October 2017

wirehead-wannabe:

thathopeyetlives:

@slatestarscratchpad wrote an article criticizing the generalization of the Rat Park experiment to humans. 

Some possible candidates they gave for the Human Park were modern celebrities and Mongolian despots who lead lives of extreme luxury and decadance in non-drug ways. (at least 3x10^3 concubines, etc)

I… do not agree with this. In fact, I think that these kinds of situations tend to breed misery (and that often the grotesque hedonistic entertainment is more a dull vacation from the misery than anything else). 

Yeah, if we’re going purely by material wealth then Bojack Horseman should be one of the happiest people alive. Ghengis Kahn’s heir even strikes me as a strong parallel to Bojack: someone who’s coasting on a fading past glory while steadily drinking himself to death.

This is not really a viable take on Ogedei Khan (and seems to have missed some of the information that @slatestarscratchpad came right out and said).

The man conquered Persia, the Jin Dynasty, Korea, and big chunks of both Europe and India.  Ain’t no “coasting on a fading past glory” up in here.

More to the point: heavy is the head that wears the crown, it’s true, but if you have to be king then being the khan of a nomadic warrior horde is probably the most psychologically-healthy way to do it (for normal-minded people).  Nomad courts run on a personal-loyalty-focused system rather than an office/title-based system, so most of your top-level flunkies are in fact your buddies rather than random power-holders you’re forever trying to placate.  The whole horse-nomad thing means that there’s a lot less infrastructure for you to navigate, a lot less specialized institutional knowledge that other people can wield against you, many fewer dark corners where your enemies can lurk and plot.

Besides, Ogedei dedicated much of his life to bureaucratizing and reforming the Mongolian government.  Which may have led to some neuroses for his successors, but it did mean that he had a Big Worthwhile Project, even aside from conquering much of the known world.

feotakahari:

balioc:

So, here’s a rapidly-metastisizing cultural/memetic problem:

There are lots and lots and lots of people who have been made to feel, for one reason or another, that the Noble Well-Presented Culturally-Approved Hero Figures are somehow not for them.  That they don’t get to see themselves and their stories in the princes and princesses, in the knights and dashing roguish rebels, etc.  They’re too ugly, too flawed, too Wrong somehow. 

Thus they do what fringey outcasts have always done, and instead identify with monsters and villains.  Great.  It’s a classic.

…except that there are so many different fringes nowadays, and we exist in a milieu that does not encourage them to be friendly to one another, or even to be mutually comprehensible.  Their norms are different, and often incompatible.  They have wildly divergent values and wildly divergent myths.  There’s a lot of hostility all around. 

The conceptual territory of “beloved monster” is getting pretty damn crowded.  And “your version of the Monster is Bad-Wrong” necessarily misses the whole point of monster-dom in a very painful way, but…it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable. 

I have no idea what you’re talking about here, but I feel like I would be very interested if I did. Unless you consider something like Hatred to be a major representative of a large subculture of outcasts, then I can’t think of any widely “beloved monsters” that inherently contradict each other. Most “beloved monsters” I can think of seem like they’d get along at a monster mash.

This isn’t about a clash of characters.  It’s about a clash of readers.

(On the object level, it also largely devolves to boring culture war shit. Which is why I didn’t get more explicit in the original post.)

**********

Who believes, deep down, that he doesn’t get to identify with the classic hero? Who actively wants to identify with the beloved monster?  

Well, let’s make a list –

1. Sexual minorities (who are often regarded as threatening bestial freaks)
2. Certain racial minorities (who are often regarded as threatening bestial freaks)
3. People who feel strong ideological pressure to align themselves with outcasts and outsiders
4. Non-minority men who are seen as threatening and bestial and freakish (especially in a sexual or romantic context)
5. Edgelordy non-minority men who want to be seen as threatening and bestial and freakish, because that’s the kind of power and dignity that’s available to them
6. People who feel strong ideological pressure to align themselves with transgression and rebelliousness

(obviously this is a very incomplete list, and obviously there’s a lot of overlap between categories, but good enough for now)

Back when I was growing up, in the ‘90s – in the heyday of White Wolf games and Anne Rice novels and hardcore Phandom – all these people were basically friends with each other, in a macro-level culture-mapping sense.  They were all Outside, and aligned against the Inside, which was the domain of smug well-adjusted normies.  White Wolf could market its products as being “for people from the Outside” and it basically just worked.

