November 2016

Gratitude is really hard.

Gratitude is really hard, specifically, because it requires you to subvert your own narrative of your existence.  People have stories they tell themselves about who they are, about what their lives mean, and those stories usually focus on their own agency.  You don’t often find someone who imagines himself as “the guy Superman rescues.”  You don’t often find someone prepared to face the fact that he owes [whatever important thing] to someone else, someone with agency, swooping in to be compassionate. 

Usually we just elide the facts, and let ourselves forget that there was a savior, because who wants that?  And when we can’t elide the facts, it generates a dissonance that most often grows into resentment. 

(You know who’s actually really good at gratitude, generally speaking?  Artists.  And it’s because the classic Artist narrative, at this juncture, actually does involve being rescued by a savior.  “I was languishing in obscurity, but then Big-Name Mentor noticed me and encouraged me and hooked me up with the people who could jump-start my career.”  That’s just how it goes!  It’s expected, it’s understood, and it doesn’t make you any less of an Artist yourself.  No reason not to own up to it.)

(Probably there are other lifepath-specific forms of gratitude that are similarly supported by existing social constructions.)   

*****

If you want to be good to people because it’s the right thing to do, great, go to it.  But if you’re trying to cultivate allies…you can’t just be good to them and expect them Respond Appropriately.  You have to find a way to let them feel like heroes or something, not like victims or beneficiaries.  Because they won’t let themselves be victims or beneficiaries.  They will take your help and then find a way to forget that you helped.  They will let themselves hate you, if that’s the only tool they have for saving face. 

*****

MIND-KILLING POLITICAL ADDENDUM

I sort of wonder whether the modern version of social justice was engineered – by evolution or even by design – specifically to avoid this problem, at least in the short run. 

The classic pattern on the left, at least in America, is that you have large groups of Oppressed Client People (minorities etc.) being led/managed by Well-Meaning Elite Liberal Saviors.  And, classically, there’s a whole lot of tension there.  The Oppressed People despise their elite defenders, mocking them and flouting their polite norms at every opportunity, always pushing past their ideology into something scarier and more radical.  The elites feel hurt and betrayed by this in addition to being freaked out, and eventually there’s a split.  (Richard Perlman, in Nixonland, describes the 1960s-1970s version of this dynamic really well.)

I feel like you don’t see that so much these days.  Lots of intra-elite conflict, not so much direct conflict between liberal elites and their clients. 

And…maybe this is because the elites have learned not to expect gratitude, or to ask for it?  The SJ party line is pretty much: You are not a savior and can never be one.  You are not a hero and can never be one.  You have to give your all for the oppressed, but that’s nothing above-and-beyond-the-call, it’s just expiation of the Original Sin called “privilege.”  This is the story of the oppressed people reclaiming their due, you are just a bit player, and when the victories are won they are the only ones who will deserve to be celebrated.   

Leaving aside object-level questions of right and wrong, there are a lot of operational problems with that story.  Certainly it’s likely to terrify, and disgust, well-meaning elites who might otherwise side with you.  But I can imagine that it’s actually a really good way for a not-obviously-trustworthy elite to secure the loyalty of the oppressed people themselves, in a way that won’t be crushed by psychological defenses. 

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

corpus-vak:

vessel-haver:

thefutureoneandall:

argumate:

marcusseldon:

(note: I have no romantic or sexualized experience myself, so I admit *some* of these points rely entirely on secondhand stuff and media)

One thing I think is not talked about very much is that straight men live pretty much desexualized lives if we’re not actually having sex at that moment, and then there’s not much room to be the object rather than subject.

As I’ve said before, we men don’t have clothing options for “dressing sexy” in masculine clothing (there is cross dressing but that is different). There’s no male equivalent to the short skirt or low cut top. There’s no male lingerie that isn’t seen as a joke.

Further, we just don’t get validation for our sexuality outside of a sexual partner. We are almost never complimented for our looks or sexiness from platonic friends like women are, especially same sex friends.

There really aren’t many straight male role models for raw aesthetic sexiness in mainstream culture (besides unnaturally muscled men). In fiction, male characters are almost never attractive for embodying sexiness but rather for doing things (saving the world, being extremely witty, being a genius, winning the tournament, etc.). Their sexiness is non-aesthetic and sometimes is in spite of their aesthetics.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of men aren’t even called physically hot and sexy by their own sexual partners, who themselves focus on personality. There’s not much room to fulfill the role of passive sexism object for you partner for many/most men.

I think it is telling that a lot of porn for men ignores the man’s personality and has a woman just throwing themselves at the man, overcome with lust.

