Just because you’ve appointed yourself the champion of the Martians doesn’t mean that all your enemies are driven by hatred of Martians. They may just hate you.
Just because you’ve appointed yourself the champion of the Martians doesn’t mean that all your enemies are driven by hatred of Martians. They may just hate you.
I need indulgent fanfiction recs pls
MCU would be great, but other fandoms are good too.
Pwp, wump, your favorite cuteness, just something that’s great and indulgent. Idgaf what pairing (s).
Not sure this is the kind of cuteness you’re looking for, and I have no idea whether you know or care about Revolutionary Girl Utena, but, uh, it doesn’t get any more straight-up indulgent than this ridiculous thing.
(I will go out on a limb and say that it is the very best Utena fanfic about Canadian politics ever written.)
A general precept of culture engineering:
You can create new norms, if you have enough social power and the will to use it. But if you want them to stick, if you want them to take root and influence people’s general engaging-with-other-humans algorithms, you have to enforce them consistently.
Which means, in particular, that you have to punish people for breaking your new norms even when the violation didn’t cause any actual harm, even when it turned out to be a totally victimless crime, even when there is literally no one who actually wants the punishment to be carried out.
Otherwise, it won’t take long for people to realize that the actual norm is “don’t screw up, don’t get caught, you should do the thing but only when it’s a good idea.” And it has been very conclusively established that this does not work. People are absolutely terrible at judging that kind of risk.
Soon enough, I promise, I’ll stop with the vague aphorisms and get back to actual things.
Short answer: you can’t. The world is unfathomably big and complicated, and while we can make models to help ourselves understand it, compression is lossy.
(That sounds like the most unhelpful sort of glibness, I know, but…it’s actually a really important thing to keep in your head. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone – often someone in a position of decision-making authority – say something to the effect of “X can’t be true, because if it were true, we’d be totally lost with no good source of information.” Well, yes, sometimes you’re totally lost and there’s no good source of information. Sucks to be you. Such is the fate of man. And it’s better to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge than to keep charging into bigger and bigger errors because you don’t wanna.)
Which is not to say that you can’t improve your informational situation, to some extent. And if that’s what you want to do…you know the tricks as well as I do, I’m sure. Use data rather than anecdotes. Pay attention to the sourcing of your information. Check edge cases to see whether nice-sounding universal rules are really as universal as they sound. Check how things work in different circumstances, with different sorts of people. Don’t be provincial, don’t be blinkered, don’t drown in swamps of ideology or ego.
But if you want a royal road to understanding, something like “just keep your eyes open and don’t be stupid,” then…I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not happening.
Say it with me, kids: your experience is not representative. The rules that seem to explain everything in your life, the phenomena you notice over and over again in a consistent pattern, are not The Way The World Works; they are incredibly localized, and in many places outside your sphere, things are going to be very very different.
(This is double-true if your sphere is full of people who are selected for being nonstandard in some common way.)
The fact that you spend lots of time on the internet does not change this. The internet is a big and extremely heterogeneous place.
If you make confident assertions about The Way The World Works, and other people act like you’re crazy…it is very possible that the things you’re saying actually just sound totally crazy to them, like you’re boldly declaring that the sky is green. Which doesn’t make your experiences false or wrong. But it does make them non-universal.
This is an important precept, and I am as guilty as anyone else of ignoring it.
There is a very astute insight here into the psychology of race. What matters is not so much the differences between individuals but which differences we choose to invest significance in. This is the good news on race. It suggests that the best way to overcome race may simply be to distract people from it. If there is nothing else to attract people’s attention, the set of physical characteristics that distinguish race will be regarded as significant, but this can be overcome by reducing the salience of these characteristics. There is probably nothing we can do to stop people from classifying others into groups and developing animosity toward those whom they regard as belonging to an out-group. Yet even if we are unable to change this basic feature of human psychology, we can develop an effective work-around, by manipulating the environment so that people classify each other in ways that are less socially pernicious. For example, instead of allowing people to fixate on inherited features of individuals — such as skin colour — we could encourage them to focus on arbitrary or symbolic features — like hair style. The advantage of hair style is that it can easily be changed, and so does not translate into permanent disadvantage for any class of individuals.
