This is a repost of something that I accidentally deleted due to phone interface stupidity. No new content.
So, the short version is:
Does anyone know where to find a full content spoiler for Cultist Simulator? (Adept’s Build, since that’s what we’ve got right now.)
Because I would find such a thing very valuable. Honestly, I would probably offer good money for someone to create one, if it weren’t otherwise going to come into existence.
Which is to say –
Cultist Simulator may be the first video game I’ve ever encountered where “paying for the privilege of not playing the game” seems like an eminently rational thing to do.
Which is to say –
Alexis
Kennedy is a literary genius within his own peculiar, fragmented
medium. We all knew that already, but it’s still true.
Cultist Simulator in
particular is a marvel of atmosphere and flavor. You’re an occultist,
brilliant and awkward and lonely and charismatic and steadily going
insane – and, above all, desperate to unlock and understand the hidden
mythic truths of the world – and those mythic truths, as you encounter
them, (mostly) feel like they grow out of a dream logic that is more
real than reality – and the secret gods in their secret house are both
terrifyingly inhuman and terrifyingly resonant – and it is all so brilliantly executed.
It does the thing so much better than like 99.9% of Cthulhu Mythos
works (and pastiches) out there, because the writer understands that you
can’t just wave some tentacles around and call it “enlightened
madness,” you have to give your audience something that will make him actually feel as though he is both mad and enlightened.
The text on every card, the narration for every event, honestly feels like a reward when you receive it. Even the art style, the whole weird elegant minimalistic Evil Art Deco thing, manages to carry a lot of power in these tiny two-color game graphics.
I
want to roll around in this game. I want to have access to all the
lore, all the words, all the pictures. I want to write big elaborate Cultist Simulator fangames. (I’ve already thought about how the LARP would work. It would be amazing.)
There’s just one problem, which is that the actual experience of gameplay is kind of…bad.
Imagine
Doodle God if it were heavily dependent on a random number generator,
and if you were playing it under constant resource pressure. You throw
money at the bookshop and hope that you get useful things out of it,
but you have no real control. You throw hints of secret lore into the
public square and hope that you get intriguing acquaintances whom you
can recruit into your cult, but you have no real control. There are a
lot of mechanics like that. Meanwhile you’re trying to figure out how
to combine scraps of occult lore into spells, and how to put resources into your
spells such that they actually do anything, and how to unlock various
subsidiary mechanics via obscure combinations of cards and action dials,
and it’s all very Use Pie on Cat – you just have to learn the
seemingly-random recipes. All this while you’re constantly maintaining
your Do Work to Get Money to Eat to Live routine, while the
investigators are slowly eating away at your followers, while sporadic
illness eats away at your health. And it’s not interesting.
It’s fiddly and frustrating and makes you waste a lot of time treading
water in order to wring out each new piece of actual content.
Which
is a pretty good, uh, simulation of the cultist experience. I guess.
So, touche. But “successfully simulate the un-fun aspects of the thing”
is not really good design.
baseless claim but feels right: the most socially beneficial religion would be moralistic therapeutic deism but with 1) a high ritual default and Really High Ritual opt-in lifestyles (ascetic practices designed to produce mystic experiences, options to be a high-status volcel, etc) 2) the option to say “oh yeah that’s all garbage lol” while still participating in all the outward rituals and rules, like how Judaism sometimes allows for that kind of orthopraxy
(when people say “x is a religion” dismissively i’m not sure why that’s a bad thing, the thing that’s wrong with most religions are the premodern survivals in ethics and metaphysics (when those are even present), not ritual, beliefs, etc; so you could probably build up all the above from existing “secular” culture and largely we have many aspects of this in a sort of prodromal form)
If you’re separating metaphysics from beliefs, something has gone very wrong somewhere.
Once there was an angel who quarreled not with Heaven.
He held no especial rank in the Host; he was not particularly wise, or particularly beautiful, except as all things in Heaven are wise and beautiful. But when the great rebellion came, he fought loyally, and achieved some small distinction on the field. And thus it was that he was one of those chosen afterward to descend to earth, and stand guard over the infancy of mankind.
He was not one of those who faltered in his watch, and mingled with the daughters of men; indeed, he sorrowed when he learned how his companions had turned their back on righteousness, and wended their way into sin. And after they had been cast into the Pit, and their terrible children had perished, he remained upon the earth, devoting himself to a lonelier guardianship.
