me. I've seen some mourn the major loss of Yiddish speakers, but there has never been a successful imposition of something like Hebrew that I am aware of. I had thought that the only way to get Esperanto really in force would be to force a bunch of people from disparate backgrounds to learn it, but there's no real great way to force someone to learn something like that, and also it would result in a bunch of horrifying stories. The creation of Israel was not without horrifying stories, but a lot less than my scenario, and it actually worked, which is shocking.
You should definitely stay, if you are able, because you make a lot of great posts and I've seen and spoken to Palestinians online, but I don't think I have with Israelis. Maybe that doesn't matter! I've found that my thinking that non-English speaking peoples would have more unique perspectives on the world turned out to be true, but not that exceptional. Humans are humans, wherever they seem to be.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug.
I have the strange sense that Doug is the rapey name and Kenneth would be edgy, and I have no clue why it would be that way. I've never known a Doug or a Kenneth! Anyways-
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Males in even slightly feminist spaces get the same feeling. Since The Motte moved off reddit I've spent more time at /r/blockedandreported than here, and while it's not "explicitly" feminist per se- one quickly finds oneself on the backfoot when certain issues or writers come up; say anything with disparate impact on men, or Julie Bindel. It has its fair share of type-B trolls, as well. And yet! There is some value to it. So I stay.
That said, there is still a line. Maybe Julie Bindel isn't quite equivalent to one of the JQ types that haunt The Motte. If Noel Ignatiev, Donald Moss, or even Tema Okun showed up, would I find it tolerable to stick around? Could I roll my eyes, downvote, and move on like with the JQ types? Maybe. But for how long? If they keep toeing the line, getting banned but coming back? Probably not.
A mod in a different forum once said that she didn't do a permanent ban "to not create a certain kind of martyr." Instead that particular problem returns on schedule, almost but not quite clockwork, to make an outrageous post and get banned again. That forum is small enough it doesn't matter. Maybe if it was only one, who showed up annually for a day or two, it wouldn't matter here, either. Alas.
I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll end it here. If you go, I'll miss your comments, though I completely understand why you'd find this place uncomfortable to stay. I do hope you'll be better than I would, in the alternative situation, and find it in you to stay.
but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards.
That is one of the unfortunate side effects of moderation based largely, though not entirely, on tone. B&R shares that issue. The calm denier gets a pass, the gasket-blowing lib does not. They get a pass for calling Appalachians retards (it's not a direct insult of another comment, you see); I get a suspension for calling them a bigot. So it goes.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yeah, but guild-busting is an accelerating trend in Hollywood.
George Lucas
I agree that George Lucas had not a wide variety of interesting life experiences, but I think illicit race car driving hobby that ended in nearly-fatal accident is plenty interesting, far more than run-of-the-mill sheltered millennial can boast of. But I agree his personal life experiences provided enough material for only one film (American Graffiti) which isn't bad but not the work Lucas is famous for.
I propose a synthesis: Great films require great directors, scriptwriters, actors, camera work, costumes, special effects, score. Some of those, I imagine, are skills someone can learn if he/she has the requisite talent and aptitude and opportunity to learn (such as in a film school). However, when it comes to the story elements and character portrayal, the film school can be beneficial but it is not the only nor the best source. School education has tendency to teach formulaic standards that please the professors. So it helps when the directors and scriptwriters can draw from real experiences- while it is not necessary if they can draw from imagination and someone else's real experiences. Likewise, it is not necessary but it helps when actors can do the same thing (during the filming of Lord of the Rings, Sir Christopher Lee corrected Peter Jackson on what kind of sound a man makes when he is stabbed in back. I doubt many actors today can claim similar knowledge.)
It is necessary that the scriptwriters are very good at writing, which requires superb talent or relentless practice and usually both.
In Star Wars the original trilogy we have a bit of both: Lucas draws not from personal biographical history but from previous films he saw as a kid that were more connected to reality and they had other writing talent and producers and directors. Star Wars (1977) is a collage of samurai epic, westerns, WW2 airplane action films, and Flash Gordon. When Lucas draws from Dam Busters (1955), he takes inspiration from a film based on a genuine military operation. Kurosawa's samurai films have a more tenuous connection to history, but it is a connection nevertheless, and as inspiration it was new to the US mass audience. Flash Gordon is work of imagination, but contributes the pulp setting and plot elements. Concerning the script-writing skill part, for The Empire Strikes Back, they brought in Leigh Brackett for the first draft, who had written countless amount of pulp space opera and screenplays for noir and John Wayne films, and later Lawrence Kasdan to polish the dialogue. For Indiana Jones, they had Lucas, Spielberg, and old adventure movie serials.
As an aside, Francis Ford Coppola is a great director who did nothing too exciting growing up, but one of his particular skills as director has been in choosing great occasionally high-brow script material. I don't think people today realize how many of his films are either directly based on or inspired best-seller novels. Everyone seems to know that Apocalypse Now is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam (and Joseph Conrad had plenty of varied life experience), but it is not as common knowledge that the Godfather was based on novel by Mario Puzo ("The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two year") who also wrote the script. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish are novels by S. E. Hinton. Original inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula is, you know, in the title. I think the only film of his I've seen that is based on original script is The Conversation. In comparison, Spielberg appears to be a directorial wonderkid, winning competitions at age 13 and sneaking into Universal Studios as teenager.