I object to this plan because wealth is inherited.
This is the exact same “colorblind” racial ideology that America had settled on until it got talked down in the last decade
This is just people grokking why that fence was there now that they see what happens without it
I dislike +1-ing anyone’s comment on the internet, I think it’s bad discursive form, but…this is an important point. Really important. So, uh, “amen to that.”
[We were so close, people! We’d successfully turned racism into a disgusting social disease! We had a generation of kids raised on Sesame Street! And now look what’s happened to us, Christ, it makes you want to cry…]
OK, a lot of thoughts about this recent discourse, but let’s start with the simple stuff:
You can create a system in which people are constrained. You can also create a system in which people have freedom of choice. You cannot create a system in which people have freedom of choice, but other people don’t judge them for the choices they make. That doesn’t work even in theory. Humans react to the social data with which they are presented, and draw conclusions, and update. That is precisely the thing for which humans are evolved.
(If people are systematically drawing the wrong conclusions from given choices, because there’s a widespread belief in bad data, you can of course try to correct that. That does happen. More commonly, though, the conclusions are accurate at least heuristically, and the complainers just don’t want those thoughts to be thought regardless.)
One of the major functions of a constraining default norm is that it allows people to engage in a certain behavior without having other people read too much into it. If the thing you’re doing is mandatory, the fact that you’re doing it doesn’t carry very much data about you. This is most useful when there’s a thing that a lot of people really want to do, but that is most desired by people who are Bad in some way, such that it’s very easy to feel pressure to show that you’re not Bad by eschewing it.
I feel called out by Hotel Concierge, but at the same time, I’m starting to see through HC’s and Scott’s respective writing styles.
HC is easy. HC is channeling TLP.
Scott writes in fits and starts, and in the latest flurry he started to cut corners that laid bare the ever-same skeleton of his essays, and then he wrote posts that were just a single idea, without any additional scaffolding.
Once in a history test I wrote a nested outline at the beginning of my essay on the causes of World War One. I should have completely erased it, because I did not finish the structure in time, so I just crossed out the outline and skipped two sub-headings. My teacher knew what I had left out, and deducted points accordingly. To this day, I’m certain if the outline had been completely unreadable, not just crossed out, I would have gotten a B instead of a C. I’m not bitter about this after all these years, but there was a lesson to be learned, and I learned it: Do not make the negative space in your concept map too obvious if you want to impress people. The systematising mindset is not your friend here.
HC has ten good ideas in five posts, but only six if you don’t count duplicates, and none of these are new, not even the duplicates. I think I’m being so hard on these people because the quality of their ideas fluctuates wildly, while their writing stays the same. My writing fluctuates too. I am not a wooden persona. I am a real boy.
I think there’s a lot of similarity in the writing styles of hotelconcierge, kontextmaschine, raggedjackscarlet, TLP, and to some degree balioc (though quality varies widely.) bal said it could be called “working class intellectual”
It’s writing that’s completely secure that the author has no need to convince you, you’re here to listen or not and that’s not their problem. It’s cynical about almost every political movement, and looks at internal sources of happiness rather than external. And it’s built on a foundation of a lot of non-topical knowledge, that makes for entertaining stories and feels less caught up in the current culture wars.
Man thinking of myself as “working class intellectual” feels all kinds of wrong, not least ‘cause in cultivating this highhanded writing voice I always thought of it as aristocratic
Though university graduate/Wikipedia-dwelling essayist Karl Marx was pretty much this exact type and if that guy doesn’t count
The concept of the “organic intellectual” might come closer, distinguishing self-selected types analyzing things as they are experienced (particularly from their structural position in society) from the credentialed intellectuals committed to The Discourse as an interpretive lens and peer group
Honestly though, “accumulating a broad store of non-topical knowledge from here, there, abroad and ago, so that you can bring it to bear on society today” really was the point of the liberal arts tradition and the public intellectual, and if it seems so alien today maybe there was something to all the fears of their decline
I agree with the last paragraph here.
This is relatively boring as levels of analysis go, but I think the common thread here is a certain response to the nature of the blog format: short-form, but with a self-selecting audience. You don’t really have enough time to present a detailed analysis of a suite of examples (the way many academic books do) – if you did, you wouldn’t put that piece of writing on a blog. So your examples have to be quick and to-the-point, like in an op-ed.