Now, uh, most members of groups 1-3 belong to one political-cultural camp, and most members of groups 4-6 belong to a different political-cultural camp, and those camps detest each other with great passion.  

But they’re still all identifying with the same monsters.  They all still think that Beauty and the Beast is a fairy tale for them, about the glories and struggles of their lives.  

You can see this, very visibly, in a lot of grassroots-level social-justice-friendly literature.  In the way that Monsterhearts comes right out and says “yeah, being a creature of darkness is basically a metaphor for being a member of an Oppressed Group.”  In the way that the core tumblr userbase will squee over any kind of cute “monsters secretly being pure and wonderful” content, more reliably than it will squee over literally anything else.  In the whole “gay Babadook” discourse.  

The edgelordy side of it is less visible, because the edgelords don’t have anything like the same sense of community and there’s not nearly as much in the way of ground-level artistic output.  But if you go look at the art that they do produce (on 4chan etc.), it’s not hard to see.  And of course their identification has a pretty solid foundation in a lot of the most important source texts – Beast and Phantom and Dracula etc. get much of their mileage out of being threateningly sexual figures, in a way that the SJW monster-fans have to work pretty hard to elide in order to make the mythology serve their purposes.  

This is going to explode horribly.  People are defensive of their symbolism, and especially don’t like sharing their symbols with their hated outgroups.  At some point, there’s going to be a nasty public fight in which someone says “you don’t get to be Beast, you’re too much of a disgusting weirdo to be Beast, Beast is our figure.”  Which will ruin the terrain for at least some people, maybe for everyone. Which will be terrible, because it’s really useful to have a powerful dignified romantic figure with whom you can identify even when you’re a disgusting weirdo.

the-grey-tribe:

oligopsoneia:

the-grey-tribe:

anaisnein:

“toxic masculinity” is a much abused and misused phrase; in particular it is frequently perverted into a misandric slur thrown at individual men (which, ironically, instantiates and perpetuates it) rather than utilized in its useful sense, referring to that subset of aspects of masculinity as  constructed within a culture which, when adhered to, cause people to hurt themselves or others. the term is itself pretty much toxic at this point and I hesitate to drop it. but I got a thought poking at me rn, so damn the torpedoes.

so. propositions under this heading that seem relatively consensus-friendly albeit obviously subject to tinkering and exception and so on include:

• men are socialized to alieve that the only socially respectable feeling they can have is anger. consequently, they are likely to reflexively convert any other negative feelings into anger so that they can express them. expressing anger is generally experienced as cathartic, while attempts to express feelings such as sadness or shame may fail even if made, ie, expression does not result in catharsis as processing is impaired/blocked and inadequate. this is pretty terrible for the men in question and it’s not great for those around them either
  
• men are socialized to alieve that they are worthless and expendable until they prove themselves otherwise by achievement; in contemporary first world societies this generally means their human worth is constituted by their economic productivity, i.e., ability to generate money on one or another level, with contributions in e.g. caring, crafts, art, etc generally not assigned value unless they also generate money. this is pretty terrible for the men in question and it’s not great for those around them either
  

k. here’s the thought. but first, a flashback. I’m old, and I remember this period of what I guess might be called peak-consensus feminism? in like the 80s and 90s? this is after things had calmed well down from the most radical peaks out of the 70s second wave, which mainstream leftish/self-identifying-as-feminist culture now perceived and painted as comically pverdone (Dworkin and MacKinnon generally carried the poster-child burden for reasons that are understandable, albeit complicated on scrutiny; it was all, name-check Dworkin and/or MacKinnon, ‘of course our feminism isn’t like that,’ proceed with proposal for dismantling instutionalized sexism and establishing guardrails against its recurrence and/or protest against specific instance of gross overt misogyny). but this is also before things degenerated as they have in the last fifteen or so years to the point where “feminism” is apparently perceived primarily or only (!! !! !!; toxoplasma, I guess) as a Tumblr-at-its-worst-but-armed authoritarian abusive purity-stick-waving mob that just wants to beat up men till the world is perfect.

