domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22hr ago
When it comes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the first two seem to take top billing. Diversity is brought up regularly in the context of affirmative action and quotas, with hot debates about whether diversity is our strength, potentially a neutral value, or even a liability. Equity is discussed in fiscal policy, with questions raised about the relative virtues of desserts, redistribution, and fairness. I rarely hear people talk about inclusion though and even among DEI skeptics, I rarely hear it raised as a point of contention. I get the feeling that this is because saying you're against inclusion sounds just plain mean. Nonetheless, I want to broach that a little bit, at the risk of being mean, since I think rejecting inclusion as a terminal value is necessary for achieving the results I actually seek.
The examples that keep popping up as the most intense culture-war fodder involve trans inclusivity. The most aggressive form of this putative inclusion is including trans-identified males in women's sports, but it's also showing up in places that I would have expected even less. In Wisconsin, we have a group called the Women's Medical Fund that has had the primary mission of funding abortions for the indigent and under resourced. While I am well aware that abortion itself is hotly debated, I am personally happy to grant that the people that are carrying out this mission are intending to provide a service that they think women should have available to them. This is, unfortunately, not an inclusive mission because of the emphasis on women. With a new director, they now have a home page statement:
The organizational leadership of WMF Wisconsin shares a commitment to gender inclusion, and we seek to hold ourselves accountable to supporting abortion access for people of all genders. We are in the process of changing our name to reflect that. As of this year, we have been trying to use only the acronyms “WMF” or “WMF Wisconsin” in our written communications, until we have a chance to do a full re-name and re-brand. However, we recognize this is not reflected everywhere in our website and other materials. We also know that it’s not just about changing gendered language; we need to continue to learn and grow our gender justice practice.
When this was brought up on a local subreddit, the comments emphasize that this was about inclusion and making sure trans men are including as well. While the private organization can do what they want here and it's no surprise to see such an organization embrace the farthest left gender politics of its day, I can't help but see such "inclusion" as actually being rather alienating to women, or at least as a complete waste of time for an organization that surely has bigger problems to deal with at the moment.
This doesn't actually get to the heart of why I think the persistent emphasis on inclusion can be poisonous though. As I have mentioned approximately 37 million times here, I really enjoy running - the physical activity, the competition, the camaraderie of groups, everything about the sport has been great for my life. Many runners pride themselves on being inclusive in the sport, welcoming everyone in, and meeting them where they're at. I agree that this is good! Everyone's got to start somewhere and I want people to feel welcome and to enjoy the sport whether they're talented or experienced or not. Nonetheless, there are aspects of the sport that are exclusive and taking an inclusion-maxing philosophy would be damaging. On a small scale, my club has one night a week that is intended for a faster group; not a hard speed workout or anything, but a fast enough pace (typically 7-8 minutes/mile for about 5-6 miles) that it excludes quite a few people. That filter is still pretty broad, but it does tend to cut down to people that are generally more serious about the sport. This isn't inclusive and that's a good thing.
On a broader scale in the sport, some races have qualifying times to enter. Most famously, most Boston Marathon entries are granted based on qualifying times and the cutoff marks for it are often thought of as capstones for being a solid amateur runner (young men need to run a marathon below 3:00 to qualify, meaning a 6:52/mile pace). I've always been dimly aware that some people don't like that setup, but became more acutely aware of it when the Boston-area running apparel company Tracksmith released a running jersey that was exclusively for Boston qualifying athletes and pissed a bunch of people off:
Diverse We Run, a popular Instagram account that promotes racial representation in the running world, responded to Tracksmith’s apology, writing, “No one is saying we shouldn’t celebrate achievements or have standards. No one is saying a race can’t have qualifying times. The problem is when a brand (or race event, or governing body … etc) claims to be a ‘champion for the AMATEUR RUNNER‘ (ie, ‘for everyone’) in theory, but actually still reinforces exclusion and elitism in practice.”
Some argued that the outrage wasn’t just about the singlet, but larger issues they see with the brand, like its limited sizing options (women’s sizing caps out at a 32-inch waist XL, or size 12 dress equivalent), or its decision to feature predominantly thin bodies in marketing, among other critiques.
...
The running community’s response brings up questions about whether it’s possible to be inclusive in substantive ways and yet still reserve some things as sacred and vaunted, only earned through fast performances.
Can you have it both ways?