But unlike an op-ed writer, you aren’t constrained by the boss’ demand that you be comfortably readable to a wide audience. So how do you give your examples more idea-motivating force when you can’t go into depth? You make them obscure (so the reader says “wow, I didn’t know that and it startles me, so maybe there’s something to this idea”), or lay them on very thick so the reader has the feeling that numerous disparate cultural stars are being revealed as part of one constellation.
Hotel Concierge and TLP are frustrating to me because they lay on the references very, very thick even when the underlying concept is often simple and/or banal. The implicit argument is something like “dude, if you were aware enough to juggle all these worldly things in your head at once, you would agree with my interpretation.” So you try to juggle them, and it’s a little dizzying, but there is the nagging feeling that the interpretation came first and the references are textual adornments, intended to have just this dazzling effect.
There is a legitimate, nontrivial way to use seemingly disparate examples to briefly illustrate a concept – namely, “this concept makes sense of all of these things, which suggests that it’s widely applicable.” SSC at its best does this. But SSC also sometimes tries to generate argumentative force by mere piling on of examples – like when a large number of hyperlinks in a short space is used to argue “this happens all the time.” (They may really just reflect one of those mini-manias that are always afflicting writers on deadlines – if there is one thinkpiece saying a thing, you can bet there are ten, or will soon be.)
I’m sure there are historical examples of similar forms? (“Pamphlets” in 18th/19th C?) Marx again seems relevant – there is something familiarly “internet” in the way he would figure out his beliefs by yelling at people he disagreed with (cf.)
In my “Why are nrx blogposts >10,000 words long?“ list of influences, I had a group of miscellaneous people I could not categorise properly. Are Eric Hoffer and Jane Jacobs “working class intellectuals”?
…yes. Absolutely.
I mean, way more than any of the bloggers listed. Hoffer is pretty much the archetype of “working-class intellectual.”
[Note how, for example, both of them were actually embedded in the working class rather than in the academy when they did their most famous writing.]
yeah, 100% you do this and, shock, you’ll get a LOT fewer people willing to subject themselves to the hell that is medical school and (especially) residency, driving supply back down again.
it’s kind of insane to me that someone would notice “health care costs more in America than other countries!” and get from there to “doctors’ salaries are the real problem” and not the INSANELY HUGE disparity in procedure costs brought on as a direct result of our fucked-up insurance system.
like, sure, yes, doctors do get paid “too much,” but given how much worse those same insurance/liability complications are making their quality of life and reducing the inherent satisfaction of what’s supposed to be Meaningful Work, if you attack that symptom first you’re gonna fuck the whole situation up a lot worse.
To be totally cold-blooded about this: doctor supply is not a thing we need to be worried about, basically no matter what we do. We could cut salaries in half, and make med school even more hellish than it already is, and we’d still have way more than enough doctor candidates to meet our needs. It’s a high-status, high-paying job that comes with more psychic rewards than almost anything else. There is basically infinite supply in the market.
Now, that said, I have (like you) some desire that things should be good rather than bad for doctors. They’re people too, and (like everyone else) they probably do their best work if they’re basically happy and not miserably stressed, and you probably get a better class of doctor if medicine is overall a better deal.
But there are a lot of potential equilibria here, and I think that most of the good outcomes grow out of the “doctoring is easier and lower-stress and lower-paying, we have a lot more and more-specialized medical professionals than we do now, this is less of an elite cartel thing” kind of equilibria.
…this explains a lot.
(i.e. “there are people who don’t do that?”)
I’ve been trying to think of a response that fully describes how I feel about this thing but…this seems like it becomes more complicated when you’re actually a moral realist. Like, being happy personally is great, but I want to make sure I don’t… the phrase my brain is generating here is “get high on my own supply.” I wanna make sure that whatever self-mythologizing I do doesn’t start to take over my objective, ground-level assessment of reality and of whether I’m making the world a better place.