in this, the eye of the hurricane, so to speak, I grew up and came of age in an extremely liberal/blue region and subculture in which I experienced female socialization. female socialization, then and there, consisted of an underlying stratum of traditional gender role teaching and policing (i.e., you still had to be pretty and thin and not too loud, and you still had to perform a lot of onerous style and grooming rituals, which were different than in more traditional settings, but still girl-specific and legion), overlaid by a thick overt explicit continually reinforced layer of peak-consensus feminism messages of egalitarianism and empowerment (you can grow up to do anything you want! you are the same as the boy next to you with the same opportunities and life options! we’ve moved beyond all that risible sexist nonsense from the past now, it’s true there are a bunch of dinosaurs still out there slinging the bullshit but they are clearly Wrong, nobody agrees with them except a few other dinosaurs. the revolution has taken place and this is just cleanup and maintenance. bullshit probably won’t happen to you, and if it does we will all stand up together and speak out against it and make it fall back and stfu)

and my thought is: women raised on this mix now suffer from the exact same kinds of internalized toxic masculinity as men do. (this in addition to the already widely acknowledged collateral damage they take from men as a result of, classic formulation, men’s own — presumably much deeper, which, god help you you poor fuckers — internalization of toxic masculinity, etc, etc). as a girl, you don’t get beaten up in the locker room for insufficient masc swagger or whatever, but you get the equivalent in the workplace when you’re passed over for promotion because you don’t project the right timbre of gravitas with clients or establish sufficient dominance (yes, in spite of sexist stereotypes about assertive women, too bad, it’s eat or be eaten) in team meetings. you don’t get the ‘boys don’t cry’ training in early childhood that guys do, but you do grow up under a pervasive unisex cultural ideal of insouciance, nonchalance, and ironic detachment, and if you violate that ideal by having and expressing an authentic feeling where people can see and hear you, you have failed. you should feel shame, and you deserve contempt.

and look, the emancipation of women, writ large, is fucking great, right, that’s obviously not what I’m questioning, but I do question whether we have utterly fucked up the process by being like: right. equality with men means we compete as men, so men’s problems are now universal problems. you get emotional repression and you get emotional repression and you get emotional repression: everyone gets emotional repression! and we’re all thrilled to be defined by and valued entirely according to our career trajectories or lack thereof! this is called “empowerment” and is what we were fighting for!

in short: due to a horrible misstep* by benign, women-are-people feminism, which I still subscribe to to be clear, toxic masculinity has been universalized. being a woman doesn’t get you an exemption! it’s just added as a whole nother burden on top of (what isn’t but might as well be called — I say it’s coercive gender role policing and I say the hell with it) toxic femininity. 

(status: speculative; am n of 1 with no claim to be a representative woman of our time — minor neurodivergences; unusually high alienation; arguably technically ineligible for n given I have ~questions~ about my gender assignment, although said questions arose late enough in life that as I’m talking socialization I’m just running with it. but those two bullet points describe my experience. my experience is neither more nor less nor other than precisely this. and I cannot stop worrying at this fact like a dog with a bone.)

p.s.: it occurs to me that some of the most flagrantly atrocious dominance games and abuses in The Worst Bits of SJ — which are, probably rightly though very distressingly, seen as driven by feminism as she is spoke in these increasingly accursed times — might be usefully examined through this lens. as I pointed out way back at the beginning, much of the current wave of feminist misandry is simply an instantiation of toxic masculinity. consider: these women are suffering from internalized toxic masculinity in the same way as men are. not only as innocent oppressed parties on the receiving end of the collateral damage thrown by men’s struggles with their own socialization, but also via their own struggles with the exact same fucking shit in a pink package.

*actually, something something neoliberal managerial capitalism systematically fomenting and coopting culture war bs to distract from material conditions etc

I wish there were clear examples of non-toxic masculinity that are not just examples of men doing traditionally feminine gender role stuff. Like “non-toxic/progressive masculinity is when men stay at home and cook and clean“ or “non-toxic/progressive masculinity is when men wear pink“.