But one day a woman came walking to his tower, swaying as if in the grip of some fever dream; and she hammered on the door, and when he opened it, she pressed a heavy bundle into his arms, and fell down half-dead. And he found that the thing squirming in his arms was ugly, and monstrous, and alive.
He considered killing it, as its hideous siblings had been killed. It would have been only right for it to follow its mother, who swiftly passed from the earth. But he was not wise, except as every angel is wise, and perhaps his time on earth had worn away at him as deeply as it had at his companions, and he found that he lacked the will to kill the child.
The babe grew quickly, as the children of the angels do, into a thing most appalling, with pale skin and staring eyes; and one had only to look upon it – or her, perhaps, for her guardian called her so – to know that she was a thing unsanctioned in the sight of Heaven, and that on her brow was written monster, and defiler, and witch. At first the angel flinched from his charge, even as he endeavored to care for her. But she was clever in her strangeness, and labored patiently under the disadvantages of her twisted form, and when he bade her sing the hymns of Heaven her voice was no different than any other. And in time he found, as perhaps he had always known he would, that the desolation that hung about her was not, after all, so terrible in his sight.
In time he grew to love her, as perhaps he had always known he would.
And this is where the stories diverge, for there are those who say she endured but a few years, before yielding to the ravages of her misshapen body; and there are those who say that she was strong, as the children of the angels are strong, and she lived longer than mortal men, long enough to rage against a world that hated her and long enough to forgive it, long enough to die at peace in her father’s tower. But what does it matter? She was mortal, as men are mortal; eventually she died.
And when she was dead the Lord came to the angel, and said, Mankind flourishes, and your watch is ended; return, faithful servant, to the halls of Heaven, and the embrace of the Host.
But the angel hesitated, and said, Lord, surely your Heaven is vast and fine, and filled with everything worthy; and were I to return I fear that my heart would be an insult to your glory, dwelling always as it is on the shadow of an unworthy thing.
And the Lord said, My servant, I hold no grudge for the strange watch you undertook upon earth. But it is not given to you to remain; for the day of My presence has ended, and it pleases Me not that any member of the Host should linger here.
And the angel said, Lord, I cannot follow you; I am no longer fashioned for your Heaven, nor formed in virtue, for the love of a monster is a fire that scars the soul. Grant me instead leave to walk into the Pit, where I might not forever behold the fulfillment of grace, and see in it the absence of my grief.
And the Lord, being merciful, granted the angel’s request; and they say that he walked into the Pit, and waited there ten thousand years and more, until another hated Child descended into Hell.
in before nazis twist this around and say we’re being intolerant
I read an interesting article once that said that in a tolerant society, the only way to keep it working was to become intolerant to intolerance if that makes sense.
It’s called the irony of tolerance or something like that. And it was written in the 1940’s. Give you one guess as to what inspired that article.
will claim and has claimed – in sincere belief – that they were only getting rid of the people who were intolerant toward them. The only way to pick out the claims at that point and decide who is accommodated is “Who do we like more? What kind of person do we innately like and want to reward, and what kind of person do we innately hate and want to punish?” This is the only way it has ever happened and the only way it will ever happen, ever, even if you live to be a trillion years old.
Popper is wrong. He is obviously wrong. “We can’t tolerate the intolerant” will always, with one hundred percent accuracy, map to “We can’t tolerate people the socially powerful dislike.” But the idea that we are tolerant and they are intolerant and so we can violate the principles we hate them for violating and it’s still all noble and righteous and good is just too satisfying. It’s too rewarding. It feels too good. Every single person without one single fucking exception will see themselves this way. The idea can never be cast off. It can never be defeated, and we can never move past it.
The cycle will never end. Humanity’s future is a flat, worthless, meaningless circle.
No, the way we pick out the claims is to look at who is advocating for discriminating against/deport/hurt groups of people for the sole reason said groups exist; and who doesn’t. That is objectively verifiable.
If you’re incapable of knowing the difference - especially if you feel the need to defend literal Nazis - that’s your problem, not mine. Stop claiming that your personal problems are “human nature”.
You are not and never will be capable of knowing the difference. You will only be capable of determining that the group you like is calling for “ethnic justice” and must be obeyed, while the group you dislike is intolerant and must be excised.