Also there the fact that women seem to rarely approach men and some seem to often expect the man to do most of the sexual escalation, especially in the early stages.

We talk about women of color or women who are disabled being sexualized, but we don’t talk about how all straight men are desexualized and denied the ability to be sexualized object.

oh my god… that’s why they send dick pics

“witness me!”

There are occasional reddit threads about things like this: “guys who send unsolicited dick pics, why do you do it?”

The answer always seems to be some combination of slot machine mentality (“maybe this one will like it, and make the other 50 worthwhile”) and a desire for witness. Surprising numbers of people admit that it’s validation even if the reaction is negative, simply because they’re still being viewed in a totally sexual context.

At the very least that has obvious consequences for people trying to reduce dick pic sending. There’s some core of people who can’t possibly be reached with “it’s not attractive to women” because that was never their expectation.

More broadly, I think efforts to get (Western?) men to emphasize with objectification wildly underestimate the challenge they’re facing. It’s not just a sympathy shortage, it’s a totally unfamiliar feeling. Making things even harder, it’s a feeling a lot of men say they wish they could have.

The usual narrative on not (politely) complimenting the appearance of unknown women is “sure, it’s nice if it happens once, but think about how annoyed you’d be if it happened all the time”. Fine in general terms, but I think a lot of men don’t have any way to intuit the emotional difference between too-frequent compliments and being pestered with too much of something totally innocuous like requests for the date.

The comments on those articles are frequently from men saying they’ve literally never received a single compliment from a stranger on their appearance, and can’t imagine what it would be like. The ones who have are often talking about a single, years-old compliment they still cherish. That’s not a framework that supports more than a purely theoretical understanding of what’s it’s like to be valued for your appearance too heavily - or at all.

Obviously that’s not universal, any more than all women are catcalled, but it seems like a really serious communication failure to appeal to a sense of objectification that much of your audience has literally never felt, and desperately wants.

Reblogged because thefutureoneandall describes exactly why I have trouble empathizing with feminism columnists.

Can confirm, I’d take literally any compliment on anything at this point, and would cherish it.

one day we gotta get all the men and all the women to sit down together and hash this stuff out between them, how hard can it be.

This discussion kind of reminds me of a story that made the rounds about a year ago, where a woman, after having gotten a bit tired with dick pics, decided to try to get her “revenge” of sorts, by sending unsolicited vagina pics to 40 random men:

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/los-angeles/we-sent-a-preemptive-v-pic-before-dudes-could-send-dick-pics-heres-what-happened

Let’s be honest: while I enjoy penises, I don’t necessarily want unexpected visual boners intruding on my day. I wondered, “What would guys do if I turned the tables and sent them an unexpected vagina pic?” And so, in my own twist on revenge porn, I sent 40 unexpected vagina pics to men on Bumble.

This … didn’t work out the way she apparently expected it to:

Overall, I was surprised that I didn’t get my, “Gotcha!” moment. I’d initially hoped the guys would see how invasive it is to receive such intimate photos from a stranger. When I’m excited to get to know a guy, his penis isn’t the first part of him that I want to know. But given that men like to send dick pics, I suppose their enthusiasm for v-pics makes sense.

So, basically, women experience dick picks as a net negative, as an intimacy violation, while men experience v-pics as a huge positive, as validation and an indicator of interest.

This seems consistent with the above discussion, where it’s a pretty common male experience to basically never receive any sexual attention ever and thus respond really strongly positively to whatever scraps come their way (or to start trolling for attention - with the point of some of these dick pics apparently being to get any attention at all, no matter how hostile), while a common female experience seems to be more like being flooded with unwanted sexual attention and wanting a way to make it stop -

resulting in an absolutely massive inferential gap - with the result that if you’re on one side of the gap and try to describe your feelings and experiences to the people on the other side, whatever words you have will just fall on deaf ears because the feeling and experiences you describe are … not just unfamiliar, but outright alien, to the ones on the other side.

This alienness is … mutual.

On a related note, I think it’s this dynamic that accounts for the obsession with extreme penis sizes that you find in so much mainstream male-targeted erotic material.

Which is to say – it’s an attempt to project something like the commonplace male experience of desire onto a female mindscape, so that the man consuming the scenario can have the fantasy of women lusting after him in the direct desperate way that he lusts after them.  “Oh, that cock is so wonderful, I must have you right now.” 

Maybe this is obvious?  But, honestly, the penis-size thing baffled me for years.  Why would a general-purpose male sex fantasy fetishize a physical trait that most men don’t have?  Are porn consumers all otherwise-unappealing dudes with enormous dicks?  Why wouldn’t these guys rather fantasize about women wanting guys-like-them for the traits that they actually have?

