June 2017

So if my historical sources are telling me the truth…

…and I’m synthesizing the history properly…

…then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization – all the cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in which we live today – can be traced back to a stupid loophole in Roman inheritance law.

NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find.  I get credit for absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between Section II and Section III. 

I.

What do I mean by “the entire edifice of Western civilization?”

Here, I mean the vague-but-enormous memeplex that can be summed up in the word “individualism.”  The thing where each person is understood to be a social unit unto himself, with his own destiny and with rights to his own person, capable of charting an independent path through life.  The thing where you pick your own job and your own mate and your own friends and your own hobbies and your own ideals.  The thing where “freedom” is even a meaningful concept because we conceive of humans as being potentially free of each other. 

Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications.  But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases.  Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else. 

[Within any kind of historical economy, anyway.  Let’s leave complicated ideas about the post-scarcity future for another discussion.]

The main alternative to individualism is the tribe.  Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group.  The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it.  You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else.  You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  You get the idea. 

This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans.  It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations.  In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis).  In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes.  The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could.  Etc.

But not in Western Europe.  Individualism took root in Western Europe really early.  You had contracts, and common law, and alienable property, going back to at least the early Middle Ages.  Same goes for the primacy of the nuclear family over the extended family, and cultural models of the non-family-defined free man.  The Enlightenment was building on a very firm foundation. 

When people talk about the importance of the Hajnal line, this is the thing that they’re trying to get at. 

II.

Why Western Europe, and not anywhere else?

Because, right from its inception, the Roman Catholic Church – and only the Roman Catholic Church, not (for example) any of its Eastern Orthodox counterparts – engaged on a systematic campaign to destroy the family.

…I say that in in a funny way, but it’s true.  There were a staggering number of major rulings issued by the early Church that amounted to “kinship groups aren’t allowed to do the things that make them function.”  Most famously, cousin marriage was banned, which meant that it was extremely difficult for kinship groups to avoid diffusing into each other and that they couldn’t shore up the most important alliances across generations with family ties.  Less famous but also very important was the banning of “Levirate marriage” (the marriage of a widow to her husband’s brother), which is a really useful technology if you want to keep all your tribe members within the tribe.  The very fact that the Church pushed hard for the legitimacy of female-owned property was a big part of this, since it meant that kinship groups were risking losing some of their stuff whenever one of their members got married.  And all sorts of rules about priestly behavior, including clerical celibacy, meant that priests couldn’t continue to serve as useful assets to their clans. 

(Insofar as this stuff didn’t come from the Church directly, it mostly came from lawmaker monarchs like Charlemagne, whose agendas tended to be intertwined with the Church’s agenda.)

OK.  So, uh, why was the RCC such an implacable enemy of the kinship-group system? 

The short answer is “because it was closely allied with the social subclass of wealthy widows.”  Widows tended to give lots and lots of money, and land, to the Church.  This didn’t work so well if a widow’s stuff would all just get reappropriated by her husband’s clan.  So the Church did everything it could to support a woman’s right to keep her dead husband’s property, and the women reciprocated by donating a hefty proportion of that property. 

The question remains, though…why did this particular form of mutual back-scratching manifest only in Catholic territories?  Why weren’t the Orthodox churches, or the various Hindu temples, doing exactly the same thing? 

III.

It turns out that upper-class Roman men liked younger women.  Much younger women.  The average patrician wedding involved a man in his late twenties or thirties, or even forties, and a girl in her early teens. 

(Brief explanation: as a rule, everywhere, aristocratic men get married when their financial and political prospects have been firmly established.  Why would a bride’s family choose to roll the dice?  In Rome, for various reasons, this didn’t happen until fairly late.  But Roman medicine was super shitty and nutrition was poor, so it was generally desirable to marry the youngest possible woman for fertility-maximizing reasons.) 

This meant that, if an upper-class Roman wife managed to avoid dying in childbirth, she was almost certain to outlive her husband by quite a lot.  Aristocratic Roman society was filled with youngish widows.  There was at least one in basically every patrician family. 

The result: as civilizations go, Rome was slightly more concerned than average about the plight of women who’d lost their husbands.  Which is important, because traditional kinship-group-based inheritance law is ridiculously terrible for widows.  All the husband’s stuff gets reclaimed by the tribe, the widow is left dependent on the mercy of a family that isn’t even her family (as such things are understood), and she is very likely to die or to be functionally enslaved. 

So the Romans came up with a kludge.  Widows were, technically, allowed to keep their husband’s property in their own name…but there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with that property.  The idea was to keep the great estates intact until the women in question either died conveniently or found a way to get married again. 

One of the very few things that propertied widows could do with their money was donate it to temples.  Unimpeachably respectable, right? 

…except that Rome was infested by this up-and-coming, wildly expansionist cult that was desperate for cash and upper-class recognition. 

A whole bunch of the early Roman bishops got their churches off the ground essentially by serving as money-laundering operations for rich widows.  The patrician women in question would “donate” vast fortunes to the Christians, with the explicit understanding that they would continue to control most of the money.  Even so, the churches were getting vastly more support from this system than they were going to get anywhere else.  And some of the widows in question even came to decide that they were actually pious. 

So the Church fathers arrived at the conclusion that wealthy widows were their best friends.  And the rest is, as they say, history.

brazenautomaton:

fatpinocchio:

brazenautomaton:

fatpinocchio:

fatpinocchio:

This is what “eaten by culture war” looks like.