Well, I have my answer. Yes, I want to include everyone in the sport. No, I don't want everything to be for everyone. There's nothing wrong with saying, "this is for fast guys", regardless of where you put that cutoff. People rightfully derive pride from putting in the time and work to develop themselves at the sport and it's good that they are able to have symbols, groups, and events that are exclusive.
This gets to my core objection with inclusion as an important value in and of itself, and it's the desire to include everyone in everything flattens people and groups out into boring sameness. It's not possible to distinguish by merits, preference, difference, or interests if the top goal is to provide an inclusive environment to everyone in every place. If I embrace inclusivity as a top priority, I lose the ability to select for people that actually demonstrate their interests, merits, and loyalty. The implications of this broaden out at every level - if anyone can be American, it means nothing to be American.
So, the next time you're thinking that you're not a fan of DEI, don't stop with noticing that diversity is a liability, and that equity is about taking your home equity, remember that the progressive conception of inclusion sucks too.
Supah_Schmendrick
16hr ago
It's not a terribly deep or positive thought, but I kinda yawned my way through this.
It's not that it's badly written, but more that it's formulaic. Ah yep - conservative religious upbringing that fails to actually describe recognizable relations between the sexes and settles for formulaic denunciations. Escapist fantasies of liberation that inevitably shatter on the weird, cold, and uncomfortable reefs of confusing interpersonal relations? Check. And next we'll have...yup, there it is...sublimation of the disappointment from those broken dreams into uncharitable takes on the opposite sex, complete with meme-tier statistics. Finally, we wrap up with white-knuckled clinging to any available validation for the hole the author's dug herself, a wistful call-back to liberatory fantasies, and a circle back to those conservative parents, who still remain fuddy-duddies.
And as a parthian shot, I have a hard time taking the author's complaints about the sexual marketplace seriously when she's literally an OnlyFans model. Bemoaning the lack of human connection in romantic matters and the reduction of women to "defective cumrags" rings mighty hollow from that position.
On the other hand, make that bag I guess.
jeroboam
17hr ago
Sorry, but this is annoying.
I said Trump is not vindictive. Then someone replied with "give an example of magnanimity". Of course, magnanimity is not the same as not vindictive. Ignoring this contradiction, I replied with an example of how he is not vindictive.
Now you are trying to force me to defend a claim I never made, that Trump is magnanimous? I never said that.
Forgotpassword
14hr ago
I think that's understated. I recently went on an anthropological expedition by way of mass online dating. I had about 80 first dates over the course of 2022. I was mostly looking for upper-middle, educated, career-having women and I'd say about a quarter were palpably inexperienced to the point that I don't think they had any meaningful romantic experience by their mid-late twenties.
Like this wasn't coy 'oh teehee I'm a virgin, bats eyelids', this was like... obvious unfamiliarity with how dating even 'worked'. The common theme generally being some form of coming from a fairly repressive sub culture, focusing hard on education/career until finally getting to 26-27 and their parents' reproach shifted from 'When are you becoming a doctor' to 'When am I becoming a grandparent'. Then they'd sally out onto Hinge with a vague dream of meeting somebody nice, and no real experience beyond consuming KDramas.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
11hr ago
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.
In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
15hr ago
I think the only solution to sexual morals is purity culture enforced and maintained with equal passion for both sexes -- actually, even stronger for men, as has been understood in Christendom for a very long time.
This isn't in the culture war thread. So I'll try to be restrained in my views here. But I see the author's post as a distinct demonstration of the utter failure mode of Islam, that it does not teach sexual purity to both sexes but hammers home the impurity of sex for women while maintaining the significance of having many sexual partners for men.
What Christian purity culture done right does, what it's always done, is insist that both sexes are placed with the burden of avoiding sexual sin and seeking righteousness. And this is not a purity that is eternally lost, but something that can be regained through repentance and a change of heart. The Christian tradition is full of sexual sinners of all kinds who made the active choice to change their behavior and are celebrated as just as holy -- maybe even more, in some ways! -- as the saints who never struggled with such sins. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:11)
I also resent the repeated insistence that Western sexual mores are in any way equivalent to the ones from her background. The "husband stitch" is equivalent to full-on removal of the clitoris? Really? I'm open to this being a bad practice, but in any case I don't see this as equivalent to FGM, just as, while opposing it, I don't see male circumcision as equivalent to FGM.
I'd also note that the purity-based murder in London she recounts, from 2002, was not a native English father, but a Kurdish man, according to her own citation, weakening her view that this is a pervasive problem in the West because of Western values:
In 2002, 16-year-old Heshu Jones, from the Kurdish community of West London, was murdered by her father after allegedly failing a virginity test. Her father slit her throat and then jumped off a balcony in an attempt to kill himself.