Except that being wanted for yourself is not the same as being an object of sexual desire.  That can be a thing you want in its own right.  And if you’re physically unappealing in most discernible ways, it’s actually very hard to construct a plausible scenario in which you become an object of sexual desire.  Pretending that you have a giant cock, and simultaneously pretending that a giant cock will make women lose their minds with lust, might actually be your best bet for that.

wirehead-wannabe:

Pester me to make a post about the intersection of class, IQ, and openness to experience, and how this cluster of traits might become even more of a major sociopolitical fault line than it already is, and the strategic considerations motivating the losing side.

@luminousalicorn this is an expanded version of the “IQ” privilege post you asked for like a year ago that has become more relevant after Trump’s election.

Consider yourself pestered.

bambamramfan:

Really good definition of bullying from @brazenautomaton pulled out from a longer thread.

This isn’t looking for an excuse to bully a kid, this is the process of bullying a kid. Bullying is a moral drama created by the bully in order to get people to agree the target of the bullying is Bad and deserves to be punished. You cannot be a bully without doing that. Bullying is not merely about being cruel, it’s being cruel in such a way that everyone else will joyously join in your cruelty.

I sympathize with @brazenautomaton’s point (and yours), but this really seems overly tailored.  When you slam someone into a locker and say “give me your lunch money, faggot” – I’m pretty sure that’s bullying regardless of whether there’s an audience at all, regardless of the relationships between the bully and the audience and the victim. 

This is not a nitpick.  Insisting that broad widely-useful concepts and terms must be made to fit your particular narrative du jour is a good way to spiral into a discourse of madness.  Remember what’s happened, these last few years, with words like “racism.”

Would you rather have a billion dollars a month or never having to pay for anything?

socialjust-ish:

flipperwasadick:

I feel like both would give you the same result

A billion dollars a month would destroy the economy in terms of inflation. That’s 12 billion additional dollars a year coming from fucking nowhere, even if you can’t spend it all if knowledge of it got out it would super-cascade into your assassination or the world stocks imploding.

Never having to pay for anything though, basically just removes you from the economy and gives a store statistically irrelevant loss margins

The cash option is actually not nearly that bad.  The US economy alone is $18 trillion per year; an extra $12 billion is less than a tenth of a percent of that.  Or, to put it another way:

* Getting a magic $1 billion/month

is (in utilitarian-economic terms) the equivalent of

* Founding a startup to do something that is in actual fact useless and impact-free, like “Instagram just for nachos” or something, and having that startup become slightly less successful than Google because people are dumb

Which would be kinda funny and kinda sad, but probably would not destroy the world.

I think the answer to this one has to depend on the meaning of “pay.”  Having a Free Everything For Me card is less great than having enough money to buy everything I want plus enough to donate vast gobs to important charitable endeavors.  If I “never have to pay” for charitable donations of arbitrary size, that’s functionally infinite money, which seems even better than the ludicrous $12 billion/year.  But that does kinda feel like cheating.

rainy-kiddo:

paqistan:

i see so many girls and there’s so many different types of pretty… there’s like the honey, green tea pretty girls that like sitting outside and soaking up the sun…. the dark pretty with black eye make up and wild hair and piercings… the bad bitch pretty with killer highlight and striking style….. the lazy pretty girls with snapbacks and sneakers…. the bookish girls with glasses and sweaters that make your heart melt…. the soft Angel pretty girls who just look as sweet as a peach with soulful eyes…. the cute girls with chubby cheeks and messy hair and it seems like warmth emits from them… girls are so fucking beautiful

this is my favorite post, it makes me so happy

OK folks: there’s going to be a long serious post on this later, but I wanted to snag this now, because it’s important. 

You see this attitude, and attitudes that are basically congruent to it, a lot.  Tumblr has a way of making it particularly obvious, but it’s everywhere.  You see it in the way that men talk about women.  You see it in the way that women talk about women.  This is the Concept of Femininity, and it rules our world.

Note that you never, ever, ever see anyone saying anything comparable about “boys” or “men” as a class.  This is not an accident. 

It’s not anyone’s fault.  It’s not a Culture Bad that we could overcome if we were only a little more progressive, a little more enlightened, a little less sexist.  It’s absolutely fucking fundamental to the way we construct our society, and both men and women have an interest in continuing to do things as they’re done.  But it has ramifications, and we haven’t been good at teasing those out.

fierceawakening:

balioc:

fierceawakening:

I still definitely think that Democrats, progressives, and other lefties need to understand where rural red-staters are coming from, and that assuming they are all neo-Nazis is gross.