Backyard grilling. Philately. Firefighting. Pickup basketball. Optimizing your orc warlock’s DPS. Teaching your son how to play catch. Antifaschiste Aktion. War of 1812 Reënactment. Camping. Chess. Knowing your way around practical machinery. That Russian breakdancing thing, what’s it called. Dying for a cause. Cracking open a cold one with the boys.

Now in a sense the actual answer is “no” insofar as basically in 99% of cases if something’s good for men to do then that’s because it’s good to irrespective of gender, so there’s no need to make it specifically male. There’s no need to be all “no Karen you can’t join our Commander table because Magic cards are for BOYS,” or whatever. But there are plenty of things that are both traditionally male-coded and that are perfectly fine good things to keep on doing.

I want to endorse your post and apologise for how I phrased mine. Also DIY woodworking.

@oligopsoneia‘s take here is entirely correct, but there are some maybe-troubling ramifications.

Two Different “Cool Girls”

wirehead-wannabe:

argumate:

feotakahari:

When I was in high school, I let my guy friends shoot crumpled paper balls into my cleavage at lunch. I thought this made me cooler than the other girls, and that my ability to assimilate and remain sexualized was special. Besides, it was just a silly thing they did. It would be years before that memory soured, and I realized how dangerous it was that this had become my basis for what acceptance looked like … 

[She describes several instances of sexual harassment.]

Encounters like these stopped when I got serious with my now-husband. I could say that men who never cared about my autonomy were respectful of another man’s woman, but to me that would be willfully disingenuous. I’m sure it’s true that they stopped mostly because I had stopped setting myself up for attacks in a visceral search for validation. This is not me victim-blaming myself—it’s a cold, hard look at the culture. I didn’t want to fuck these men, but I thought being powerful, popular, and even self-possessed would follow if I could set myself up as a figment of their fantasies. In between these assaults I didn’t sleep around, or even date all that much. It wasn’t that I traded sex for self-esteem; it was that that I’d spent my whole life convinced—and being convinced to believe—that girls with an adoring gaggle of guy friends were empirically more valuable than other girls. Long before anyone was capitalizing Cool and Girl, I understood that the template involved exuding an effortless, accidental sex appeal.

Hannah Keyser, Some of the Times I Didn’t Consent

Once I organized a dinner
for office friends
and I was proud when I ordered
barbecued spareribs, eggroll appetizers
bird’s nest soup 
empress chicken with asparagus
peking duck and thousand-layer buns
lobster cantonese
mushrooms, grass, black, button
yang chow fried rice
sweet and sour rock cod
oolong tea
fortune cookies
and almond delight
and I was prouder still
when I invited my guests
to tour dark alleys
the sing-song waves of faces
peeping from second-story windows
pointing to ducks, squabs, thousand-year-old eggs
me on the perimeter of Chinatown
with my office friends
gulping wine, holding my nose,
masked, playing oriental,
inscrutable, wise.
Now standing
before a brass spittoon
I recall that time
and i want to puke
not from the food, my friend
not from the food

Nellie Wong, Not From the Food

I don’t have a larger point here. I just find it interesting that both of these authors had a sense that, as part of being the “cool” woman/minority member, they had to offer themselves up as willing exemplars of other people’s half-formed stereotypes.

“I will instantiate your fantasies in exchange for positive regard”

(Not meant to imply that feeling like this is illegitimate)

These are really good examples of a reaction that I just don’t grok. Like, I guess I can see in the abstract how they might feel like they were being pressured to play a role they didn’t want to play, but like… trading performances for social attention is just kind of a thing that everyone does? Idk maybe it’s something specific to being a minority (in the sj sense).

Mmmmrph.  I think I do understand this.  But the thing that I understand is uncharitable and cynical, so…maybe there’s something I’m missing, maybe there’s a nicer spin that can be put on the dynamic.

Trivially: we change as life goes on. 

