domain:mattlakeman.org
felis-parenthesis
39m ago
Because the actual history is messy and embarrassing to every-one.
The early medieval church was clear enough that belief in witch-craft-as-real-magic was superstition left over from the bad old days (think 800 AD). Witch-craft-as-baseless-superstition was heresy and subject to punishment, but you could get in trouble both ways. You committed heresy if you put yourself forward as a witch who could really do the magic. You committed heresy if you tried to protect society against some-one who you asserted was a threat because they could really do the magic.
Then, starting around 1400 AD (but slowly at first) mankind regressed, becoming afraid of witchcraft-as-real-magic.
This is obviously embarrassing to the Catholic Church, who knew the truth and lost it. But it is embarrassing to Enlightenment thinkers too. First, the deterioration happens late; the early stirrings of modernity are making people less rational. Second, the Enlightenment could have taken witch burning as showing the fragility of human knowledge and a case study in losing truths once known. But instead it just ignored the real and troubling story in favour of bashing the Church as always in error.
Recall the story that Columbus met opposition to sailing West to China from people who believed that the Earth was flat. It originated in a "biography" that changed the story to make it more dramatic. Then anti-Catholics took it up, because the flat earth myth was a convenient stick to beat the Catholics. There is a problem with anti-religious campaigners just making stuff up.
I find this disillusioning. As a young man I believed that the 18th Century Enlightenment guys were the good guys who were opposing the Catholic Church (who were the bad guys because they just made stuff up). Now I find that every-one is just making stuff up. And twisting the witch craft story to bash Catholics isn't the only example, so I cannot excuse it as "just once".
WhiningCoil
54m ago
Witnessing what my friends went through, as well as living through my own batch of lackluster dates, I wondered if I should just wait to have sex.
The idea felt odd. And boring. I wasn’t religious, nor did I have my sights set on a diamond ring. So I wasn’t scared of hell, nor a future puritanical husband. “What are you waiting for?” people would ask me. I’d ask myself as well. I didn’t have the gall to admit that I was sort of waiting on my gut to tell me when. It felt like a cop-out. I knew gut feelings were wonky moral compasses– afterall, that semester we were reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in class, and learning how Huck’s gut feeling of guilt for abetting a runaway slave is shaped by the social mores he’s been exposed to. That was also the year the media littered the term “implicit bias” in basically every headline,27 to unmask rampant racism and sexism in institutions. Suffice it to say, gut feelings were not in season.
Now estranged from the sex-positivity I once adored, I do believe there is a right and wrong time to have sex. I also believe that your sexual footprint does affect you, for better or for worse. And I think a lot of girls are having sex at the wrong time. All these beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the principles of sex-positivity, which beats out any notion of right or wrong sex, other than via the consent-yardstick.
A proper feminist should make prescriptions not off some optimistic blank-slate, but from these basic phenomena: girls are more agreeable, more susceptible to manipulation, cognitive-sexual overload, and sexual blueprinting. They are more likely to be pressured into the receiving end of violent porn fantasies, lied to about STDs, addled by sexual regret, and victim to partner violence.
Anyone who turns a blind eye to this epidemic and eggs on young women to carelessly leap into bed with guys in the name of female liberation, is grooming girls with a flashy, pink glove.
Instead of working against the culture of rampant sexual coercion, pop feminism basically just serves as a bottom-bitch.
Everything old is new again, isn't it? It's fascinating watching someone think out loud, going round and round and found in a neurotic spiral for 30,000 words.
When I tell people that I’m opting out of having sex, I get told a lot of things. That I’m prudish, wasting my “prime,” overthinking it, a control-freak, or even pathological.
I mean, both can be right.
It's fascinating, going through this bizarre, alternate reality hellscape of sexual relations. Absent is even a single person in a monogamous relationship. Not even a single one. How is that even possible? You don't know one single person in a relationship? You don't even know of one? This reads like some sort of speculative fiction where relationships have been outlawed.