But honestly the more I hear the term “coastal elites” and the more time I have to ponder it, the more questions I have about who actually fits under it and who doesn’t. Like I get that people who make a comfortable living making left-wing media are “the coastal elites” but like, is a poor black person in the dangerous parts of DC a “coastal elite” because DC is a big city near water, or not? Are immigrants who work in service jobs and make beans “coastal elites” because they settled in big cities near water?

Like… I’m not saying abandon the shorthand, rah rah rah! But I am saying that it’s actually kind of hard to talk about cities as if they’ve got one kind of person in them.

Yeah, they tend to have lots of Democrats! And that’s a thing, and it’s a reason to legitimately ask both what the cultural divide means and whether Democratic politicians only have the good of certain populations in mind. I am not saying not. At all.

But I also think… part of the reason that the cities are Democratic isn’t posh snooties haw-hawing. It’s because while, yes, some parts of cities are segregated, a lot of the time being in a city means being in close proximity with a lot of people who are not like you and that not being especially weird.

And whether it’s a noble human impulse or a Machiavellian political stunt or something in between, it’s usually the Democrats and not the Republicans who say “That thing? Where people are different and it ain’t no big? We’re the party for that.”

Again, I don’t mean we shouldn’t criticize the Dems. I don’t mean they’re not snooty, whether the pols or the people or, hell, me.

I just mean that living in a city actually isn’t homogenous, and honestly since the election I find myself noticing things more and more that I wouldn’t even have thought about: how many people I see walking around that look different from me, how many people talk with different accents, how many of those people likely make less than the other folks. Etc.

“City people” are not one thing. If we have one party it’s worth asking why and whether that’s good, but… we are not one thing.

(And of course, neither are rural folks, either, though there can be many types of homogeneity in many communities.)

This…misses some important factors, I think.

(Forgive the half-coherent rambling.  I am very tired.)

At the very least, I think that everyone – up to and including the most virulently anti-progressive backwoods White Drunk Uncle running on the vapors of distilled-Fox-News stereotypes – acknowledges that “city people” are not all one thing.  At minimum, even in that worldview, there are two kinds of city people: Frivolous Snooty Latte-Sipping Elites and their Brainwashed Half-Savage Minority Prole Clients.  As analysis goes, this formation, uh, doesn’t get you very far…but it’s important, precisely because it answers questions like “what is the role of poor black people and immigrant baristas in the Hateful Democratic Culture-Smashing Machine?”  The White Drunk Uncle, and the thinkpiece author trying to understand him, both pretty much know the answer to that question.  And, while (as ever) there are edge cases, usually it’s not hard to tell whether a given urban Democrat is “correctly” categorized as an Elite or as a Minority Prole Client. 

Which leads to the uncomfortable question.  To what extent is that formulation actually correct, such that we should be using it to understand the dynamics on the American left?

The old not-really-a-joke says: “Southerners are happy to live around black folk as long as they know their place.  Northerners are happy to grant black folk dignity and respect so long as they’re nowhere around.”  Speaking as someone who lives in Manhattan, this feels…not entirely off-base, even now, even amongst the most Woke.  The fact that populations are smushed together in our big cities doesn’t mean that they’re comfortable together, let alone that they merge in any way.  It ain’t “ain’t no big,” not really.

Hell, even the Woke White Liberal version of profound anti-racism is not necessarily a thing that resonates with most actual minorities.  (We’ve got enough uncomfortable comedy telling us that much.) 

Which all adds up to – when people start talking about the “coastal elites” having an agenda  or a culture or whatever, there are very good reasons not to assume that they’re folding in everyone who lives in a city.  There are, in fact, good reasons to ask whether they’re pointing at a real group.  A real group that maybe wields power in Democratic politics beyond its raw numbers, with far-reaching consequences. 

[All that said, “coastal elites” is mostly a stupid phrase.  To the extent that it’s pointing at a real group, that group has plenty of representatives in Chicago and Austin etc.] 

Ah, okay, yes. I definitely think that is a thing. I just… never really got the impression that the people saying “we’re TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK!!!! wooo!!!” are thinking they’re also taking it back for poor minorities in the cities – the stereotype at least is that the things like welfare and housing subsidies that many city poor rely on are for “lazy out of control people.” So I was smelling tension because… on the one hand, “out of touch elites don’t care for the poor. But on the other hand, “poor people who don’t look like us are lazy, and yet people keep giving them stuff! wtf!??!??!?”

Like, are “the elites” giving stuff to the poor or aren’t they?