My stance on this issue is somewhere between her and her mother. I think she's right that the double standard for men and women, the teaching that God is "the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women," is bad. I also don't believe in that God. Instead I believe in the God who teaches that "no fornicator or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance." (Eph. 5:5) May the fuckboys live in as much shame as the sluts -- perhaps more.
I agree with the author that there are many cases in which women choose to have sex when they'd probably be better off making a different choice. That's baked into the pie of my fair-minded views on sexual mores, and is the same for men. But I also think this particular person may be doing that thing where people project their own understanding of their sexuality onto other people, and then recoil in horror with an inability to understand how other people's legitimate sexual desires differ.
While I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM's existence in the world, I think she, like many radfems, has utterly no understanding of the actual and real women out there who legitimately and in the deep recesses of her desire want some sort of kinky sex life. I have known women like this. Fifty Shades of Gray did not become a best seller because of the patriarchy.
As with all radical feminists, I'm not sure she's the best person in the world to make a full determination as to the state of play re: women's sexuality. I believe she still has a lot of her mother in her, though she doesn't realize it. In her feminism, I think she may have become a raging sexist, denying equal agency and humanity to women. In pinning blame for all of the sexual revolution's failures on men, she ignores the actual reality that many women do want sex, even promiscuous sex, even kinky sex, and in that way falls deeply into her childhood beliefs that "it's different for boys."
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
16hr ago
I found it remarkable that she fully offloaded any responsibility from women for the status quo. They are all being forced to have all this sex with strangers by the men and the media and have zero accountability themselves.
Little by little she comes to agree with what her mother taught her. Her onlyfans career is perhaps best viewed as a way to continue her rebellion without a cause.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16hr ago
Even if true, which I doubt, it’s by the standard of the day erasure. The first Japanese centered AC storyline doesn’t feature a Japanese lead. Imagine the uproar if the first AC set in Africa didn’t feature a black African man as the lead. And really I don’t see Yasuke as that famous. He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020. This despite Anime and Japanese gaming being huge and samurai being second only to ninjas in the part of Japanese mythology exported globally. I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made. I suspect that what really happened is that the production team went to Japan and went through the archives looking for a Black Man who they could make the star of their game and then polite Japanese archivists agreed that of course the Black Samurai was super famous and of course was a bad ass until the white people left and they laughed behind their back.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
21hr ago
One of the more interesting “conspiracy theories” I’ve read was a comment about how athletic / athleisure brands no longer use scenes of competitive dominance in their marketing. Instead of scenes of glorious victory, you find scenes of drills and weightroom practice, occasionally alone or on an empty court. This was a decision to market to those who only occasionally exercise or who purchase the consumer goods as a signal (to themselves or others) that they are athlete-coded. The aspirational messaging can't depict competitive victory because the person who just goes to the gym after work doesn’t compete at all, so the marketing valorizes the act of “progress”, “improvement” alone. They want to feel like they are a “great athlete to be”, in training, rather than a competitor pursuing competitive dominance.
And this relates to that marathon jersey. By producing a cutoff jersey you are delegitimizing the whole attraction to running gear. If a norm of showing off your competitive times through trademarked clothing developed, then putting on Nike running shoes now signals to everyone that you are not athlete coded, but a poser (the skateboarding culture equivalent of wearing vans but unable to kickflip). The consumer is no longer dressing like the high status royal but a Don Quixote. It’s stolen valor.
So I wonder, did the journalistic criticism of this company originate with a brand like Nike? Maybe. But it could have also been a marketing ploy by the company; “people are mad about this” is a way to say “look at this”. I’m more tempted to think the cause is the former, because running magazines likely have major deals with the big giants.
It doesn't matter what you get them for as long as you confiscate their money and give it to regime-supporting organizations through Consent Decrees, like Obama did. The famous "120 mil to the govt or 40 mil to La Raza" option.
You seem to buy the leftist propaganda that "owning the libs" is about bullying rather than destroying the enemy's ability to wage war.
Fine them 60 billion for not having enough signage on their disabled parking spaces, whatever you can pin on them. Tesla had to pay a hundred mil because a black guy said "nigga" without being fired, bet we can find plenty of hostile workplace materiel in "literally slaughter colonizers and their children btw my coworkers are filthy white colonizers" if we really try.