Then again, I'm married. I've been with the same woman 15 years. Apps were brand fucking new right when I met my wife, old school dating websites being the standard. In my 20's I remember a lot of people in turbulent relationships. Or the weird friend groups where it seemed like everyone had tried a relationship with everyone at some point. Those were bizarre to me. It was rough. I know a few guys who opted out, and just couldn't take women's high expectations, sociopathic behavior and imperious attitudes anymore.
Maybe there really are just two breeds of men. The ones depicted in this article, who somehow get these broken women to throw themselves at him, and everyone else who these broken women take their trauma out on.
I can imagine how the experience of dating has deteriorated greatly since I was active. But the reality of this article where a monogamous relationship is literally not an option for anyone, and doesn't exist at all, seems a bit extreme. It seems more like cope to justify sex work and/or trying to rebrand as some sort of "intellectual" e-girl.
She'd be better served deleting her entire internet presence.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
25m ago
No one thing Sam Altman has done sticks out as evil.
His advocacy for regulatory capture in his company’s favor is a pretty clear cut example of it.
YoungAchamian
just now
"I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
This isn't exclusive to men. Both genders don't like it when you turn down their offers of sex. Badgering men into sex by calling them gay, questioning their masculinity, and suggesting impotence are classic Women variations of this playbook. Many Women don't respect a Man's no either. We realistically need to create social conditions where everyone feels not only empowered to say no but people have empathy for that no and can respect it.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
just now
Jos on kerran äidiksi syntynyt
Joka kerran on äidiksi syntynyt,
hän äiti on kaikkien lasten,
ja kaikkia maailman lapsia
hän on painanut rintaansa vasten,
ja maailman lasten itkua
hän on korvissaan alkanut kuulla,
sillä maailman lapset puhuvat
hänen omien lastensa suulla.
-Anne-Mari Kaskinen –
Lewis2
4m ago
Yeah, if you want a god to help you with actual fighting, you want Ares. Athena, as you said, was more about behind-the-lines strategy.
hydroacetylene
37m ago
Red tribe whites with their upper 90s IQ have a TFR on par with Latinos.
You know, this does hit on a curious experience I had.
I was going through my big stack of George Carlin DVDs, and I got to one which opened on about 10 minutes of unadulterated white bashing. Now I recall, way back in the day, when I first watched this special, that never bothered me. But that was also performed in an era before State and Federal governments were nakedly discriminating against me. Or the schools I would send my children to began gutting the curriculum to cater to lower black achievement levels. Or preposterous notions of "restorative justice" allowed feral blacks to terrorize schools with impunity. Or before decent, productive, law abiding people were punished to the maximum extent of the law for refusing to allow themselves to be victimized by habitual criminals with a politically relevant melanin content.
It reminds me how I laughed at similar bits by Louis CK about how whites have had it so good, we've gonna get fucked so hard when the tables turn. It was funnier as a hypothetical, in the context of lots of other challenging and awful bits. Now it just makes me angry beyond reason to watch it happening in earnest.
Did I care about AC2's pope shiving when it came out? Nope. But it also came out in a very different cultural climate. Things that were hypothetical back then are actually happening now. I also never cared when the pilot episode of The Lone Gunman involved an airplane crashing into the twin towers, and it was all framed as marginally goofy hijinks. But things happened between now and then which significantly changed the cultural context in which an episode like that, made today, would be received. This is not hypocrisy or evidence of any sort of inconsistency.
Edit: I want to note, I know "feral blacks" might be an inflammatory phrase, but I am honestly at a loss as to what else to use. There is a massive cohort of aggressively and confidently antisocial and violent blacks in our schools, enabled by feckless "restorative justice" policies. They are a force of destruction, disruption and violence, unaccountable to all, and utterly untamable, as though a pack of feral animals had been loosed in schools. Some protected species nobody was allowed to do anything about.
NewCharlesInCharge
1hr ago
If she converts to Christianity she can claim to follow the example of all the reformed prostitutes turned saints.