Secondly, I have a hard time thinking of myself as an interesting and noteworthy person in a world where the vast majority of people are boring and mediocre. Even among the ones who aren’t, they still kinda are in the sense that they’re not really all that noteworthy in a world of 7 billion people. Quick: who’s the current leader of MI5? You probably don’t know, because despite being in the top 0.001% of spies (number pulled out of my ass), he’s doesn’t have much in the way of actual influence over world affairs, and isn’t a big enough deal to be a household name. You can accomplish that much and still be a footnote.
Thirdly: https://local.theonion.com/woman-struggling-to-contort-dreams-ambitions-into-shap-1819578642
This question deserves more in the way of a response than I’m going to provide here. Y’know, something on the order of “years of dedicated thought put into years’ worth of serious writing.”
But, in (very) brief:
1. Perform meditative/cognitive exercises. Think seriously about the kind of person you want to be, as seen from the outside – not just in an everyday instrumental/practical kind of way, not just in terms of “what you want to get done [that you haven’t already done],” but in a holistic and, uh, character-driven way. What kind of traits and quirks do you want to display? What kind of impression do you want the Cosmic Akashic Audience to come away with, after seeing you in action? To the extent you don’t live up to the image that this process generates, try to do so. More to the point, to the extent that you do (which is likely to be very considerable), take the time to consciously recognize and consider that fact. You are (in some measure) the person that you want to be. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it seem like you should be reveling in that fact, and indeed using it for something structural, rather than letting it gather dust in the back shelves of your mindscape?
(To be absolutely clear: stripped of its self-help-y phrasing, this is to some extent calling for a values / utility-function shift in most people. I am recommending that you focus on moving away from a methodology that checks well-being in terms of having things and having done things and experiencing things towards one that checks well-being in terms of being things. Which, in my experience, is a very natural way for people to deal with envy and with external things-they-find-cool but not at all a natural way for them to deal with themselves on a day-to-day basis.)
2. Acquire personal symbols, use them liberally, and encourage those who care about you to employ them as appropriate. It’s very easy to feel like all the things that make you cool are just part-of-the-fabric-of-the-world, that you partake in the same actions and thoughts as a million other people and that your version of them isn’t particularly special or meaningful. Heraldry, catchphrases, etc. allow you to “tag” an instance of a thing as being particularly associated with you, so that at such time as it generates worthwhile results you funnel the ensuing reward towards your own identity. In lame normie language, this is “building your brand” on a micro-level.
As an additional bonus, this process creates a positive resonance between yourself (from which you want to draw welfare) and various symbols that you presumably find cool (from which you are already drawing welfare).
3. Identify and attack the anti-identitarian memes that are floating around your own mind, insofar as they’re worth attacking. None of this psychological program I’m pushing here is “natural,” but we do make it a lot harder than it has to be by actively denigrating the psychological state of (literal) self-satisfaction. And you can always just, y’know, try to stop doing that. Probably you don’t want to mess around with your core ideals here, but…probably you won’t have to in order to get something good out of this.
Idealizing accomplishment is fine, but remember that a lot of concrete accomplishment devolves to some combination of luck and willingness-to-sell-out, and it may be better to reframe it as idealizing “being the kind of person who actually does the kinds of things that generate accomplishment.” Being a hedonic consequentialist is fine (I guess), but the world is terrible at reliably providing the raw stuff of happiness and our brains are even worse at processing it, so it might be worthwhile to put some of your eggs in the basket of “being the kind of person who seeks to make a happier world.” Etc.
More later, perhaps, as I think on this.
FITCHBURG, WI—Exerting a considerable amount of mental effort on twisting and reshaping the dreams she’s held since she was a child, local woman Abby Bowers reportedly struggled this week to contort her personal goals and ambitions into the shape of a dental technician. “The hours certainly aren’t bad, and it pays pretty well, plus I like working with people—I could definitely be happy being a dental tech,” said Bowers, straining to apply sufficient pressure to her educational and professional aspirations to forcibly bend them into something resembling a two-year track at a local technical college and a career repairing bridges and crowns. “I’ve always really liked science, and I’d get to take a biology course if I do this. And I wouldn’t have to work holidays, which is nice. It’s actually a really great career.” At press time, Bowers was laboring to mentally pare her lifelong passion for music down to the size of a hobby pursued only in free moments on the weekend.