Don’t read the news. Especially don’t read thinkpieces. Otherwise, your availability heuristic will get messed up and you’ll think that the culture war is actually important.

shlevy:

Care to expand?

Twitter, Tumblr, and the culture war industry in general represent a loud minority. In my experience (and I went to a small liberal arts college in CA), the regressive left isn’t even that popular there, so I expect that what we see is the result of the media seizing on unusual incidents because that’s what gets the clicks. In the broader world, it seems to basically be a non-factor. It’s more common to passively share posts with a regressive-left message, but most of those people are still reasonably normally tolerant in real life. Consistent liberalism is rare, but the norm of at-least-minimal liberalism through apathy still looks very strong. Free speech issues aren’t on most people’s radar, but they’d see punching “Nazis” as politically motivated hooliganism - if it were ever relevant to them.

I think if someone wasn’t directly subscribed to the culture war (or following someone who really cares about it), they’d see very little of it. Even if they’re interested in politics, the culture war may only rarely come up. While the left gets a lot wrong, in practice, it looks more like “Senator So-And-So introduced the Safer Pencils for America Act and some people support that” and less like the kind of illiberal SJ that Scott is concerned about. Republicans controlling everything means less influence for Senator Safer Pencils, but it doesn’t make a significant difference for the antifa cluster, because they wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.

Which is not to say that the culture war is completely irrelevant for everyone. Maybe if you do IQ research at a university, you’d like to be able to talk about it without worrying that someone might come down on you. If you’re a conservative in a generally progressive industry, you’d like to speak your mind without being viewed as an idiot. And in the regular political sphere, both sides keep finding new ways to damage political liberalism. But as far as cultural liberalism is concerned, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.

it must be nice to exist somewhere that is yet undevoured, so you can pretend those who saw it happen are all just stupid and contemptible

Considering the variance in places I’ve existed that are all undevoured, including what are supposed to be the main SJ centers/battlegrounds (liberal arts college, tech company), I’m skeptical of the extent of the devouring. And I don’t think that people who think otherwise are stupid and contemptible. I have a great deal of respect for Scott, whose post inspired my original comment. The problem is that there’s enough culture war content to surround yourself with it, and then it seems like it’s everywhere, so it’s easy to overestimate its importance.

This isn’t the greatest analogy, but it’s kind of like alcohol. Not only the addictive aspect, but also because if you’re in a peer group where heavy drinking is normal, it can seem like an inescapable part of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop engaging with it and find different people, you see that you were part of some weird group and that it’s actually not important.

Yeah, if alcohol explicitly colonized all of the places where you could do the thing you wanted, and it was no longer possible to do the thing you wanted to do that had nothing to do with alcohol, due to the knowing, malicious, and deliberate actions of alcoholics; and alcoholics were currently colonizing another related thing that you wanted to do and making it their explicit mission to make it impossible for you to engage with it without being showered in alcohol and everyone was helping them and nobody was permitted to notice it was happening and every time you point it out people call you a hysterical liar who should be punished because you hate alcohol-drinkers.

…hyperbole (and bitterness) aside, this is actually a surprisingly on-target analogy.

Because alcohol-centric socialization is in fact both

(a) really genuinely not universal, and

(b) nonetheless very very very widespread, especially in certain particular sectors of the culturesphere, where it’s totally dominant. 

[I was a member of my college sci-fi / gaming club.  We didn’t drink much.  Every so often someone from the college newspaper would come by to do a patronizing human interest story on the weird nerds, and an alarming amount of the time, these stories devolved into “did you know that there are people on campus who somehow magically know how to socialize without getting totally hammered?!?”]

There are in fact lots of places you can go that are totally alcohol-free.  There are lots more places you can go where people drink in a very low-key way, such that you’d barely notice.  And if you land in one of those places, the whole alcohol-centric thing can seem like a weird quaint cultural vestige, something that’s obviously not going to impose itself on anyone who’s not explicitly looking for it. 

Except that not everyone is that lucky.  If you’re stuck in the wrong town, or the wrong college, or the wrong line of work, or the wrong subculture, it may be that alcohol is dominating every single social center that you can see.  It may be that your choice is between “suck it up and deal with the drunkards” or “leave behind everything and everyone you know for the sake of this one preference.”

(…or sometimes there’s like one group of people around who aren’t always getting shitfaced, like maybe it’s the campus Bible study group or something, and you have absolutely nothing in common with them apart from this one random thing about alcohol, but the fact that every social gathering is full of plastered jackasses is starting to really get to you, and you find yourself wondering whether maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to try letting Christ into your life…)

Social justice is like that.  Contra @brazenautomaton‘s implications, it hasn’t eaten everything and it’s not going to.  There are vast sectors of the world – of the country – of the urban upscale crowd, even – that don’t give any fucks about SJ, that aren’t even slightly afraid of angry Twitter mobs, and that aren’t going to persecute you for your unwokeness.  And, to those who are sitting comfortably in those places, the whole culture war can seem like a stupid internet foofaraw to which the correct response is to Turn Off the Computer and Get a Life. 

But there are places where that is really really really not the case.  There are campuses, and industries, and social circles, where everyone you know – and everyone they know – is living in perpetual fear of having his life destroyed by an angry ideological mob.  There are hobbies and cultures, particularly online ones like fandoms, that have been so completely destroyed by this shit that you literally cannot find a (haha) “safe” instantiation of them anymore.  If you’re embedded in one of those things, or if one of those things is very important to you for its own sake, you are genuinely in a pretty bad place. 