I don’t think Islam has such a thing. When I asked ChatGPT for a parallel it gave me a male mystic who was never a prostitute.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
1hr ago
Humans aren't even going to be recognizable as such in a few hundred years, pearl clutching about population decline is a non-starter in a world that still has 8 billion and climbing and robotic and AI tech that is about to make us all obsolete anyway.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11m ago
FWIW, I think modern Christian purity culture is bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense of something fake and not intended to be taken seriously, not as a moral condemnation). Apart from a small number of families still practicing Christian patriarchy
There is a certain minimum degree of patriarchy in societies with enough socially necessary physically demanding work that they need non-elite men to be productive (i.e. not hoe cultures). It is an interesting question how close medieval Christian patriarchy got to that minimum. I find it entirely plausible that if you asked the question "Where was the best place to be a non-elite woman in year X given various gender norms in different cultures?" that the answer would be "Cishajnal Western Europe" for most values of X between 1100CE and the present.
hydroacetylene
18m ago
Why don’t you marry her? Only a couple of years of seeing each other every few months, then she’ll I’m sure have a foot in the door to live in Scotland with you. Your family thinks it’s a good idea, her dad would definitely know if it isn’t. You should just go for it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3hr ago
I've pwritten on this at some length in the past](https://www.themotte.org/post/865/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/185340?context=8#context), but the evidence is much stronger than "I don't like the looks of this". I'll accept that the elections are free and fair when there aren't thousands of people mentally adjudicated incompetent voting in my state. If the clerk's office admits it's not capable of running a cross-check that prevents that subset, specifically covered as ineligible to vote, I have no idea why anyone would believe it's capable of preventing the myriad of other ineligible voting that occurs.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
42m ago
I enjoyed the article. I think I'm one contributing factor here is what Scott identified over a decade ago in should you reverse any advice you hear. People in either sex positive or purity cultures are probably in thick information bubbles that take those positions to pathological extremes. This is probably even worse today than when Scott's article was written.
I suspect a lot of people operating in an enthusiastic consent framework would agree with the author that the circumstances she describes some of her friends having sex under were problematic. There's a reason those articles have the disclaimers they do. I suspect they would do so using a language of consent, that various kinds of pressure had rendered the sex in question not really consensual. The problem with this angle is that it turns what is supposed to be a simple and intuitive concept into one that hides a lot of complexity and nuance.
From my perspective it seems like there are two key issues. Firstly, women feel a social and interpersonal pressure to have sex they don't want. Like they need a good reason not to have sex with someone. This is totally backwards to how it ought to work. You do not need any reason to refrain from sex with someone beyond "I don't want to." "No" is a complete sentence, as they say. Related to the first, many men apparently feel no compulsion to respect that "no." Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds. So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
You can totally do that today, it would take 5 seconds of google to find a story about someone beating up his daughter’s boyfriend for messing around. And there are literally laws on the books in multiple states against things like ‘seduction under false promises’.
I like Lindsay's take on the whole DEI. Paraphrasing:
Diversity means whatever is opposing the cultural hegemony. That is why room full of women feminists can be diverse and why Larry Elder can be a Black Face of White Supremacy. So in practice, diversity means that you have to welcome subversive elements into the company/movement/club or whatever, diversity needs to be ensured by cadre of political commissars who themselves are experts on diversity.
Inclusion means that you are welcoming to "diversity", it is making sure that the subversive elements can have free reign. The basic form of inclusion is basically censorship - you will be subject to certain "ethical standards", that you will not do hate speech or microagressions. The advanced level of inclusion is called belonging, this means that you now have to be active and supportive of these elements: you have to put pronouns into your bio, you have to get rainbow keychain for your company card and so forth.
Equity means adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal on basis of diversity. This is your cookie cutter socialist redistribution so that subversive elements get necessary resources to thrive and multiply, but now expanded to other domains such as positions of power inside companies or in casting of movies or moderating teams of some random forum. As with other socialist movements that were also very keen on redistribution, it has to be enforced by diversity and inclusion experts - those are the vanguard forces that will at first enforce equitable society until this becomes automatic as when socialism is supposed to voluntarily turn into communism.
hydroacetylene
27m ago
And- I’m going off the numbers gathered by Lyman stone so I don’t have them handy, I’m just remembering- nobody really likes it. 40% of women want to wait until they’re married, and a large majority of women want to meet each other’s families before sex. The percentage of women that like this system is likely negligible and men are mostly complaining about it.