In particular, our identities change and our values change.  Things that we used to prize very highly, things that we used to try to be and display, become disgusting and shameful to our sight.  Sometimes it’s because the broader fashion changes; sometimes it’s about life-stage transitions; sometimes it’s because we fall in with a new crowd, or because our friends change and we follow after; sometimes it’s because we arrive at epiphanies on our own, or through our reading.  Lots of avenues.  And of course this is totally unavoidable, and it’s no one’s fault, at least not in a broader sense. 

But it does mean that sometimes we look pack on our past selves, whom we still consider to be us, and cringe.  We can’t change what we were or what we did, however much we hate it.  It’s a source of terrible psychic pain, at least for me, and authors from David Foster Wallace to Dave Barry have convinced me that this problem is pretty damn universal. 

People in terrible pain are easy marks for ideologues. 

The thing that this meme has to offer is: It’s not your fault that you did all those shameful things, that the you-of-yesterday didn’t live up to the standards that the you-of-today holds so dear.  You were tricked.  You were bullied.  You were FORCED to be shameful by the pressures of oppression.  So long as you hate the oppressors, you don’t have to hate yourself.

…and of course it’s actually worse than that, because the ideology that’s offering you this moral-blame-shifting technology is the same ideology that pushed these new standards on you in the first place, that made you feel like your old self is disgusting.  The Culture Juggernaut tells you that wanting to be the Cool Girl is sexist and degrading, that wanting to be the mysterious exotic Asian is racist and degrading, and offers you absolution for having committed these spiritual sins by letting you push them on someone else.  

It is very, very, very reminiscent of the kind of tricks that certain evangelical faiths play with actual concepts of sin. 

rowantheexplorer:

earlgraytay:

yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined:

systlin:

rowantheexplorer:

We really ought to bring back the term “grognards” for misogynist throwback geek boys. I know it used to be applied to “old school” tabletop gamer bros who refused to grow as game systems and gaming culture changed, but I think it’s a good term that deserves to be applied more broadly.

French for “complainers”, the historic grognards were Napoleon’s Old Imperial Guard that he let get away with complaining about stuff that others might go to the guillotine for saying. They were not good for morale, and pretty much universally reviled by the rest of the French Army. Even Napoleon wasn’t all that fond of them, but he let them get away with it because seniority.

I second this motion. 

the last time we took an insult that mocked already-hateable people for something relatively unimportant and tried to turn it into a synonym for “misogynist” it did not end particularly well

I hate the word ‘neckbeard’ (to the point where I think it’s an anti-autistic slur), but I still think this is a good idea. The difference is that having a neckbeard does not inherently make you an asshole, but being a grognard in the geek sense has always meant you’re an asshole. 

A grognard isn’t just ‘someone who likes older game systems and is sad that newer ones don’t have the features he wants them to’, a grognard is someone who’s That Fucking Guy about it. A guy who says that anyone who isn’t playing their preferred edition of a game is a Fake Geek who Has It Too Easy and Doesn’t Understand What Makes The Hobby Great (sound familiar?). A guy who’s willing to get in big flame wars on the internet about how OH MY GOD 1ST EDITION WAS THE BEST AND ANYONE ELSE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS LYING. A guy who, in short, believes No Fun Allowed unless it’s his preferred kind of fun.

‘Grognard’ thus has two connotations built into it that ‘neckbeard’ does not: 

1. “You’re being That Fucking Guy, stop it.”

2. “It’s just a game, you should really just relax.” 

As long as we’re careful to specify that this doesn’t just mean someone who’s socially awkward or “creepy” - it specifically means someone who’s That Fucking Guy about women/minorities/LGBT+ people in Nerd Stuff- I think it works.

This was exactly where I was going with it. Thank you for finding better vocabulary than me. Because I also hate the term “neckbeard”, and I also don’t like that we stick related stereotypes to “basement dwellers” and “fedora wearers”. Those things are not the problem with the behavior. That’s bullying someone’s outward appearance or living situation, and that’s not fair or right. But “les grognards” - the complainers - describes what they do, and carries with it why it’s a problem.

I appreciate where you’re coming from, I appreciate the distinctions that you’re trying to draw, but…this is not a good plan, folks, you will not like the thing it ends up doing.