For those who really can’t help making everything about Whose Side You Are On: no, this doesn’t apply only to SJ.  The conformity-demanding ideological mobs of the right do exactly the same thing, in the places where they have power.  Probably that’s caused a lot more damage overall, although I confess that I care less, because conformity-demanding right-wing ideology has never gotten any traction at all in the cultural sectors where I dwell.

digging-holes-in-the-river:

balioc:

wirehead-wannabe:

mailadreapta:

the-grey-tribe:

Do religions really scale?

A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.

The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.

Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.

It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.

Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.

I do not understand this, and I wish I did.

Entrepeneurs standing on the shoulders of nerds?

This one seems pretty straightforward.

From the viewpoint of a social group, society-at-large can be modeled as a giant Prisoners’ Dilemma, where liberal norms = cooperating and tribal norms = defecting.

Liberalism: “We are going to be scrupulous about giving our individual members the freedom to pursue their individual well-being, even if that results in them doing things that degrade group coherence or group prestige.  We will also try very hard to pretend that we don’t care about outsiders less than we care about our own people, even to the extent of giving them our resources for reasons of abstract principle.” 

Tribalism (which includes many popular forms of organized religion): “We are ruthlessly going to optimize for group success, which will entail both quashing inconvenient outbursts of individualism and systematically privileging our own interests over the interests of outsiders whenever we possibly can.” 

If every group is tribal, then you end up with the sort of place where politics is always zero-sum and corrupt, where infrastructure isn’t developed because there isn’t enough widespread trust, where conflict and violence are rampant, etc.

If every group is liberal, you end up with a well-developed, atomized, highly mobile society full of people who do whatever the fuck they want (which will often involve wasting lots of time and energy on stupid shit). 

If you are the only tightly-knit tribe in a liberal society, then you can move through it like a shark.  You find ways to hunt down lone undefended tribe-less people and absorb their resources into yourself.  You parasitize the infrastructure built by the liberals and redirect its benefits to your members as much as you can.  You redistribute resources within yourself to the places where they will be the most useful.

Man, everyone has been writing about liberalism as a social technology this week.  I guess I ought to write my post about it (which is going to be anticlimactic at this point).

@balioc, I mostly agree with you, with the caveat that a liberal society can still have a police force, which serves as a centralized system for punishing defectors.  Like, yeah, gangs seem to wreak havoc in the way you’re describing, but I assume the reason that they haven’t overrun society is that the police manage to stop them.

To be clear: most of the sharky “defecting” I’m talking about isn’t illegal.  It’s often not even particularly immoral, in any very clear-cut way. 

I mean, this includes stuff like “we hire group members for jobs whenever we can.”  Or “we deal preferentially with group members when making business arrangements” (something for which the Orthodox Jews of the NY diamond business are famed).  Or “we use community-wide social pressure to come down hard on group-member kids who seem like they’re about to go off and do something self-destructive / low-status.”  Or even “we maintain a relatively insular and group-norm-focused culture while piggybacking off a capitalist system that frees us from the need for productive autarky.” 

Tribal groups (including religious groups) can do plenty of terrible things – but there’s nothing so very terrible about any of the things I’ve just listed.  They all make a lot of sense, mostly in a fairly wholesome and understandable way.  Yet the fact remains that society falls apart if everyone tries to do them, but doing them while others don’t gives you a massive concrete advantage. 

wirehead-wannabe:

mailadreapta:

the-grey-tribe:

Do religions really scale?

A lot of talk about the social benefits of Mormonism, Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism talks about the effects of the religion on local communities.

The social “benefit“ of hellfire as a deterrent against crime, in addition to secular punishments like jail or fines should persist on a national level.

Positive effects of Mormon communities extent to their non-Mormon neighbours.

It’s really unclear to me if a belief in the supernatural is necessary to create these benefits, or if the benefits of the beliefs vanish if you’re the only one with them, or if they vanish as a religion becomes the majority in a country.

Religion has one hell of a Simpson’s paradox. The wealthiest nations are also some of the least religious, and poor nations tend to be more religious. But within nations, religion correlates positively with income.

I do not understand this, and I wish I did.

Entrepeneurs standing on the shoulders of nerds?

This one seems pretty straightforward.

From the viewpoint of a social group, society-at-large can be modeled as a giant Prisoners’ Dilemma, where liberal norms = cooperating and tribal norms = defecting.

Liberalism: “We are going to be scrupulous about giving our individual members the freedom to pursue their individual well-being, even if that results in them doing things that degrade group coherence or group prestige.  We will also try very hard to pretend that we don’t care about outsiders less than we care about our own people, even to the extent of giving them our resources for reasons of abstract principle.” 

Tribalism (which includes many popular forms of organized religion): “We are ruthlessly going to optimize for group success, which will entail both quashing inconvenient outbursts of individualism and systematically privileging our own interests over the interests of outsiders whenever we possibly can.” 

If every group is tribal, then you end up with the sort of place where politics is always zero-sum and corrupt, where infrastructure isn’t developed because there isn’t enough widespread trust, where conflict and violence are rampant, etc.

If every group is liberal, you end up with a well-developed, atomized, highly mobile society full of people who do whatever the fuck they want (which will often involve wasting lots of time and energy on stupid shit). 