First thing:
This is a good and serious objection. The best and most serious objection, as far as I’m concerned. There’s clearly a sense in which identity-building can lead into delusion, and if you have truth-apprehension as a terminal value – as I do, and if you’re reading this, I suspect that you probably do too – that’s a scary thing.
There are workarounds and patches. (Having an identity as “someone who sees and believes the truth, even when it’s painful and dissonant” can work wonders.) But on the most abstract level…yeah, there’s nothing for it but to admit that identity and truth-apprehension sometimes conflict, in much the way that human happiness and truth-apprehension sometimes conflict. Prioritize and resolve as per your favored metaethic.
Second thing:
As others have said, there are definite ways in which this kind of thinking betrays a construction of concepts like “interesting” and “noteworthy” that is…certainly not intellectually mandatory, and probably not even very consistent with other values that you hold.
It’s tempting to think of fame, influence, and rank as proxies for the things we care about. The best scientist is the one who gets cited all the time and the one whose name everyone knows, etc. But in most ways this is a patently terrible heuristic; it’s convenient and easy, but it replaces measurements of the things we care about with measurements of things that we expressly don’t. The way you become famous is to attention-whore super hard and to optimize for catchiness above other values. The way you rise through the ranks is by paying attention to politics. And if you’re really into the idea of Being a Scientist, or whatever, you probably don’t want to invest lots of ego into politics or attention-whoring.
There are probably a lot of really top-notch spies working in MI5 who are way better, as spies, than the director will ever be. Culture is set up to make this hard to recognize, even for them. Don’t be fooled.
I think of it in fictionalization terms, because that’s how my mind works. If you’re reading a story, it’s usually possible to tell whether a given character Does the Thing in a resonant or admirable way, just by looking at him and what he thinks / says / does – you don’t need lots of external social cues. So just look at your own life, and the lives of the people who matter to you, in that way.
Third thing:
This Onion piece is actually a really good illustration of why identitarian construction is important, and how its absence can fuck you up psychologically.
(ahem)
I have a day job. It pays reasonably well, and it’s not very stressful, and good Lord is it boring. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a pretty good setup; I have enough money to lead a decently comfortable lifestyle, and I have the time and the energy to do the things I care about – the things that make me me – without having to fret over whether I can somehow manage to find someone to pay me to do them. Better yet, I can actually work on the actual projects I want to do, rather than marketable things that vaguely resemble those projects if you squint.
The reason that this works is that I’ve actually put some independent work into building my identity. I know who I am. I don’t need an employer to confirm it for me. I know a lot of very-smart very-driven people who haven’t done this, and who therefore have their self-conception tied to the vagaries of the marketplace and of social recognition, and they are fucked.
Maybe Abby Bowers’s real dream was to be an astronaut, or a secret agent, or something, and she just didn’t have the chops or the motivation to make it happen. That would be very sad, but them’s the breaks, it happens. Narcissistic injury is a real thing.
BUT – maybe her real dream was to be a writer. Or a philosopher. Or a witch. Or a beloved beautiful princess. Or, indeed, a scientific innovator, as the text vaguely suggests. Those are all dreams that lots of people have. And she can still do them! Any of them! Nothing is stopping her! Better yet, she can do them while making dental-technician money, and thus enjoying a middle-class lifestyle instead of struggling through poverty!
She won’t, though, because she doesn’t have an identity to guide her. She’s looking to the world to hand her one, and the one that it’s offering is “dental technician.” It’s a damn shame.
I don’t think the question of what really actually truly happened in Ferguson - at any stage - is really even all that important, the whole thing was just a pretext anyway.
- = - = -
Benghazi. I swear this loops back in in three paragraphs in a productive way, stick with me. The official Republican complaint about Benghazi - what even was it? Something about not sending backup, or a coverup? Whatever.
But fundamentally it’s a pretext. I mean some people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext. But the actual issue is about the Arab Spring, the actual issue is “Who Lost The Maghreb?”. With the implied answer “the Democrats, by doing that dumb Carter thing where you only support foreign allies who are nice and polite and democratic and don’t repress and torture and massacre their citizens, and then when the ones you abandon fall and the people who replace them - the people who had been being repressed and tortured and massacred - come to power and start doing shit that you hate, that is completely incompatible with the things you most emphatically and sincerely want, go ‘Oh shit, right, that’s why we were supporting that guy in the first place’”.