Of course the real golden ticket is finding that the tides foundation is conspiring to fund criminal activity and launder money from that activity.
Which starts by getting sentences on street level antifa groups and working up until you can get all their lawyers disbarred.
Even setting this as a goal counts as a win when Conservatism spent years trying to "win debates" in a bow tie.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
16hr ago
Reading femcel accounts/anecdotes are always.... Grating. I hate it.
Did the women in the story suffer? Yes. Is this a suboptimal scenario for most women were the modal experience is getting pumped and dumped? Yes.
It's grating because men are always painted as evil in these articles and it's only the 5% of men they interact with off of the apps being talked about.. No shit lady, what were you expecting?
Seriously? What even is the solution for women here? Expecting agency from them is a non starter, most men applying their agency won't work in this app mediated world, seems to be a coup complete problem.
Um actually black samurai were totally a thing historically. But even if they weren't, why does it matter and why are you so bothered about an ahistoric depiction of a black man pairing up with a young Japanese woman to kill a bunch of Japanese men? It's only a video game.
its_all_so_tiresome.jpg
On the bright side, this should be a boom for jokes and memes beyond the obligatory "dass rite, we wuz samuraiz n shieett."
For example, the top appearing comment on the YouTube trailer says "The most heroic thing about this trailer is that they left the comments open." Another commenter remarks, "I cannot wait for Ubisoft to make an assassin's creed game set in Africa and make the main character a Chinese man." Assassin's Creed: Empire of Dust does indeed have some gravitas as a title. There are a bunch of Japanese comments and I'd like to imagine they're chudding out hardcore, but haven't plugged them into a translator lest my illusions get shattered.
Looking at Wikipedia, apparently there are something like 25 Assassin's Creed titles between the main and spinoff series? I would have guessed there were like five.
Tanista
20hr ago
Exclusivity is still a widely accepted marketing and branding decision. Media networks love to brag about exclusive events, where only they get to show something. Hollywood in general loves exclusive events where only the biggest stars can attend. Clubs brag about their exclusive requirements. High end brands love to use cost as a way to exclude the riff raff and readily imply that only the rich and discerning can afford to choose their brand.
This depends on you taking "inclusion" at face value, instead of it meaning specifically racial and sexual inclusion like anyone who's ever seen the term used.
There's no contradiction in that view for events to both be inclusive and exclusive. In fact, being inclusive removes the moral argument against being exclusive: if you have some minorities and women it's considered more legitimate to keep out the poor.
Dean
16hr ago
I don't think so?
I'm as much to slag on Odyssey as anyone for basically ignoring fem!MC's gender when it should have mattered in a notoriously sexist society, but AC has consistently to this point picked representatives from the culture of the setting as the primary MCs, and to varying degrees used their identity as part of the culture as a significant part of the storytelling. The Italian Renaissance wouldn't have worked as well without an Italian straight out of a noble revenge story, American Revolution utilized it's half-native-american quite deliberately to illustrate that the revolutionaries were the heroes of not necessarily everyone's story, gangster London is a class struggle of the undercrust. Odyssey is blatantly a Greek heroic epic by and of a greek, right down to the notorious fighting of family.
None of these would have worked nearly as well were the character a cultural outsider, as the protagonists aren't simply protagonists of their game, but of the culture rising above the socio-political moment the stories take place in. The Italian Assassin subverting the Church in the Renaissance is also the Italian culture taking that step towards subverting its dogmatic influence through reason and, well, the enlightenment. It's an Italian cultural victory, through an Italian cultural representative, in an Italian manner.
Yasuke the black samurai/ninja isn't going to be the most Japanese protagonist of one of the most culturally salient periods of Japanese identity, particularly when the reason for choosing him derives from American, not Japanese, identity politics.
RegularlyExpressed
20hr ago
One angle I'm somewhat surprised hasn't been brought up much is that this set-up will almost certainly lead to the "problematic" optics of a non-Japanese person running around slaughtering a bunch of Japanese people.
It won't matter in any appreciable way. Some leftists might not like it, but the people who really drive the energies of the progressive movement will, in any conflict between protected groups, come down 100% on the side higher in the progressive stack. This was clear to see during the affirmative action debate, where suddenly children of Asian immigrants were white-adjacent/part of the privileged class.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
21hr ago
At least Ubisoft managed to divert the attention away from the fact that they charge $40 for letting you play the game a few days early. /trueleft
The last few AC games have been consistently bad with their historicity. Origins was rather fine actually, but Odyssey first told you how sexist the Olympics were and then let you participate in them as a woman anyway, Valhalla was bad enough that it was criticized by the Acoup guy.
faceh
22hr ago
A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.