If you are the only tightly-knit tribe in a liberal society, then you can move through it like a shark.  You find ways to hunt down lone undefended tribe-less people and absorb their resources into yourself.  You parasitize the infrastructure built by the liberals and redirect its benefits to your members as much as you can.  You redistribute resources within yourself to the places where they will be the most useful.

jadagul:

robustcornhusk:

sinesalvatorem:

jadagul:

I think one of my favorite place names is “Pendle Hill”.

In old England, it was just called something like “Pennul”. This was a compound of a Celtic word “Pen” (meaning “hill”) and the English word “hyll” (meaning “hill”).

Thus the place is literally called “Hill-hill hill.”

This is beautiful

redundant names!

one of my favorites is “the milky way galaxy”, the milky way milky thing.

That is pretty good.

But my favorite part of this one is they did it twice.

Like, the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain and asked the Celts “what do you call that hill?” And the Celts say “oh, that’s a hill.” And the Anglo-Saxons say “Great, so that’s Hill Hill.”

And then centuries later, the modern Britons are like “What do you call that hill? Oh, you call it Hill Hill. So this is the Hill Hill Hill.”

But the best part is they did that twice. There’s another hill in Britain called Bredon Hill. And Bredon comes from the Celtic “bre”, meaning “hill,” and the Old English “down”, meaning “hill” (and still in limited use today, if you think about places called “downs”).

So Bredon Hill is also “Hill-Hill Hill” with a mostly different set of words.

how many layers of linguistic redundancy are you on?

(And you can do even better in fantasy fiction.)

endgaem:

It’s funny because it becomes more and more transparent every day that these people aren’t “anti-destructive protest” they’re just anti-protest, period.

When people riot they point to them and them alone as examples of what “protesting is like”.

You ask them what a good alternative would be, and they say “non-violent protesting.”

Then a peaceful protest that closes maybe one or two roads in a city happens.

Then when you ask them what their idea is of a “good” protest is, they say “one that isn’t disruptive.”

Then a protest that doesn’t bother anyone at all but still makes a statement happens, and you know what they do?

They mock it and call it “slacktivism”. 

This thing you are describing is not a demonstration of of hypocritical idiocy.  It is a totally plausible, coherent position.  It is, in fact, my position.  Because most of the time it is basically correct.

The vast majority of protests are worthless.  If they involve riots and violence, as they too often do, then they involve incurring huge social costs for the sake of doing nothing worthwhile, and so are very bad.  If they result in street closures or other disruptions, then they involve incurring smallish social costs for the sake of doing nothing worthwhile, and so are kinda bad.  If they result in no disruption at all, then they are just wastes of time for the people engaging in them, and so are probably a bit risible.

In brief:

There are, overall, two effective ways for activists to wreak change upon the world.  (Three, if you count violent revolution, but I assume that we’re not going there right now.)  They can (1) influence the government and powerful institutions directly, causing their favored policies to be put into place; or they can (2) spread their message in an effective way, changing hearts-and-minds on a large scale and laying the foundation for political and/or cultural change. 

Most actual effective non-“slack” activism takes tack (1).  This is the hard slow work of engaging with elected officials (especially at sub-national levels in the US!), organizing unions at workplaces, creating and supporting primary challengers, etc.  If you are a normal person who wants to do good in the world in an activist-y kind of way, the odds are like 95%+ that this is the kind of thing about which you should be thinking, and it looks nothing like protest.

Tack (2) can light fireworks when it works, but it’s very very very hard to make it work, because it’s very very very hard to make an idea go viral…especially when it’s not an idea that people are already predisposed to share. 

Protesting works, when it works at all, because it causes a bunch of people to see that (i) there is an issue about which they weren’t really aware, that (ii) sounds sympathetic, and (iii) a bunch of other people already care about passionately.  That is what it does.  That is the only story that explains how it gets results*. 

If you are protesting about something already firmly embedded in the social consciousness, it is worthless.

If you are protesting in such a way that you will attract as much hate as love from the people who notice it, it is worthless.

If you are protesting in way that makes it look like you are part of the crowd of hobbyist / semi-pro activists who will be forever holding protests regardless of the circumstances, it is worthless. 

I am aware of maybe one protest, within my lifetime, that did not fall into at least one of those categories.  

Protests often piggyback on other change vectors – people do a lot of activist yelling when something is about to happen, and then take credit – but don’t be fooled.  Try something more efficacious.

* OK, there’s also the story that says “the protest turns out to be the spark of a violent revolution,” but, uh, not better.

raggedjackscarlet:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

ranma-official:

wokeman beardson watching fight club: it superficially appears that this movie glorifies going to basement to punch people but it’s actually criticizing this mindset and toxic masculinity in general! stupid dudebros don’t understand art critique! it’s so obvious! no wonder they are so stupid, they don’t even pay attention to movies they watch!

wokeman beardson watching inglorious basterds: this movie tells us an important moral lesson that all nazis need to be shot which is good and cool with no ambiguity

endorsed, minus the beardjoke.

Yeah, OK, derailing to ask:

How is it that “beard” has become a metonymic stand-in for “woker-than-thou young urban progressive dude?”  I see this with surprising frequency, from @raggedjackscarlet etc.  But I don’t think of that demographic even as being more bearded than average, let alone as being The Main Bearded Ones.

…of course, I have a beard, so my perceptions may be biased here. 