But the awkward thing, the reason they run with this pretext instead of saying it explicitly (like they did with the original “Who Lost China”), is that going Carter in the Ummah didn’t start with Obama, this started with Bush the Younger and the neoconservatives, and a lot of it that happened under Obama’s watch was under the influence of holdovers from the Bush era - Robert Gates and all that. And in any case unlike Carter, Obama had a second term in which to reverse course himself, and now the military is back running Egypt and Mubarak was just released scot-free.
- = - = -
Ferguson, Mike Brown, all that’s a pretext. And a lot of people sincerely, unkshakeably care about the pretext, but the actual issue is that even as the civil rights movement of the 1950s-70s has been institutionalized as a sacred part of our national history, the actual gains made - “let’s flip the national switch away from repressing black people, and towards helping them” - have been allowed to gradually erode. Because white people found that completely incompatible with the things they most emphatically and sincerely wanted, and remembered why they had the switch on repress in the first place.
And the awkward thing, that makes this difficult to address head-on, is that it was “First Black President” Bill Clinton that blessed the erosion. The Democrats had, since LBJ, been the party of “let’s keep the switch in the helping position”. And between LBJ and Clinton, 1968 to 1992, 8 whole terms, the Democrats only won one term as President. Carter. With the whole Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon tailwind at his back.
And Clinton got elected, and more significantly got re-elected! By taking the Democrats’ hand off the switch. Federal funding for 100,000 more cops. Welfare reform. (Subtextually, federal funding for how many fewer black babies?) School uniforms, which was rinkydink but was the idea was “yes, we are willing to walk back ‘60s-style freedoms in order to further discipline urban black kids - you know, the gangbangers, the crack babies, the superpredators.”
Sister Souljah - I used to wonder what that was even about, I’m no rap genius but I at least recognize big names and I’ve never even heard of her in any other context. Does anyone cite Sister Souljah as a musical influence? But I’ve come to realize that was the point - deliberately picking a fight with someone who didn’t actually matter (and thus bore no cost) - just to make a point, a branding point.
“The Democratic Party: Once Again Willing To Tell Uppity Blacks To Stuff It”
“First Black President” Bill Clinton took the Democrats’ hand off the switch and at least let other hands pull it back to “repress”. And under actual first black President Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, who owes two elections to being black, and at least one to black votes entirely, putting it back hasn’t even been on the agenda.
And I can see how you’d get upset.
-=-=-
“What we really need is for everyone - black, white, whatever - to respect each other.”
Okay, that’s correct, and that’s impossible, because here’s the thing. When people say they want “respect”, what they mean is they want other people to acknowledge their own conception of the world, where they’re the protagonist, and their story is the main plotline, and everyone else is, I guess, NPCs? Or at least, at least for those other people to not explicitly challenge that conception, to allow them to maintain that fiction to themselves.
Which doesn’t necessarily set you at odds, a good share of NPCs are allies, or questgivers, or shopkeepers, or background characters, and most people prefer the paragon path, and in the normal course of things you get along fine.
But only as long as there’s nothing important at stake that can only be resolved by conflict. If that NPC is the only source for a good drop, and you’re sure they’re not going to be critical to any of your future quests…
“He was murdered for jaywalking!” Even accepting that framing, here’s the thing. Physically being in the street is important. The inciting incident of the Hamburg Massacre, back during Reconstruction, was white guys angry about black guys standing in the road blocking traffic.
Because two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. The fundamental example of something that can only be resolved by conflict.
You know, if you look in the right parts of the web, where white people complain about black people in complete, properly spelled, passive-aggressive sentences, one of the most commonly recurring stories is black guys walking, or having a conversation, in the middle of the road, and they can see I’m waiting, and they don’t get out of the way, don’t even make an effort to let me through.
(There’s a tumblr post with half a million notes on it. Right here.i know i give white people a lot of shit but u guys are really nice. like when the light turns green and there’s a white pedestrian that’s almost across the street u guys always do that jog thing. i know it’s kind of insignificant but i appreciate it white people. u and ur half jog thing.