Your political foes will make the opposite conclusion based on their self-serving emotions. Then you scream at each other forever and ever. Everything becomes a popularity game. You mark the people you dislike as deserving of exclusion no matter what they said. We can literally see this entire process happening now. It does not stop happening.
The cycle does not end. Ever. There is no virtue and there is no restraint. Ever.
Yeah, I’ve found the guy who has a keen interest in making the people who oppose literal Nazis to be just as bad as Nazis. Also, one who believes that wanting to “defend people from bigotry” and wanting to “harm people for bigoted reasons” both stem from a desire of personal popularity, instead that from empathy and bigotry respectively. Good job.
Also, answer me these two questions:
Can you explain how “You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist” equals “Black people should be discriminated against, deported, and harmed (no reason given other than them being black)”?
Does
“You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or
harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
target a specific ethnic group? If so, which one?
EDITED TO ADD: I’ve skimmed brazen’s blog, and I am now fully convinced that everything they do is for attention. Given that they’re throughly convinced that everyone does everything for attention and “status”, why should brazen consider themselves to be any different?
You are not and never will be capable of separating “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist” from “people who want things that in my opinion are bad for black people” from “people who are weak enough that I affirm my social status by hating them.”
You are not and never will be capable of distinguishing Actual Nazis from people who are weak enough that you affirm social status by hating them. The only way to stop you is to say you don’t get to kick people out of society for being Actual Nazis, because the attosecond you gain that power you confuse the Nazis for everyone who’s weaker than you and disagrees with your status-politics.
Your questions are valueless. It means nothing that you define the category of people you hate and want to harm in such a way that it’s virtuous and pure to do so. Your opponents can also lie and engage in motivated reasoning. They can claim they only hate thugs and criminals while you hate white people. Both of you are lying. You hate members of your ideological outgroup who are too weak to make you stop hurting them.
The only way to stop their hypocrisy is to stop your hypocrisy. The only way to stop your hypocrisy is to say “Okay, FINE, because you cannot be trusted to tell the difference, you don’t get to kick someone out even if they’re actually waving a Nazi flag and heiling left and right. Because you can’t stop yourself from claiming everyone you don’t like is doing that.”
But your hypocrisy will not be stopped. You will annihilate our society’s protection against Nazis, in the name of fighting Nazis. Because you cannot ever stop or restrain yourself.
All is lost.
You still reat that all those statements have the same meaning, but are incapable to explain how. So, let’s try this again.
QUESTION 1: Explain how the following statements have the same meaning. (No “Oh, you SAY one, but in reality you MEAN the other-” argument. That’s irrelevant to your claim that both messages say the same thing; as such, trying to pull again that excuse will result in an immediate failure.)
You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist.
Black people should be discriminated against, deported and harmed. (No reason given.)
Since you also claimed that other statements all have the same meaning, you now must prove that. Q1b: Explain, exactly, how all the following groups are identical. (Again, the same limitation to Q1 applies here.)
People who “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
People who “want things that in my [Aridara’s] opinion are bad for black people”.
People who “are weak enough that I [Aridara] affirm my social status by hating them.”
Now, you’ll probably deflect the questions by claiming.that I’ll just twist and lie about my opponents (exactly like my opponents and everyone else does, according to you) to have my way; or.by claiming that everything I do is not for ideology or morality, but for signaling “status” (like how, according to you, everyone does). In that case, allow me to ask one question: Why should we listen your opinion, when you’re someone who, by your own repeated admission throughout your own blog, is perfectly willing to say ANYTHING to put down the people who you dislike, and who isn’t interested in defending a specific position or your own morals, but solely to obtain satus and popularity among your peers?
You summarized me as the exact and literal opposite of my beliefs. You post on Something Awful, don’t you?
The answer to your questions is “Your question is invalid because you are lying about its premises and I know you are lying and I can fucking see you doing it.” You demanded I prove a falsehood I accused you of using!
It is in fact true that repeated, insistent assertions of the form –
“Literally all things said or done by all humans under all circumstances are examples of pure status-seeking behavior with no regard for truth or virtue, there are literally no exceptions to this, there is no good faith, all is doomed forever and ever.”
– do seem to contain themselves, along with all other discursive utterances, within their field of reference.
Which means that it’s actually reasonable for an interlocutor to ask: “OK, why are you any different? What exempts your own words and actions from the principles that you’ve just laid down? If I am to take what you say seriously…how could I possibly take what you say seriously, given that you’re participating in this discussion by emitting utterances, and apparently all utterances are worthless?”