It’s weird, though.  Don’t the nerdy gamergater anti-SJ types go in for beards just as much, if not more?

Heyo, super late reply incoming.

I’ll cop to using “goony beardman” for no reason other than I believe it’s an effective insult. but as for how this concept got started, well…

it’s not just about the beard– it’s about the sort of smug, wimpy, unattractive dude who’d normally be pegged as a creep trying desperately to avoid that fate by making himself look as non-threatening as possible.

There’s this…. weird idea out there, buried deep in our collective sense of aesthetics, that “clean shaven = self-serious” and “bearded = self-effacing”.

I think it ties into age. “Ambitious young man” vs. “Contented old man”

The beardman is a dude in his twenties trying to look like your jolly old grandpa.

As for why it seems to be an effective insult, well, firstly, there’s something inherently unnerving about a guy who’s barely entered adulthood trying to appear grandfatherly.

secondly, (here’s where things get fuckin’ weird)… the beardman is a guy who is trying to, in some way, to escape his individuality. Like a priest, when he speaks, it is not he who speaks, it’s the Big Other speaking through him, reciting the latest woke talking points. The Purity Spiral is a way of life to him. He aspires to a state in which he has no particular or concrete characteristics– no identity other than “one step ahead of you, purer than you, not like the other boys.” The beardman dreams of being a walking talking negation of all other white males.

When your identity is based in asymptotically approaching a state of pure negation, simply being reminded that you have physical existence is an insult.

it’s not just about the beard– it’s about the sort of smug, wimpy, unattractive dude who’d normally be pegged as a creep trying desperately to avoid that fate by making himself look as non-threatening as possible.

There’s this…. weird idea out there, buried deep in our collective sense of aesthetics, that “clean shaven = self-serious” and “bearded = self-effacing”.

OK, so, like…I believe that you are getting this from somewhere, that there is some actual cultural construct that is causing these assertions to make sense to you.

But, to my ears, it sounds remarkably like someone saying “so the sky is green” or “there’s this widespread notion that rhinos can jump really high.”  This is a baldfaced assertion that is just, like, completely incompatible with all my perceptions of the world and how it works. 

I have a beard.  I have been told by many, many people that it makes me look (unnecessarily) more menacing, imposing, and possibly-dangerous.  I have gotten hassled by guards, cops, etc. in a way that none of my clean-shaven male friends has ever experienced.  I am a short fat totally-not-physically-competent dude who regularly gets read as presenting a threat, as far as I can tell almost solely due to the terrifying power of facial hair. 

The “hairy guy = dangertown” meme has been active in full force from the days of Greek satyr plays through the 1960s conversations about hippies, at the very least.  And of course every lovable nonthreatening dreamboat idol is totally smooth, in every sense of the term.  Jacob and Esau.

The idea of trying to make yourself appear less like a masculine menace by growing a beard sounds, to me, like trying to keep ants out of your house by covering the floor with honey. 

But…maybe I’m just missing something here.  Or crazy.

Anyone want to chime in?

fierceawakening:

oliviajewels:

marzipanandminutiae:

forthegothicheroine:

I feel torn about tumblr’s love of southern gothic.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in that genre to be admired, but I feel like sometimes those posts (especially when made by people who don’t live in the south- and hey, neither do I) come across as “aren’t poor people spooooky?”

As a born-and-raised southerner, I was surprised to discover this literary convention because a lot of modern southern gothic fantasy written by southerners focuses on old-money families who turn out to be [witches/werewolves/vampires/etc]. I didn’t encounter the “scary redneck mountain people” variant in non-fantastical media until later, and it baffles me because the modern southern elite are TERRIFYING.

Endlessly smiling hypocritical senators in tacky palatial houses with wives who espouse “traditional values” while being poisonously sweet and cutthroat? Those make much more frightening antagonists for gothic heroes/heroines to fight. If you live in the south you will probably never meet backwoods demon sibling-spouses but you’ve definitely seen the void staring out of a “Live, Laugh, Love” picture frame.

ACCURATE

I am just barely Southern enough to confirm this.

…who the hell does Southern Gothic with the creepiness centered on poor people?  I mean, I’m sure it exists if people say it’s out there but…huh.  Wow.  I am not super conversant with the genre, but I definitely have the sense that you’re supposed to focus on, like, Antebellum Mansions of Rotting Splendor where Ghosts and Incest and Weird Memories of Slavery are going on. 

(I can assure you that my Southern Gothic LARP does precisely that thing, at any rate.)

bophtelophti:

balioc:

bophtelophti:

leeshajoy:

animatedamerican:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

butim-justharry:

shieldmaidenofsherwood:

vicambulating:

danisontnonfire:

karkat-doodle-doo:

justpeachyandcream:

bear-maximum:

fuocogo:

killitwithzombies:

romeo728:

sheriffpanda:

tom-marvolo-dildo:

lizziebug:

indigopixels:

egberts:

luciferofficial:

samoorex:

lorde-of-the-things:

luciferofficial:

steph

stephanie

jeff

jeffanie

tim

timothy

jim

jimothy

nick

nicholas

rick

richolas

harry 

harold

larry

larold

Zack
zackary
Jack
jackary

Jon
Jonathan
Ron
Ronathan

Greg

Gregory

Craig 

Craigory

ben
benjamin
gwen
gwenjamin

Phil
Phillip
Jill
Jillip

Frank
Francis

Hank
Hancis

Ed

Edward

Ned

Nedward

Dan

Daniel

Stan

Staniel

Meg

Margaret

Greg

Grargaret

Carry

Caroline

Gary

Garoline

Al

Alphonse

Val

Valphonse

Jen

Jennifer

Ken

Kennifer

Molly
Margaret

Holly
Hargaret

Harry

Henry

Larry

Lenry

Mick
Michael
Dick
Dichael

Vlad
Vladimir

Chad
Chadimir

Connie
Constance

Donnie
Donstance

Bill
William

Bob
Wobiam

Kate
Katharine

Nate
Natharine

Fred

Frederick

Ted

Tederick

Dick
Richard

Doug
Rudyard

Kiv

Akiba

Reeve

Arriba

For that matter, I’m generally in favor of giving your kids Unnecessarily Flamboyant Names that can be condensed to Totally Normal Nicknames if they really want because they’re lame or something.

Like, y’know,

“Polly” –> Polyhymnia

“Al” –> Alaric

“Luke” –> Lucifer

etc.

bophtelophti:

leeshajoy:

animatedamerican:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

butim-justharry:

shieldmaidenofsherwood:

vicambulating:

danisontnonfire:

karkat-doodle-doo:

justpeachyandcream:

bear-maximum:

fuocogo:

killitwithzombies:

romeo728:

sheriffpanda:

tom-marvolo-dildo:

lizziebug:

indigopixels:

egberts:

luciferofficial:

samoorex:

lorde-of-the-things:

luciferofficial:

steph

stephanie

jeff

jeffanie

tim

timothy

jim

jimothy

nick

nicholas

rick

richolas

harry 

harold

larry

larold

Zack
zackary
Jack
jackary

Jon
Jonathan
Ron
Ronathan

Greg

Gregory

Craig 

Craigory

ben
benjamin
gwen
gwenjamin

Phil
Phillip
Jill
Jillip

Frank
Francis

Hank
Hancis

Ed

Edward

Ned

Nedward

Dan

Daniel

Stan

Staniel

Meg

Margaret

Greg

Grargaret

Carry

Caroline

Gary

Garoline

Al

Alphonse

Val

Valphonse

Jen

Jennifer

Ken

Kennifer

Molly
Margaret

Holly
Hargaret

Harry

Henry

Larry

Lenry

Mick
Michael
Dick
Dichael

Vlad
Vladimir

Chad
Chadimir

Connie
Constance

Donnie
Donstance

Bill
William

Bob
Wobiam

Kate
Katharine

Nate
Natharine

Fred

Frederick

Ted

Tederick

I do not understand the point of a Create-a-Character system like Tekken’s.

The Soul Calibur version of the same thing, which is extremely similar, is great.  You can build any character you can imagine!  (Within the fairly tight limitations of the game’s proffered options.)  You can certainly make fighting-game versions of yourself and all your friends, which is of course what I do, and what I imagine pretty much everyone else does as well.  Or your favorite media characters, if you prefer.  Making all those people slug it out in a video-game brawl is loads of fun.

But if you’re limited to fiddling with the costumes of the game’s preexisting characters…well, is there anyone who’s actually even slightly excited by the prospect of “I’m going to play as Kazuya, but in a wacky T-shirt?”  Do you get any payoff whatsoever for all the time and effort it must take to make all those costume pieces?

Am I missing something here?

Free Speech Reminders

bambamramfan:

Incidents lately:

An Asian, progressive professor at Yale was doxxed when students discovered her very nasty pseudonymous Yelp reviews.

June Chu, dean of Pierson College at Yale University, apologized last Saturday for her Yelp comments which included calling people “white trash,” “sketchy” and “low-class folks,” the Yale Daily News reported.  Chu was placed on leave this week and will not take part in Commencement activities, according to an email sent to students by Head of College Stephen Davis, Yale Daily News reported.

Plus a Breitbart reporter is suing a reporter at conservative anti-Trump magazine Fusion, for saying she is racist for making the OK symbol in a picture.

In the complaint, shared with BuzzFeed News, lawyers for Cassandra Fairbanks allege that Emma Roller, the Fusion journalist, defamed their client when she tweeted an image of Fairbanks at the White House making what Roller claimed in a caption is a “white power hand gesture.”

Fairbanks is represented by Robert Barnes, a Malibu attorney best known for high-profile clients such as Wesley Snipes and Ralph Nader. In the suit, Barnes pits “independent, outsider writers, scribes, advocates, and journalists… a new media” against an “increasingly distrusted elite-backed press.” Mainstream media organizations “view the First Amendment as a wholly owned property of elite-backed journalists to smear and slime their adversaries at will,” the complaint reads. “The First Amendment is meant to protect the Cassandra Fairbanks’ of the journalism world: independent, alternative voices of truth in a sea of fake news.”

Yeah, the lawyer is declaring the importance of the First Amendment as he sues a reporter for saying something he doesn’t like.

(The actual issue seems to be that the alt-right is having fun appropriating “normie” symbols - like Pepe, Taylor Swift, milk, and now the OK hand sign - knowing that social justice opponents will treat this as credible, and throw another totem of mundane culture overboard because it had been infected by racists. Alt-right-adjacent like Fairbanks types help this along, and then are shocked when their opponents read them as participating in racist signalling. It’s dumb all around.)

Anyway, I’m not going to do the “no one is talking about this” whine because I have no idea what all the discourse is. But I haven’t seen many references to either of these on rationalist tumblr myself at least.