ArmedTooHeavily
32m ago
Thank you, I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone questioning the basic validity of this whole story. I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.
hydroacetylene
33m ago
I’ve definitely heard this before, and it seems like solving the problem for shy, introverted women with (de facto)conservative preferences would solve the problem for normie men.
Orlan-10 is more of a long-range long endurance spotter, it has an ICE engine. Lancets are getting targeting data from small electric recon drones with 2-3 hour endurance. We know Orlans can be acquired by stingers- there's even footage of it getting shot down from drone's POV. Electric drones are probably way less conspicuous in IR.
, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.
If you spot the flatbed trucks before they release the drones, you can hit them with PGMs or cluster MLRS strikes. Electric drone range is quite limited..
At this point, anyone who isn't developing autonomous defense drone swarms isn't gonna make it. With AI and terrain following, getting rid of lots of drones is going to be very hard next to impossible. Filling the air with flak fragments gets you only so far. It's strictly line of sight.
Guess what's line of sight: 2 mach ATGMs like the Russians have. So anything exposed is toast. There's also the obvious counterplays, such as drones marking the spot the flak is firing from, sending info back to MLRS and then you have 500 cluster bomblets on that location within a 30 seconds, ideally. Or, you know, a tank firing a HE round from 10 km away.
focus on grenade launchers at the squad level,
I mean, grenade launchers integrated with drone spotting are stuff of nightmares. Unless you're running like a lunatic or under hard cover, you're gonna get blown up. What's wrong there?
Modern warfare makes me wish for a nuclear winter. People getting blown up from 50 km away because a drone spots them, or getting hunted down by FPVs.. bad. It's bleak and only ever going to get more bleak.
I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.
I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range. I presume it can carry some short range IR missiles, right? Are these helis designed to be really cheap ? Can you truly build a cheap helicotper ?
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything.
Yes, that's part of the game. I guess we're supposed to believe that the CEO that's part of a company dealing with AI, that recently had a kerfuffle involving an AI voice from a movie just coincidentally tweeted the one thing that perfectly touched on all of these things?
Thing is, this sort of plausible deniability Twitter baiting is fine for a pop star, but maybe not appropriate for actual grownups. This guy is building AI and beating off board attacks; he's as close as we come to comic book CEO-geniuses like Lex Luthor.
He doesn't get to act like Taylor Swift or Drake.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
Sure, but releasing something for a Youtube video is different from releasing a large commercial product. Imagine thousands of man-hours on the voice making sure the AI never says anything embarassing, pronounces sensitive words appropriately, still sounds pleasing and attractive, doesn't accidentally sound angry when you prompt it a certain way... You have a bunch of nerds who watched "her" and want to use ScarJo's voice, so you prototype with that, hoping everythijg will work out. Now she says no. What do you do? Find someone with a similar voice so you don't have to redo thousands of hours of work.
This would be extremely easy and plausible for a PM unless he was explicitly told not to.
Quantumfreakonomics
3hr ago
I would have a much easier time believing his, “Aw shucks, I had no idea we were signing that. Must have been those silly lawyers,” routine if there wasn’t a long history detailing Altman’s penchant for plausibly-deniable power grabs.
Tophattingson
1hr ago
Seems like a variant on merited impossibility. Perhaps merited possibility.
"It isn't happening and if it is, it's a good thing"
"It did happen, and if it didn't, why do you care?"
I think you’re pointing out, correctly, that she’s going at it from the perspective of ‘this is how patriarchy works in goatfuckerstan’. It’s worth emphasizing for the audience- goatfuckerstani patriarchy is legitimately a worse deal for women than modern or historic Christian purity culture. Pagan primitives patriarchy is possibly an even worse deal.
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