As long as we’re careful to specify that this doesn’t just mean someone who’s socially awkward or “creepy” 

That never ever works.  Once you create a discursive category, it will immediately start mutating to fit the needs of the people in the discourse.  Once you create a discursive category that is specifically crafted to be an insult, it will immediately start being used to insult whatever groups people actually want to insult, so long as they’re close enough to the blast radius that the semantic stretch can be made to work.  That is how categorical language works.  And if you try to push against it, to defend the rigorous boundaries of your terminology…well, we’ve all seen how well the phrase “well, actually” fares in the wild. 

“Grognard” sounds a whole lot like it means “filthy basement-dwelling subhuman autistic neckbeard.”  Therefore, if it gains any traction, it will be used to mean that thing by the many people who are invested in making such attacks.  The niceties of your usage choices won’t have any power to constrain. 

To be clear: I don’t mean to be policing your private vocabulary here, it sucks when you can’t talk as you please, use whatever terminology makes you happy (and live with the consequences if/when people misunderstand you or diverge from your intentions).  But it sounds like you’re saying that it would be good to make a public campaign of spreading this particular usage of “grognard,” so as a member of the public I’m pushing back.

The best results are likely to come from not creating weaponizable categories.  Say the thing you mean, don’t chunk ideas together.  You want to say that someone is complaining about other people having Bad Wrong Fun?  Say “he’s complaining about people having Bad Wrong Fun, and he should stop.”  It’s more words than “grognard,” but the costs are much lower.

mitigatedchaos:

osberend:

shieldfoss:

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

What a moron.

These people are going to get away with it, because the accusations will forever be associated with the alt-right. If he’d waited a week or two, someone else would have taken the bait, published, and the media would have eaten it up.

But now the whole issue has been coded “of interest to racists” and everyone else will be careful not to touch it. The people involved will defend with “You’re accusing me of sexual harassment? Aha, I see you’re a fan of Mike Cernovich” and it’ll never go anywhere.

here you are assuming Cernovich intends to bring abusers to justice in an effort to help women

which

i mean

Nah, the analysis still applies if he wants to take down Biddle et al. for being sociopolitical enemies. Where it falls apart, of course, is if he really just wants to gather money and love from guess existing base for “boldly standing up to the hypocritical liberal media establishment,” etc. In that case, he’s actually better if the left drops it as a result of his support, because it gives him more “lone voice crying the wilderness” cred.

Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?

One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes.  Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.  

Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?

They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.

Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do.  The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.

We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.  

So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down.  But what if the point isn’t to take them down?  What if the point is recruitment?  Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.

Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.

The parallel doesn’t really hold; the metacultural situations are just too different.

People really care about kids getting groomed for prostitution by gangsters.  They will change their attitudes and allegiances, at least somewhat, in order to align themselves with the “not supporting kids getting groomed for prostitution by gangsters” camp.

People do not give any shits at all about ethics in video games journalism.  Even serious video gamers mostly don’t care about ethics in video games journalism, because the “mainstream games press” was corrupted into worthlessness long long ago, and because there are enough independent sources of information and insight that you don’t really need to rely on the pro journalists for anything.

If the Big Left throws Europe’s safety-in-the-streets situation under the bus, it will suffer real consequences in the arena of culture.  If the Big Left throws games journalism under the bus, then…games journalism gets squashed by the bus.

The fact that infinitely-bad outcomes are easier to imagine and understand than infinitely-good outcomes doesn’t mean that infinite goodness is less plausible, or indeed that it would be less morally salient for some reason. 

bambamramfan:

Yglesias is doing a tweetstorm of “Confess Your Unpopular Opinions” (141, one for each fav he got), and I agree with more of them than I disagree. But I wanted to draw attention to the political trap we’ve fallen into with one.

Almost every smart person agrees with this, and what more, thinks most other people don’t. “Other people” are the ones who care about some big symbolic matters that can be captured in soundbites. We care about the complicated details that get resolved behind the scenes. Right?

Ideally for us consequence-oriented technocrats, this should mean basing elections and voting on substantive policy details.