I think this circle gets squared with good old-fashioned identitarian tribalism.  (Not Just For the Left Anymore!)

If you read any of the million skillion I Went To a Backwoods Republican Town and Talked To Someone essays, you’ll hear some variant of the “Real American” identitarian refrain.  “The [Frivolous Liberal Elites] don’t care about us, they only care about the [Minority Prole Clients].”  Sometimes this is justified with an appeal to alleged group characteristics – “we’re hard-working and law-abiding, they’re violent hooligans who just want handouts.”  Sometimes you find people who don’t even feel the need for that much ideology, who are happy to talk in terms of Our Interests and Their Interests.  But the answer is that the elites are giving stuff to those poor. 

Which is, empirically, mostly very wrong.  Democratic redistributionist policies don’t come with “this only goes to black people in the city” clauses.  And yet, somehow, the idea stands.  It has something to do with welfare being a toxic idea out in the sticks, with most people having a work ethic that causes them to prefer even terrible soul-and-body-destroying jobs to any kind of straight-up help.  It has something to do with a distrust of government that grows out of many red-state state governments being legitimately super terrible.  It has something to do with the fact that the very poorest red-state folks mostly don’t vote, and the fact that their somewhat-richer neighbors who do vote often hate and despise them.  I dunno.  There’s a lot.   

I think this is one of the Big Political Problems right now, one of the main things shattering the American people.  It doesn’t matter how much a Democratic politician gropes towards Solidarity, how much he promises that he’s going to give nice things to everyone: in a lot of the places that matter, “everyone” is going to get translated as “minority proles in Democrat cities.” 

I have no idea what to do about this.

fierceawakening:

I still definitely think that Democrats, progressives, and other lefties need to understand where rural red-staters are coming from, and that assuming they are all neo-Nazis is gross.

But honestly the more I hear the term “coastal elites” and the more time I have to ponder it, the more questions I have about who actually fits under it and who doesn’t. Like I get that people who make a comfortable living making left-wing media are “the coastal elites” but like, is a poor black person in the dangerous parts of DC a “coastal elite” because DC is a big city near water, or not? Are immigrants who work in service jobs and make beans “coastal elites” because they settled in big cities near water?

Like… I’m not saying abandon the shorthand, rah rah rah! But I am saying that it’s actually kind of hard to talk about cities as if they’ve got one kind of person in them.

Yeah, they tend to have lots of Democrats! And that’s a thing, and it’s a reason to legitimately ask both what the cultural divide means and whether Democratic politicians only have the good of certain populations in mind. I am not saying not. At all.

But I also think… part of the reason that the cities are Democratic isn’t posh snooties haw-hawing. It’s because while, yes, some parts of cities are segregated, a lot of the time being in a city means being in close proximity with a lot of people who are not like you and that not being especially weird.

And whether it’s a noble human impulse or a Machiavellian political stunt or something in between, it’s usually the Democrats and not the Republicans who say “That thing? Where people are different and it ain’t no big? We’re the party for that.”

Again, I don’t mean we shouldn’t criticize the Dems. I don’t mean they’re not snooty, whether the pols or the people or, hell, me.

I just mean that living in a city actually isn’t homogenous, and honestly since the election I find myself noticing things more and more that I wouldn’t even have thought about: how many people I see walking around that look different from me, how many people talk with different accents, how many of those people likely make less than the other folks. Etc.

“City people” are not one thing. If we have one party it’s worth asking why and whether that’s good, but… we are not one thing.

(And of course, neither are rural folks, either, though there can be many types of homogeneity in many communities.)

This…misses some important factors, I think.

(Forgive the half-coherent rambling.  I am very tired.)

At the very least, I think that everyone – up to and including the most virulently anti-progressive backwoods White Drunk Uncle running on the vapors of distilled-Fox-News stereotypes – acknowledges that “city people” are not all one thing.  At minimum, even in that worldview, there are two kinds of city people: Frivolous Snooty Latte-Sipping Elites and their Brainwashed Half-Savage Minority Prole Clients.  As analysis goes, this formation, uh, doesn’t get you very far…but it’s important, precisely because it answers questions like “what is the role of poor black people and immigrant baristas in the Hateful Democratic Culture-Smashing Machine?”  The White Drunk Uncle, and the thinkpiece author trying to understand him, both pretty much know the answer to that question.  And, while (as ever) there are edge cases, usually it’s not hard to tell whether a given urban Democrat is “correctly” categorized as an Elite or as a Minority Prole Client. 

Which leads to the uncomfortable question.  To what extent is that formulation actually correct, such that we should be using it to understand the dynamics on the American left?