I assume you have some kind of answer to this. And in fact I assume that getting a worthwhile conversation out of this line of reasoning is going to have to begin with that answer, since the answer would serve to provide some kind of asserted positive value that your interlocutors might use as a foundation for mutual intelligibility.
To actually take the view would require you to have noticed the things I am begging you to notice. If you have finally noticed the thing that fills your field of vision from every angle, then I don’t give a shit what your opinion of me is.
If you have not noticed this thing, then I answer your question with another question: why do you think the person lamenting the inexorability and all-consuming nature of this, specifically all that it annihilates and despoils, and how utterly worthless everything it produces is, is more likely than others to be engaging in that behavior?
I confess that I’m not sure what “take the view” means here.
I’m unhappy about a fair number of the same social / cultural phenomena that seem to be upsetting you, and I think that your explanations for them capture important partial truths…but I don’t think that all group-level human endeavors are doomed to immediate worthlessness and cruelty and failure, and indeed my own experience strongly suggests otherwise. Thus I assume that by your lights I count as “not having noticed the thing.” So I will, ah, respond to your question by saying:
Who said “more likely than others?” By your stated logic everyone is equally likely to be engaging in the behavior you describe, with a probability of 100%. That includes the various people with whom you’re engaging, and also yourself.
Somewhere, somehow, if your putting words on the internet is anything more than an exercise in empty Dadaism, you have to get to “…but you should be listening to me and not to the people who are disagreeing with me.” I am curious what bridge you use to get there, since that bridge – whatever it is – must reflect some conception of useful human engagement.
The conception of useful human engagement, that little bridge, is explicitly a thing being consumed by the rising waters of entropy. Once it is consumed, it can never be remade, and it can never be rediscovered. The inevitability of this process is the thing I am talking about. It will be consumed by entropy. No human agency can stop it from being consumed by agency. You cannot possibly escape those who seek to aid it being consumed by entropy. Every way you try to stop it being consumed by entropy can only possibly hasten it being consumed by entropy. No person can be trusted not to aid entropy, and no person has the capacity – regardless of motives – to not aid entropy. No person can ever be trusted not to betray you in exchange for no reward other than betraying you. Modeling social entropy as all-consuming and all-pervasive allows you to predict events constantly. The moon. Look at the moon. The moon. The moon fills your field of vision. You cannot orient your eyes in any way to not be seeing the moon. The moon. You are looking at the moon swallowing the horizon. Not my finger. The moon. Stop focusing on my finger instead of noticing the leering moon. Notice the moon.
By my stated logic, everyone is equally likely to be engaging in the behavior. You reject the stated logic. Because you do not believe the stated logic, you do not believe it is true. You do not believe social entropy is all-pervasive and all-consuming in all people. Because you do not believe it is true, you would have to have a reason why the behavior is more present in me than in others, to accuse me of it.
I’m not accusing you, or anyone, of anything.
I am trying to understand what your project is here. I am trying to understand why, if you take your stated philosophy seriously, you think it is worthwhile to communicate – why you think anyone should, normatively, be more inclined to accept your assertions and arguments than those of your opponents. I am trying to understand why I should not understand each of your paragraphs to contain, in invisible addendum, a claim like “…but of course all of this is a truth-blind status grab as well, and can therefore be dismissed and ignored.”
I look out at the world. I do not see what you see, not by a long shot…and, judging by the kind of conversations you seem to have, that’s a pretty common experience amongst your interlocutors…and in fact I’m pretty sure I see a lot more of what you see than most people do. Given that fact, given that I am passing on to you the sincere report of my own perceptive and analytic faculties, I want to know why you think I should distrust my own interpretations and adopt yours. It seems very likely to me that you have a reason, but it’s not coming through in the endless repetitions.
Just putting one stone on top of another is counter-entropic, at least locally. And the local scale is all we’ve got.
in before nazis twist this around and say we’re being intolerant
I read an interesting article once that said that in a tolerant society, the only way to keep it working was to become intolerant to intolerance if that makes sense.
It’s called the irony of tolerance or something like that. And it was written in the 1940’s. Give you one guess as to what inspired that article.
will claim and has claimed – in sincere belief – that they were only getting rid of the people who were intolerant toward them. The only way to pick out the claims at that point and decide who is accommodated is “Who do we like more? What kind of person do we innately like and want to reward, and what kind of person do we innately hate and want to punish?” This is the only way it has ever happened and the only way it will ever happen, ever, even if you live to be a trillion years old.