Instead of bringing enlightened policy focus, this makes a problem.

1. The really important stuff can’t be campaigned on in a soundbite.
   
2. Therefore the really important stuff MUST NOT BE what’s campaigned on with soundbites. It must be in the details that are worked on behind closed doors. Definitionally, the public doesn’t know about them.
3. So what you actually have to do is make sure your guys win, and so people you trust are making these closed doors technical decisions, instead of the other side.
4. So even if the other side promises things like “We won’t execute you with death panels” or “We won’t touch Social Security”, you just can’t trust what they’ll do with the details of the policy that the public isn’t paying attention to.
5. So you have to signal to your less-educated allies “ignore the policy compromises they are making publicly, it won’t matter. All that matters is getting your guy - no matter how personally dumb or cynical he is - in power so his assistants can be the one solving these boring technical aspects.
6. So the ideological elites crank UP the symbolic campaign agitprop, and ignore any attempts at proposed compromise.
7. So the campaign is entirely about blunt symbolism.
8. The people actually governing… only have blunt symbolism to guide them. In fact, voters on both sides seemed completely uninterested in policy and middle ground.
9. The people governing base all their management details on what looks good in the simplest terms to the base.

Which is, you know, like the Republican Parties entire response to Obamacare and every bill afterwards. “This policy might sound conservative, but it’s so complicated that a Democrat running it will screw us over. <Enter Trump> And now that we’re in charge, we don’t even know what to do to make this work.”

(Edit: Readers of this blog know: Every extremist trend in the Republican Party, like this, the Democratic Party is only 5-15 years behind on then they’ll be doing it too.)

So, here’s a rapidly-metastisizing cultural/memetic problem:

There are lots and lots and lots of people who have been made to feel, for one reason or another, that the Noble Well-Presented Culturally-Approved Hero Figures are somehow not for them.  That they don’t get to see themselves and their stories in the princes and princesses, in the knights and dashing roguish rebels, etc.  They’re too ugly, too flawed, too Wrong somehow. 

Thus they do what fringey outcasts have always done, and instead identify with monsters and villains.  Great.  It’s a classic.

…except that there are so many different fringes nowadays, and we exist in a milieu that does not encourage them to be friendly to one another, or even to be mutually comprehensible.  Their norms are different, and often incompatible.  They have wildly divergent values and wildly divergent myths.  There’s a lot of hostility all around. 

The conceptual territory of “beloved monster” is getting pretty damn crowded.  And “your version of the Monster is Bad-Wrong” necessarily misses the whole point of monster-dom in a very painful way, but…it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable. 

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

silver-and-ivory said: seems like there’s a v strong division

silver-and-ivory said: between high status men who get away with everything

silver-and-ivory said: and low status men who get arrested for, idk, wearing a shirt crooked or some shit

yessish, but I’m not sure if that’s the best framing for it as it offloads the difference onto vague notions of status instead of institutional position.

While a prison guard may be “low status” relative to a movie producer or a member of congress, they can still get away with very creepy and exploitative behaviour towards prisoners, sometimes even up to the point of torture and murder without repercussions.

Michael Bay didn’t have that kind of power over Megan Fox, but he still had some power that say a Citibank executive wouldn’t have had, in that his position includes the right to decide who has a career and who doesn’t, with no real oversight or feedback on how he makes that decision.

“you can’t avoid the guy, have to work with him, have to be nice to him, and can’t complain to anyone about his behaviour” is a toxic combination anywhere.

Status is also a factor beyond just institutional power.

People will let popular and attractive people get away with doing things that they would never let an unpopular, unattractive person do, and they’ll make excuses for them that they wouldn’t make for an unpopular person.

I don’t agree with BA that it’s all-consuming, there are things that can pierce and overcome it, but it’s definitely a factor.

Most non-AnCap Anarchists I’ve seen don’t seem to have anything to stop weaponized popularity, except that the communes are limited in size.

Most non-AnCap Anarchists I’ve seen don’t seem to have anything to stop weaponized popularity, except that the communes are limited in size.