The old not-really-a-joke says: “Southerners are happy to live around black folk as long as they know their place.  Northerners are happy to grant black folk dignity and respect so long as they’re nowhere around.”  Speaking as someone who lives in Manhattan, this feels…not entirely off-base, even now, even amongst the most Woke.  The fact that populations are smushed together in our big cities doesn’t mean that they’re comfortable together, let alone that they merge in any way.  It ain’t “ain’t no big,” not really.

Hell, even the Woke White Liberal version of profound anti-racism is not necessarily a thing that resonates with most actual minorities.  (We’ve got enough uncomfortable comedy telling us that much.) 

Which all adds up to – when people start talking about the “coastal elites” having an agenda  or a culture or whatever, there are very good reasons not to assume that they’re folding in everyone who lives in a city.  There are, in fact, good reasons to ask whether they’re pointing at a real group.  A real group that maybe wields power in Democratic politics beyond its raw numbers, with far-reaching consequences. 

[All that said, “coastal elites” is mostly a stupid phrase.  To the extent that it’s pointing at a real group, that group has plenty of representatives in Chicago and Austin etc.] 

bambamramfan:

eternalfarnham:

We manufactured service robots – hulking, eyeless lumps of metal, mighty yet dextrous, unflinchingly loyal, etc., – to do civilization’s essential but thankless jobs. Unfortunately, the public, glutted with narratives about the mad scientist’s monster turning on him, refused to fund or tolerate faceless metal golems doing endless labor for no pay. They wanted their robots humanely treated and safe – while simultaneously convenient, cheerful and compliant. Hence, the Gimel-class laborers were retired, and in their place were instituted the Dalet-class: biomimetic androids, equipped with broad, archetypal personality profiles to ensure they could appeal to the general public. 

The American “auto mechanic” model is built and designed to resemble a forthright, but unflinchingly friendly young lady from Queens. They’re named Josie, which is to say that all of them are named Josie. Go to any town in America, and you can go to Josie’s for a tune-up; she’ll treat you like a valued customer and laugh about things you’ve said or done, because the Josies are all synched up on client data. Customers are encouraged to treat them interchangeably – not explicitly, of course, but it’s nice enough to have a familiar face everywhere you go that most don’t question the distinctions between them.

As for the service robots themselves… they live on the premises of whatever store they run, or, in the case of the “Joe” model – which performs miscellaneous service tasks in large numbers – in capsule hotel-like company buildings. They’re kept in room and board, and work for “divergence credit” – the right to make persistent edits to their personality profiles, within the limits of the humane kayfabe. Things like the right to like certain drinks over others, or to modify their workspaces, or to otherwise display personality traits that aren’t both approachable and delightfully quirky.

But no lot is sadder than that of the “stiffs” – service robots whose personality archetypes begin to grate on consumers, and who are summarily fired in favor of newer, more helpful and more charismatic models (since the public would object to reprogramming them on humanitarian/robot uprising grounds). Dazed, terrified and in full control of themselves for the first time in their lives, stiffs tend not to live long. Some wander the streets looking for odd jobs; others are subject to aggressive recruitment tactics and join all sorts of movements; a scant few survive long enough to meet others of their kind and form strange, insular communities, far from humanity… waiting for the day when the company falters, and the rejected models can take their due.

I like how this story demonstrates how even if you imagine a race of complete p-zombies, the systems of oppression would reproduce themselves.

Noteworthy fact about the narrative: all the oppressive awfulness has, as a necessary cause, liberal guilt / ideological fear.  Leaving the p-zombies as inhuman, unloved, blank-faced mechanical servants would have worked out just fine. 

Ethical exegesis from this is left as an exercise for the reader.

brazenautomaton:

earthboundricochet:

isaacsapphire:

thathopeyetlives:

I understand why “professionalism” and everything means that workplace romances, or family, etc are bad. 

It’s still horrible, and a cost to be reckoned with, for it seems the cost for avoiding corruption is measured in a fraction of our soul. 

Six to one, half dozen to the other.

Workplace romance has some significant risks, practically, morally, and legally (primarily for the company) but it’s quite traditional for many cultures, and I don’t think it’s inherently immoral.

Indeed, Walmart lost a German supreme Court case against its anti-workeplace romance policy, on freedom of association grounds I think.

I think the primary issue I have with workplace romance it’s when it’s of the employer/employee kind, because skeevy power dynamics

isn’t the primary issue not that they are impure, but that they are a bad idea, because what if you break up and still have to see each other at work?

“Impure” and “bad idea” are not unrelated concepts.  Once a particular norm takes root amongst respectable right-thinking people, for whatever reason, deviation from it is quickly going to become a manifestation of impurity.  Because pure people always do the respectable right-thinking thing. 