)
The flip side of that story of course is “what the fuck this is a public road and I’m as much the public as you are so why the hell would you think it’s my duty to stop using it how I want so you can use it how you want, Mr. King Shit of the World?”
(“Mr. King Shit of the World” is the hostile way of saying “protagonist”.)
And you know how much you fucking hate it, how much of a personal affront you take it when NPC pathfinding is so fucked up that they block a door and you can’t get through? (Alternately, when collision detection is set up so that random NPCs can force you out of the way, maybe knock you out of a dialogue tree or screw up a quest?)
Gives you the unshakeable sense that this world was not properly designed for you, for the purpose of furthering your plotline.
And if these issues came up in the last update, you’d want a patch to revert them. You’d go on the devs’ forums and bitch forever, it’s like the devs don’t even care about the players, and you’d threaten to never support anything they did again, take your money and give it to some other devs, and devs, WHERE’S THE FUCKING PATCH.
And the patch, of course, is white supremacy. (It also buffs your class so you’re not grinding for fucking ever just to spend your loot on repairs and potions, and reduces your random encounter rate in safe zones.)
“But this isn’t a game, this is REAL LIFE!”
If you ever end a sentence with “REAL LIFE” in all caps you are being an idiot, I guarantee it. Yeah, the fact that the stakes of this game are real, that’s gonna make you more willing to let things slide? That’s not how people work. Not enough of them to hold a coalition together.
- = - = -
The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!
The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.
You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.
Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.
Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.
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I grew up in the Huxtable ‘80s and the End of History ‘90s, I kind of expected the two classic nations of America to merge, black into white, just as the white ethnics had the generations before.
Who knows what we’d call the amalgam, maybe still “white” just to play up the ridiculousness of it all, maybe some hyphenated neologism to bridge the gap, like we played up “Anglo-Saxon” to meld the English and German populations that originally formed the white American nation, or coined “Judeo-Christian” later on.
But I’m less and less certain of that. You look at the people saying interesting things about race these days, they’re pushing other possibilities, each with their three-letter acronyms. The left-racebloggers pushing “PoC”, “Persons of Color”, the idea that there’ll be white on one side and on the other this black-hispanic-asian-amerindian coalitional nation. The right-racebloggers “NAM”, “Non-Asian Minorities”, suggesting a white/asian against black/brown split.
And then there’s always the possibility that things’ll go the classic American route, where there’s black on one side and everybody else eventually joins “white”, earns a spot specifically defining themselves against “black”. Given a choice between the two, it’s an awfully appealing option.
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Race is the fundamental tragedy of American history. A tragedy being where everyone’s understandably, sympathetically human, even (especially) in their failings and shortcomings and trespasses, and the inevitable consequence is suffering.
I’ve read this essay numerous times now, as it’s repeatedly crossed my dash, and…either I’m missing something, or there’s a major logical gap at the heart of the argument here.
I’m generally inclined to buy into this style of logic, this kind of explanation; I think that a lot of the world boils down to stuff like this. But something’s not clicking.
If I understand it correctly, the basic argument is:
1) Black/white conflict [at least in America] is driven by an actual conflict of interest, and therefore can’t be papered over by normal levels of social pressure to “be nice to each other,” because those conflicting interests aren’t going away and will keep rising to dominate group politics even if some of us would prefer to ignore them.
2) This conflict is essentially psychological in nature. Black people existing in public space somehow deny white people their sense of protagonism, of the world-being-as-it-should-be, and as long as they continue to do so (without something else changing) white people are going to be made unhappy by it.
…and here’s what I don’t get:
It is true that, from the perspective of a white person, it is an unfortunate feature of minorities that they stubbornly insist on being independent entities rather than NPCs designed to further the Story Starring Me. This is also true of white people. For that matter, it’s true of dogs and pigeons and couches. This can all foster resentment, to be sure, depending on the development of your narcissistic awareness. But what about it is particularly racial? What about it fuels the Great Tragic American Conflict, as opposed to a gazillion other potential conflicts?