This is a feature, not a bug.  A large part of the ancom fantasy – a large part of many political fantasies, actually, especially the more naive breeds of anti-capitalist fantasy – involves the restoration of popularity to its rightful level of influence over human interactions. 

“When the revolution comes – the fact that I’m a good person, lovable and beloved, will be enough to make things go my way.”

“When the revolution comes – that jerk boss that everyone hates will get taken down a peg or two.”

“When the revolution comes – snotty unlikable young nerds won’t be able to lord it over me just because they’re good at weird abstract tasks.” 

Sometimes, of course, this also involves the fantasy that you are secretly popular, and that this will be recognized and rewarded when the drama plays out.  But not always.  Sometimes it is a fantasy held by genuinely popular people annoyed that post-high-school contemporary life doesn’t reward popularity in the ways that they’ve come to expect that it should. 

brazenautomaton:

quinndolyns:

capitalists right now are terrified of the spectre of “automation”, which is, ostensibly, an incredibly good thing.

capitalists are writing articles that say “Machines Are Going To Replace All Low-Income Jobs” as if this is somehow a bad thing to be happening

machines taking the grunt work and doing it for us? order takers at restaurants being replaced by tablets? unnecessary work being done for us, automatically? these are all GREAT things!

but under capitalism, this reveals a fatal flaw; the poor cannot exist, cannot subsist, without being fed scraps by the rich. when our jobs are replaced by robots, the rich man has no reason, any longer, to hand us those scraps.

in an ideal world, robots doing trash collection and janitorial work and other such jobs would be a good thing. but under capitalism, it means the decimation and further poverty of the working people.

once again “capitalism is bad because of this thing that it does unimaginably better than everything else”

under capitalism, the low-class and the despised have the ability to sustain their existence by doing useful things, like janitorial work and garbage collection, even though everyone hates them and wants to harm them for existing

under every single other system that can ever possibly exist including and especially your personal vision of your mythical, blessed Real True Communism, the low-class, despised people do not have this ability, and are left in a world where the only salient fact about them is that everyone hates them and wants to harm them for existing. 

capitalism does more for them than any other system ever has or ever will, ever, no matter what, because capitalism is the only system where they can be sustained by something other than “how much other people like them”

so of course you hate it and want to destroy it, so you can replace it with a system where people are “cared for”, which means “allowed to exist according solely to how much people care about them being alive”. social entropy is invincible and unstoppable and can never be fought by anyone.

This analysis is half-true at best, and it does a bad job of identifying the actual social virtues of capitalism. 

Most pre-capitalist economic systems are, in one way or another, more communitarian.  You’re closely tied up with your extended family / your jati / your peasant village / whatever; lots of resources are pooled within that unit, and the unit (acting mostly through its leaders) gets a lot of control over everyone else. 

This is actually a lot more egalitarian, resource-wise, than modern atomized capitalism.  (Even accounting for the fact that the past contained fewer wealth-centralization technologies, which is of course true.)  The units spread wealth around – sometimes through actual communal ownership, sometimes through a ton of mandatory festivals or whatever, sometimes through complicated marriage schemes – rather than letting the most successful individuals hoard it.  Even low-skilled people tend to get a reasonable share, because the units like having manpower available, and any asshole can be an asset if you’re allowed to tell him what to do.  Plus, everyone is someone’s kid, and it’s not that difficult to become a member of the local big man’s entourage, etc. etc.

The downside, of course, is that you’re embedded in a social unit that will try to run your life.  For some people this is fine, or even better than fine, and for some people it’s soul-crushingly terrible.  This can be called “the normie spectrum” without losing too much fidelity.

The big winners under atomized capitalism, from a social perspective, are non-normies with valuable skills; they get to benefit from using those skills without having to share the wealth, and they’re not subject to the social politics of people who don’t like or understand them.  The big losers are low-skilled people who would otherwise receive subsidies from a communitarian social unit and who would thrive under its politics. 

That last group of people is real.  It is not a fiction.  Many of the soon-to-be-displaced probably belong to that group.  And they’re not wrong to say “we would do better under a system where we would matter to someone by virtue of participating in a social structure, and we are doing worse under a system where the free market makes us literally disposable to everyone.”