And it’s an important reminder that in any battle over “free speech”, a large portion of those defenders are completely opportunistic partisans who will abandon this principle when they are offended. (Or who will use the defense that they are “only highlighting the hypocrisy of their opponents”… by being massively hypocritical themselves.)

This does not mean that no one values Free Speech qua itself. There are clearly some principled defenders. But it’s really not very many. It’s certainly not as many as those who are shouting Free Speech as a defense in any particular controversy.

…so?

That sounds glib, but it’s a sincere question.  It is true of any principle that, at a given moment, many of those defending it will be “people who are personally profiting from it right now” rather than “people who have made a sincere ideological commitment.”  This tells us nothing about the principle’s value. 

“Some shitty people are on your side for bad reasons” is one of the world’s least convincing arguments.

It is often very hard to tell the difference between Behavior X is intrinsically harmful and Behavior X is mostly practiced by horrible people who are generally harmful to those around them. 

Stigma and taboo can drive good, upright, pro-social people away from damn near anything; good, upright, pro-social people often don’t want to risk hurting or upsetting others, and even if they’re not genuinely altruistic in that particular way, they generally have reputations to lose.  Which means that, once the stigma or taboo is firmly in place, you’re left with a core of deviants who can’t control themselves and/or don’t care about being labeled as scumbags because they’re already scumbags.  And, surprise surprise, everything those people touch turns to shit, they make their friends and relations miserable, so you’re left with a pattern of taboo-breaking correlating strongly with awful outcomes. 

Or maybe the taboo really is important, because the proscribed behavior really does yield awful outcomes!  That can sure be a thing.  But how can you know?  Are you going to conduct a study?  Of course you’re not, that would require breaking the taboo over and over in the name of social science.  And there are seldom a lot of good natural experiments to observe, because of the aforementioned social sorting.  In the end, your ability to discern the truth of the matter is very limited. 

But it’s worth trying to imagine the taboo being broken by the most careful, kindhearted, well-meaning people you know, and asking – would that be such a problem?

eternalfarnham:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

There’s this weird trope, which I have now come across in several examples of weird-dark Japanese fantasy, and never even slightly in anything from any other cultural source:

The gestalt masses of humanity, as a collective, made a wish.  Because of their corrupt and sinful nature, they wished for something really fucking terrible.  This wish was granted, and gave rise to a super-creepy evil entity that serves as the Metaphysical Big Bad of the narrative, standing in for “everything that is wrong with society.” 

This is specifically something much stronger than the “so long as there is darkness in men’s hearts, I will survive” trope.  The demon isn’t just feeding off of human badness, or reflecting it, in some nebulous way; it rules precisely because, at least on some level, people want it to rule and called it into being so that it might do so.

I’m not going to go into details, because in almost every case it would involve a huge spoiler for the work in question, but this pattern perfectly describes:

* Persona 5

* Berserk

* Fate/zero

* Paranoia Agent

…and even, to a lesser extent, Revolutionary Girl Utena.

(I feel like I’m missing a couple of salient examples here, but these will do for now.)

I am not sure what to make of this.  It bespeaks a sort of reflexive super-ultra-cynicism about humanity, a contempt for the People, that I think of as being very much at odds with the standard fantasy feeling of “the nameless faceless People are the source of all legitimacy and virtue, which is why the good guys have to fight and die for them.”  Is it just, like, a random cached concept that cropped up in one particular place?  Is this a reflection of weirdo Japanese auteurs feeling really hemmed-in by a more-than-usually conformist culture?  

Is there a TVTropes page for this that I can’t find?

I have no answers right now, just questions.  But…it seemed worth making note of the pattern.

Give us Barabbas!

[content note: spoilers for most of those series which @balioc mentioned above, as well as Personas 3 and 4]

Honestly, these seem to me like psychodrama more than condemnation of the gestalt, at least on some level. It’s not a lack of faith in the nebulous category of the People, but a specific confrontation of some externalized, Jungian human quality (appropriately for Persona with its Jungian metaphysics, and a less explicit ditto for the Fate series and its heroic archetypes), one independent of the times. The “born from the gestalt’s wish” part is less about sin and more an indication that the demon is a general human weakness; at least a few of your examples involve protagonists confronting the principle represented by the demon in themselves (SEES in Persona 3 and the question of suicide / loss via Nyx; the IT in Persona 4 confronting themselves as complex people via Shadows).

They don’t refer to structures of a specific society (beyond the fact that they’re necessarily in the context of Japan, which, yeah, that’s definitely a non-trivial trend), they’re embodiments of psychological phenomena – Nyx is the death drive and desire for suicide, Izanami is the desire to reject difficult truths, Angra Mainyu is the desire for a scapegoat/rejection of heroism as an enterprise, Li’l Slugger is the desire to blame your suffering on a nebulous, unstoppable Other in which you are not blamed for anything, etc. 

But Persona 5 kind of breaks the trend (as I perceive it); none of the protagonists are tempted by the idea of surrendering to power. The Phantom Thieves and your Confidants are explicitly non-participants in humanity’s ignorance and worship of the Holy Grail. And P5′s popularity poll, emphasis on fame and public approval, etc. seem, more than the rest (although don’t quote me on anything but Persona and Paranoia Agent – the Nasuverse is basically impenetrable to me and I just haven’t read Berserk), to treat Yaldabaoth as everyone else’s fault, a consequence of a corrupt, sinful society (with its own Treasure and vice of Sloth, to boot) which you are challenging as the Phantom Thieves.