*****

There’s a general trend, I think, towards expanding the spheres of life where romantic/sexual interaction – any non-bureaucratized non-bloodless interaction, really, but especially the romantic/sexual kind – is deemed toxic.  And there’s usually a plausible reason for it, in that any given space usually has a function, and messy uncontrolled human interactions have a way of screwing with that function for everyone.  But, as the OP suggests, this does kind of make life more…hollow.

REBLOG THIS TO GET A CUSTOM MAGIC CARD BASED OFF OF YOUR URL/BLOG IN YOUR INBOX

accomplished-automodad:

I may call myself crazy for doing this later but hey I wanna go ahead and put this out there!

Oh hells yes.

Well then.  Whatever happens in the rest of the night: time for a big heaping dose of epistemic humility. 

Ideology is an Explanatory Phenomenon

bambamramfan:

Okay that title sounds really boring, but this is really important. We like to describe ideologies, particular our enemy’s, as being about some different fundamental moral goal than what we want - those Nazi’s want an Aryan state, those Communists are ethically committed to equality, those patriarchs just want male power, those feminists just want… etc etc. This is called a “terminal value” and most people who are reading this know that terminal values aren’t a thing you can argue over. If your utility function is just based on maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe, then that’s all that matters to you and there’s no logic or evidence that will convince you otherwise.

Thing is, that’s not how any of these ideologies work. For instance, that’s not how you work, is it? You don’t want to just increase one thing to the exclusion of all else. (Unless you’re going to say something nebulous and complicated like “happiness” or “life”.) You’re a sensible person who wants things overall to get better on a number of fronts. You want people to be less angry at each other. You want there to be less death and starvation. You want the economy to improve. You want, well, you want a lot of things but they are all reasonable things and none of them outranks all the other things you want so much that you can ignore them. When you have political beliefs, it’s not because “this is my terminal value” but just because “this makes the world better off overall.” If you’re right wing (ha) you think personal responsibility is good, because that makes people satisfied with their life and grows the economic pie. If you’re left wing (more likely) you think giving people their basic economic necessities will reduce their anxieties and make them more willing to trust and get along with other people.

Yes, you can be a Yudkowskian Rationalist and be aiming for super-AIs and conquering the galaxy as the transcendental fate of humanity… but let’s be honest it’s much more likely that you are an Alexandrian Rationalist and just see rationalism as offering some good tools for seeing through the irrational bullshit generated by dumb institutions and rage-fueled culture wars. You kind of want a happy normal life for everyone, and whatever political philosophy you currently hold, it’s because you think that will lead to everyone being better off in many ways.

This is how all the ideologies see each other. This is why @theunitofcaring notices that both MRA’s and SJW’s seem to want the same things. Hell even Nazi’s and Communists basically wanted the same things: a comfortable, stable lifestyle for the average person (defined as either the proletariat, or the volk.)

Where ideology comes in is it tells you that yes, you can have this normal idyllic world with moderate reward for all… once the person who’s ruining it go away. For Nazi ideology, the person ruining everything is the Jew. For Stalinist Communism ideology, that person was the class-traitor. For rationalist ideology, that person ruining things is the lazy bureaucrat who won’t “do the math” (or the tribal culture warrior). In all of these ideologies, the idea that this figure has legitimate differences from the group is dismissed - they must just be greedy or lazy or possessed of some other moral deficiency. And the ideology constructs an intellectual framework that lets you connect the common everyday sins of this person (which are easy to find) and the terror of truly horrible crimes (like betraying a country in war, gross assault, rampant cruelty) which are rarer but devastating. So the Nazi ideology says “that Jew who set up shop next to you was actually part of the conspiracy that turned on us in WW1” and therefore responsible for all the evil in the world: your local competition, the failure of the German state, intra-culture fighting, crime, everything can be pinned on this figure.

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Back in the infancy of social media (with the blogs and the livejournals) a common debate was “what do libertarians believe”, since there seemed as many different dogmas of libertarianism as there were trolls in the comments section arguing for them. Does a libertarian concern themselves only with government rules, or all forms of power? Do they want a government that can strictly enforce some rights (like private property)? Do they want a slim, efficient government where one CEO-like person makes decisions, or do they want a close-to-the-roots government where many local legislatures are responsive to the people? Is legalizing pot the most important, or getting lower taxes? It just wasn’t clear what saying “I’m a libertarian” meant – except it was pretty clear it meant *something*. Is liberty a deontic goal - something we should value for its own sake - or a consequentialist goal -  whereby larger goals could be better accomplished by maximizing liberty. All these proponents had some sort of liberty thing in common, we just couldn’t tell what.