I mean, I can come up with a number of plausible-sounding answers to that question…
A. The Nietzschian / Hofferian Theory. Mediocre white people deal with their narcissistic pain by submerging their mediocre individual identities into the more powerful, more satisfying group identity that is whitedom. Thus they seek out group-level conflicts and fight for group-level victories, because those are the victories that are actually available to them. [Note that this model suggests that racist white people don’t genuinely want an end to racial conflict, and would not be satisfied by any kind of (ahem) final solution, because the actual goal is to keep being dominant over a rival group. If blacks actually went away, another enemy minority would have to be invented or found.]
B. The Cultural Theory. Whites know how to get along with each other and mutually preserve their feelings of protagonism, but something about the way black people act [innately? just at this particular cultural moment?] makes them particularly offensive to white sensibilities.
C. The Political Theory. White people preserve their feelings of protagonism through access to particular resources that are distributed by the political system (jobs, welfare, representation-on-monuments, etc.), and black people collectively are somehow contesting their access to these resources via inconvenient political action.
…etc. Or, of course, some combination. Any of these theories will have obvious weaknesses and will present obvious questions, and probably any of them can lead to a fun and productive discussion.
But it seems to me that you need at least one such theory in order to make this explanation tick, and without it, there’s not really anything to discuss.
What am I failing to understand? What gives?
This question deserves more in the way of a response than I’m going to provide here. Y’know, something on the order of “years of dedicated thought put into years’ worth of serious writing.”
But, in (very) brief:
1. Perform meditative/cognitive exercises. Think seriously about the kind of person you want to be, as seen from the outside – not just in an everyday instrumental/practical kind of way, not just in terms of “what you want to get done [that you haven’t already done],” but in a holistic and, uh, character-driven way. What kind of traits and quirks do you want to display? What kind of impression do you want the Cosmic Akashic Audience to come away with, after seeing you in action? To the extent you don’t live up to the image that this process generates, try to do so. More to the point, to the extent that you do (which is likely to be very considerable), take the time to consciously recognize and consider that fact. You are (in some measure) the person that you want to be. Isn’t that great? Doesn’t it seem like you should be reveling in that fact, and indeed using it for something structural, rather than letting it gather dust in the back shelves of your mindscape?
(To be absolutely clear: stripped of its self-help-y phrasing, this is to some extent calling for a values / utility-function shift in most people. I am recommending that you focus on moving away from a methodology that checks well-being in terms of having things and having done things and experiencing things towards one that checks well-being in terms of being things. Which, in my experience, is a very natural way for people to deal with envy and with external things-they-find-cool but not at all a natural way for them to deal with themselves on a day-to-day basis.)
2. Acquire personal symbols, use them liberally, and encourage those who care about you to employ them as appropriate. It’s very easy to feel like all the things that make you cool are just part-of-the-fabric-of-the-world, that you partake in the same actions and thoughts as a million other people and that your version of them isn’t particularly special or meaningful. Heraldry, catchphrases, etc. allow you to “tag” an instance of a thing as being particularly associated with you, so that at such time as it generates worthwhile results you funnel the ensuing reward towards your own identity. In lame normie language, this is “building your brand” on a micro-level.
As an additional bonus, this process creates a positive resonance between yourself (from which you want to draw welfare) and various symbols that you presumably find cool (from which you are already drawing welfare).
3. Identify and attack the anti-identitarian memes that are floating around your own mind, insofar as they’re worth attacking. None of this psychological program I’m pushing here is “natural,” but we do make it a lot harder than it has to be by actively denigrating the psychological state of (literal) self-satisfaction. And you can always just, y’know, try to stop doing that. Probably you don’t want to mess around with your core ideals here, but…probably you won’t have to in order to get something good out of this.
Idealizing accomplishment is fine, but remember that a lot of concrete accomplishment devolves to some combination of luck and willingness-to-sell-out, and it may be better to reframe it as idealizing “being the kind of person who actually does the kinds of things that generate accomplishment.” Being a hedonic consequentialist is fine (I guess), but the world is terrible at reliably providing the raw stuff of happiness and our brains are even worse at processing it, so it might be worthwhile to put some of your eggs in the basket of “being the kind of person who seeks to make a happier world.” Etc.
More later, perhaps, as I think on this.