To be clear: I don’t disagree with any of this.  P5 is maybe kinda sorta making a Social Point about how contemporary-Japan-in-particular has problems, but overall, the works I’m talking about are definitely doing the Universal Psychodrama thing.  They’re not saying Society X is bad, unlike Society Y, which is totally doing the right thing by our standards.  They’re talking about “general human weakness,” as you say.

But I’m a little taken aback – not unhappy, not offended, not disagreeing especially, just surprised – to see a robust tradition of pop-culture media taking this kind of stance regarding the topic of general human weakness. 

As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of pop-culture media adopts one of two socio-metaphysical stances (or blends them together somehow): “people are basically good” and “people are just people, and you have to take them as individuals.”  Individuals can be anything and do anything, but when they’re presented as the faceless gestalt of The People…and when this presentation is made out to be legitimate…they are the source of all that is good and right and important in the world.  Heroes are obligated to give their all, often unto death, so that The People may survive and thrive.  Paeans to the fundamental excellence of humanity are the mark of good-guy-ness, and anyone who talks about how The People are actually bad is thereby revealing his status as a mustache-twirling villain, or at least as a gritty cynical antihero who doesn’t really mean it deep down. 

Hideous sin is the province of unusual, warped individuals. 

So when the manga/show/game/whatever comes out and says “nope, The People summoned up the eldritch horror because human beings just suck that way,” I find myself doing a double take. 

wirehead-wannabe:

discoursedrome:

argumate:

fluffshy:

It seems that people assume that if only we got rid of conventional beauty standards that everyone’s internal beauty standards would default to some standard that placed themselves at the top. I haven’t seen anyone ever argue for that position explicitly though. I could just be misunderstanding the logic behind other peoples hatred of conventional beauty standards. (I also might be biased because my internal beauty standards don’t seem to be influenced by external culture in a straight forward fashion.)

even if we got rid of conventional beauty standards I suspect that many people would still inexorably end up fixating on a particular aesthetic that isn’t physically possible for them, so transhuman body mods all the way baby

sometimes I fantasize about how nice it’d be to just automatically look really great all the time, like perfect skin, effortlessly excellent posture, everything in place all the time, don’t have to mess with your clothes, and so on, because I covet that look but just do not have the discipline to put the effort into that. BUT

inevitably this leads me to reflecting on how, if everyone was like that, we wouldn’t have a world where everyone is effortlessly beautiful, we’d have a world where people put the same amount of time and expense into their appearance that they do now, and expectations are just as uneven, only the bar is higher, so it’s like you’re totally sloppy if you leave the house without painting a unique abstract art composition over your entire body and crossbraiding your hair with live flowers

like most superpower fantasies, it only works if everyone else is denied it.

I think the actual position that people unconsciously hold is that we’ll stop having beauty standards, in the same way that naive anarchists think that we’ll stop having power dynamics if we get rid of the current government.

So…I think that there are (at least) two mostly-separate psychological phenomena that manifest as The Dream of Being Beautiful.

There’s the desire to be recognized as a Beautiful Person, someone who is noteworthily more-attractive-than-the-masses by conventional standards.  This is a semi-specialized social role that comes with its own perks, in the form of certain kinds of status and attention and identity-validation etc.  (It also comes with its own burdens, of course.)  Some people covet those perks, and so find it painful that they don’t have the looks necessary to get them.  Such people, when they’re wise and thoughtful and self-aware, don’t usually rail against beauty standards in the abstract, because – as @discoursedrome implies – the thing they want actually requires that some kind of beauty standards exist.  They want to win the status competition, which means there has to be a status competition.

(I should be clear, here, and say that many people in this category do rail against beauty standards.  That is because they are being hypocritical, or otherwise failing to achieve integrity and self-awareness.  They are sleight-of-handing their way to the fantasy of a world in which they are the beautiful ones, not those hateful Chads / popular bitches, but otherwise nothing much has changed.)

Then there’s the desire to be Beautiful Enough For Practical Purposes, which is in fact pretty different.  There are lots of people who don’t particularly wish to be remarkably attractive, to be the best-looking person in the room, and who would actually find it kind of weird and unpleasant if that got folded into their identities. Many of them nonetheless want to be free of physical flaws that they or others might find actively off-putting – want to be sufficiently attractive that they can feature in fond romantic/sexual imaginings without dissonance – want their preferred partners, who probably aren’t super invested in the have-the-hottest-mate status game but who do probably have normal levels of preference for an attractive-looking mate, to be totally satisfied – etc.

This is the desire to live in an anime world, fundamentally.  In an anime, some people are marked as being noteworthily more attractive than others, just like in real life, and everyone treats them as such…but even a universally-acknowledged “plain” character is in truth physically flawless, and his level of physical beauty isn’t ever going to cause a problem for him in a relationship that’s largely based on other things. 

Assuming that “make reality look like an anime” sadly isn’t an option, “widely-available body mods” is a pretty good solution for such people.  You can’t guarantee that you’ll win the status contest no matter what you do, but you can probably guarantee that you’ll be perfectly acceptable by your own lights and the lights of your ingroup.  “Eliminate beauty standards by enlightening humanity” is a terrible solution, in that I think it would be easier to eat the moon than to make it happen, but it does at least attempt to address this kind of suffering face-on.