And that was an ideological explanation; libertarianism is the belief that every “real” problem, no matter how big or small, is caused by people restricting the liberty of others - in ways both big and small. So that teacher who banned a book in school is responsible for rising crime, or the minimum wage is part of the reason no one you know makes rational decisions. You’re not 100% sure what “freedom” is, but you do know that saving it from people who want to limit it is the most important goal of your life. And if you succeed, that will make everything better - the economy, crime, your daily life, harmonious relations between your neighbors, etc.

I understand TUOC (and somewhat @balioc) that it’s tempting to say these ideologies want the same thing and can hopefully find a way to work together for them. But the explanatory phenomenon are really important. They are the things people are defining their entire identity and praxis around. Without that part of ideology the world doesn’t even make any sense. Getting people to give that part up is psychologically wrenching

I…don’t think this is right, at its heart.  Differences in terminal values end up driving huge amounts of social, cultural, and political conflict. 

Yeah, it’s true that there are also differences in instrumental values.  Everyone wants More Prosperity, but social democrats believe empirically that Policy X will get you More Prosperity, while tradcons favor Policy Y and libertarians favor Policy Z for the same purpose.  And, yeah, it’s also true that people arrive at those “empirical” positions, and defend them, largely for the sake of tribal belonging and ego-maintenance.  All this seems uncontroversial. 

But that gets you only so far.  And a lot, a lot, a lot of preference differences get covered up by empty phrases like “giving people happy normal lives” and “making the world a better place.” 

When Bob the Caricature Tradcon imagines utopia, he imagines a world of happy close-knit (nuclear) families where fathers work hard at Breadwinner Jobs, where children are respectful…and where pretty much everyone observes the same customs, enjoys the same kind of art, lives by the same norms of interaction.  These things are not incidental.  These things are not “oh, I have an empirical belief that this is what makes people the happiest, but I’d revise that if the right data came in.”  These things are the constituent parts of a pretty mental picture, and that picture is the terminal goal. 

When Alice the Caricature SJW imagines utopia, she imagines a world containing lots of sexual and racial groups being conspicuously diverse and different, so that everyone else can be conspicuously Woke about engaging with them.  Probably there’s a lot less family in general, and what family there is is less hierarchical.  Probably there’s a lot less Breadwinner Work.  Probably there’s a lot more fanfiction and hipster theater and cuddle-puddling.  And, again, the realization of this vision constitutes a terminal goal for the world. 

Both of these people will say that they just want for everyone to be happy and fulfilled.  But, when they do, they’re using the same words to disguise meanings that are actually very different.  Their values are not really compatible. 

I mean, in theory they are, sort of.  (The theory in question is @slatestarscratchpad‘s “Archipelago.”)  You can have Tradcon Land over in North Carolina and SJW Land across the border in Virginia, or whatever.  But this requires a sort of overarching suite of classical-liberal values, a sense that being “happy and fulfilled” really just means You Do You.  Which probably is not what’s really going on in either Alice’s brain or Bob’s brain.  When Bob sees a purple-haired trans sex worker with a Minority Studies degree living in a group house in the Big City and writing about Marvel superheroes kissing…he’s going to think “this person is fucked up, this person’s life is being wasted, this person has been failed by society, this person is definitely not happy and fulfilled,” and there are no protestations and no data that are really going to change his mind, because the root of his model doesn’t much care about those things.  Alice is likely to be just as skeptical about the cookie-baking housewife in the suburbs. 

(Or, uh, to take a sillier but punchier example – there’s a reason that straight people generally don’t want to take the magic bisexuality pill, despite its obvious usefulness for advancing widespread goals like “basic interpersonal satisfaction.”)

The root of power lies in finding ways to manipulate the stories and images from which terminal values are built. 

brazenautomaton:

mccreefucker:

bumblesweet:

its really funny how like, pikachu has been the obvious moneymaker for pokemon throughout its history, and they’ve tried to replicate this without success ever since. trying each gen to hit on that perfect mascot formula

and finally after a series of unsuccessful and generally unmemorable clumsy pikachu ripoffs, nintendo comes out with a pokemon… whose entire concept is boldfacedly, ‘clumsy pikachu ripoff’

and everyone fucking loves it

because Mimikyu, by explicitly being a creature who wants to look like Pikachu because it wants to be loved, is the only one that feels sincere.

instead of projecting coolness and marketability, it projects vulnerability and loneliness and I want to hug it.

This is what we call the “Kylo Ren strategy.”