The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.
Maybe they could get away with setting it during the "Scramble for Africa" colonialism period. But they'd have to pull some explanation out of their butt for why Africa was so fundamentally undeveloped BEFORE the Europeans arrived, i.e. why did the magical illuminati people ignore it until then?
faceh
23hr ago
My working theory which I don't (yet) endorse is that MBA grads and SJWs actually have a lot of aligned incentives.
MBAs come into a company and try to figure out how to broaden their target market beyond whatever core demographic they have established. Regardless of what your company sells, the MBA wants to find a way to sell it to EVERYBODY.
SJWs also have a 'product' they want to sell to 'everybody.' That is, their ideology.
And SJWs can claim to be the ones who can tell the MBAs how to sell beyond their core demo. "If your product isn't selling well to women, it is probably too sexist. If your product isn't selling well to minorities, its probably too racist. If you can't get LGBT folks to buy, your product is too heteronormative. If you denounce the patriarchy and white supremacy and become known as a queer ally, you can reach out to those otherwise unattainable groups who will then buy your product."
An MBA presumably doesn't bother to comprehend the ideology or its goals, but thinks "Ah, we hire extra women, we run some ads that uplift black people, and we start openly celebrating pride and that will kick open new, untapped markets. Lets do it!"
And because SJWs have indeed done the groundwork in prepping the larger society to accept more diversity, this strategy might even pay off in the short term.
In this sense, MBAs and SJWs form a symbiotic team, with both having the similar end goal of achieving 100% market saturation for their product even if it means 'sacrificing' those things that made the product successful to begin with.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
It is a testament to how completely fucked up our relationship norms are that sex by the third date is not considered a big deal, but dropping the L-Bomb (saying "I love you") is huge. The modern dating script is that you fuck someone before deciding whether you love them or not. And you move in with them before getting married. It's absurd.
Botond173
16hr ago
Unfortunately, the scarce historical record that is available about him suggests that he was simply a Jesuit novice from Abyssinia. Not exactly kickass category, I'd say.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
19hr ago
I'm for "Trump smash". Breaking the current environment that any tactic is OK for the left but none (including ordinary political rallies, which as you may recall the left liked to disrupt in 2016) for the right is necessary for the right.
But I suspect that a Trump in Sing Sing for putting an expense in the wrong ledger category(with the correct one determined retroactively, natch) will have trouble doing any of those. The boomercons will desert him as a criminal and he'll lose, and the left will be emboldened.
Of course if they put Trump in Sing Sing and he wins, he'll almost certainly at least TRY "Trump smash".
SteveKirk
20hr ago
The thought of Paxton prosecuting the Tides Foundation the same way this administration prosecuted the NRA is wonderful, but will he be able to get the staff and bureaucratic whips together to do it?
Tanista
21hr ago
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi
The answer is always, always, always the same. And it's not even just minorities. It's why there's a girlboss in your old thing.
It's expensive to do something novel, and most people don't care about African history. A studio is likely not taking a $100 million gamble just to find out how much they don't. They want to pander but not that much.
However, this other thing has a built-in audience already. They tend to just buy shit (nerds being such reliable consoomer has its downsides) and they've already accepted some female/race-swaps (e.g. growing up BSG was already doing it) with minimal or ultimately meaningless grumbling. Why not more?
(I think the writing is worse now and everything is far more offputtingly oppositional but that's me)
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Trump announces Ken Paxton as possible AG pick: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/20/donald-trump-ken-paxton-attorney-general/
“I would, actually,” Trump said Saturday when asked by a KDFW-TV reporter if he would consider Paxton for the national post. “He’s very, very talented. I mean, we have a lot of people that want that one and will be very good at it. But he’s a very talented guy.”
This is interesting because 1) Paxton is an aggressive partisan willing to engage in skullduggery, exactly the sort of person project 2025 would want and 2) he’s one of the few people trump has shown loyalty to. Also unlike Greg Abbott, who turned down the VP job, he seems to want the job. Also, last time he was out of office Abbott appointed his own chief of staff as attorney general, so it’s not like that would strip mine the Texas state government of conservative talent.
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr, and an aggressive consiglieri in the AG seat is probably what trump needs to be effective.
Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!
The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.
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