The generation of film-makers today have two major endogenous weaknesses: Firstly, they draw from pop culture products that are now twice or thrice-removed from the 'real' source (instead of WW2 aircraft dogfight films, the Star Wars sequels were inspired mostly by previous Star Wars) and the creators have PMC childhoods followed by college and adulthood which are more boring and scripted than 60's kids had. Secondly, both low-brow pulp fiction and high-brow literature are dead. Of pulp era media products, only the withering remains of comics are left. Pulp provided scripts and training ground and filter for aspiring writers whereas high-brow literature provided an aspirational ideal, and occasional script, too. DC and Marvel have been mostly successful at reanimation of decades-old characters and tropes.
Now I believe the weaknesses mentioned above would not be fundamental obstacles alone- the directors and scriptwriters could draw inspiration and verisimilitude from elsewhere if they had to, but then myriad of separate obstacles grind down that possibility: propensity to be blinded by activism; attention deficit among the audiences; economics influenced by streaming services; economics of producing CGI heavy blockbusters to sell toys and-or theme park rides; all sound plausible contributors to decline of the cinema.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
HereAndGone
1d ago
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
HereAndGone
1d ago
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
Corvos
1d ago
I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).
Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1d ago
Sometimes I just feel something needs saying, and I guess I just have to live with it whenever I give in.
This is basically the only reason I post. Well, this and alcohol.
Clementine
1d ago
This analogy doesn't help as much as you (and I) might hope because I often accidentally dehydrate myself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes but the author of the article is specifically positing that there's been a shift in attachment styles (something I previously mostly encountered as a trait you acquire very young, like, baby to toddler years). Perhaps he is using the term differently, but he does specifically refer to "secure attachment", so he's definitely borrowing the entire set of vocabulary while he's at it. And if he isn't using the term differently, it's really strange how the article is framed around "go against your attachment style, you need to not be avoidant" and not "but why are we experiencing an epidemic of avoidant personalities?"
Again the article has singleness as a symptom of the problem, so addressing other possible causes of singleness interests me less than "if it's true people nowadays are more avoidantly attached — why?"
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
That's a better reason than most, and one I share.
To me, a great deal of the attraction of The Motte is the opportunity to lock horns with intellectual peers. If my ideas can't stand up to scrutiny, I owe it to myself to find out.
shoeonfoot
1d ago
As someone who has lurked around for a LONG time, notwithstanding an an account with like 4 comments back on Reddit: please don't leave.
I admit that it's a selfish request as someone who doesn't make the effort to comment, but I'm super grateful to those who take the time to push back on the Holocaust denial and anti-semitism. Please know that you, and all the others who do so, have people like me in the shadows reading your comments, nodding in approval, and (now) upvoting. Thank you.
Grant_us_eyes
1d ago
As someone who's taking semaglutide, been on both sides of the fence of loosing alot of weight(in terms of using straight CICO and now using drugs) - yes, it's different. Radically so - it's very much given me a shift in attitude of what's necessary to loose weight nowadays, and the disturbing and sad revelation that people's bodies are infuriatingly different on a multitude of fundamental levels.
You ever hear stories about people whom can literally ignore hunger while focusing until they get near to pass out? Yeah. I can do that, now. Couldn't before. Or about that typical loosing weight advise about drinking water to stifle hunger? That never worked before - it does now. Hell, I was always confused about those strict dieting plans that called for snacks, as I've never had the urge to snack between meals. Guess what? I've begun to get dizzy and lightheaded at certain points during the day, because I lack fuel, and a small snack clears that right up.
But - and this is the part that drives me up the wall and makes me want to chew the scenery - despite eating less, I have so much more goddamn energy now. I'm able to push myself further and harder in training, and I'm alot more active in getting tasks done without even tiring. It's as if I can finally, finally use all the fuel in the tank for the first time in my life.
The frustrating element is that there is no diet, no food plan, nothing that I could feasibly do that could replicate that. I don't know whether it's genetic, developmental, or a side-effect of having your body fried growing up sucking down sugars and carbohydrates - even after pushing myself to eat healthy and exercise for years by this point, I still wouldn't be able to get that amount of energy without taking semaglutide. It's to the point that even if I wasn't loosing weight, I'd still be taking it because I want that level of energy.
Having been on the drug for a few months, now, I've begun to describe it as if I've been issued a new body and now have to re-adjust all my prior expectations. It's that much of a radical change.
From my experience, you can't compare exercise to dieting. It's two different things, two different categories of discipline. Despite training in martial arts for years, no amount of willpower was going to fix and/or change the damage my body has experienced over years of bad dieting - or maybe I'm trying to blame an external source, and maybe the fault was my body itself, a flawed meat-machine that needs drugs to perform at it's optimum. I don't know.
What I do know is, if you want to fix the issue, take drugs. They're fucking awesome, and will cure what ails you.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d ago
I'm not anti-HBD. I'm anti third-worldism.
Could it be daycare/preschool? Nowadays even most SAHM’s send their kids to it for some reason or other, I’m not sure why.
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