Popper is wrong. He is obviously wrong. “We can’t tolerate the intolerant” will always, with one hundred percent accuracy, map to “We can’t tolerate people the socially powerful dislike.” But the idea that we are tolerant and they are intolerant and so we can violate the principles we hate them for violating and it’s still all noble and righteous and good is just too satisfying. It’s too rewarding. It feels too good. Every single person without one single fucking exception will see themselves this way. The idea can never be cast off. It can never be defeated, and we can never move past it.
The cycle will never end. Humanity’s future is a flat, worthless, meaningless circle.
No, the way we pick out the claims is to look at who is advocating for discriminating against/deport/hurt groups of people for the sole reason said groups exist; and who doesn’t. That is objectively verifiable.
If you’re incapable of knowing the difference - especially if you feel the need to defend literal Nazis - that’s your problem, not mine. Stop claiming that your personal problems are “human nature”.
You are not and never will be capable of knowing the difference. You will only be capable of determining that the group you like is calling for “ethnic justice” and must be obeyed, while the group you dislike is intolerant and must be excised.
Your political foes will make the opposite conclusion based on their self-serving emotions. Then you scream at each other forever and ever. Everything becomes a popularity game. You mark the people you dislike as deserving of exclusion no matter what they said. We can literally see this entire process happening now. It does not stop happening.
The cycle does not end. Ever. There is no virtue and there is no restraint. Ever.
Yeah, I’ve found the guy who has a keen interest in making the people who oppose literal Nazis to be just as bad as Nazis. Also, one who believes that wanting to “defend people from bigotry” and wanting to “harm people for bigoted reasons” both stem from a desire of personal popularity, instead that from empathy and bigotry respectively. Good job.
Also, answer me these two questions:
Can you explain how “You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist” equals “Black people should be discriminated against, deported, and harmed (no reason given other than them being black)”?
Does
“You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or
harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
target a specific ethnic group? If so, which one?
EDITED TO ADD: I’ve skimmed brazen’s blog, and I am now fully convinced that everything they do is for attention. Given that they’re throughly convinced that everyone does everything for attention and “status”, why should brazen consider themselves to be any different?
You are not and never will be capable of separating “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist” from “people who want things that in my opinion are bad for black people” from “people who are weak enough that I affirm my social status by hating them.”
You are not and never will be capable of distinguishing Actual Nazis from people who are weak enough that you affirm social status by hating them. The only way to stop you is to say you don’t get to kick people out of society for being Actual Nazis, because the attosecond you gain that power you confuse the Nazis for everyone who’s weaker than you and disagrees with your status-politics.
Your questions are valueless. It means nothing that you define the category of people you hate and want to harm in such a way that it’s virtuous and pure to do so. Your opponents can also lie and engage in motivated reasoning. They can claim they only hate thugs and criminals while you hate white people. Both of you are lying. You hate members of your ideological outgroup who are too weak to make you stop hurting them.
The only way to stop their hypocrisy is to stop your hypocrisy. The only way to stop your hypocrisy is to say “Okay, FINE, because you cannot be trusted to tell the difference, you don’t get to kick someone out even if they’re actually waving a Nazi flag and heiling left and right. Because you can’t stop yourself from claiming everyone you don’t like is doing that.”
But your hypocrisy will not be stopped. You will annihilate our society’s protection against Nazis, in the name of fighting Nazis. Because you cannot ever stop or restrain yourself.
All is lost.
You still reat that all those statements have the same meaning, but are incapable to explain how. So, let’s try this again.
QUESTION 1: Explain how the following statements have the same meaning. (No “Oh, you SAY one, but in reality you MEAN the other-” argument. That’s irrelevant to your claim that both messages say the same thing; as such, trying to pull again that excuse will result in an immediate failure.)
You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist.
Black people should be discriminated against, deported and harmed. (No reason given.)
Since you also claimed that other statements all have the same meaning, you now must prove that. Q1b: Explain, exactly, how all the following groups are identical. (Again, the same limitation to Q1 applies here.)
People who “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
People who “want things that in my [Aridara’s] opinion are bad for black people”.
People who “are weak enough that I [Aridara] affirm my social status by hating them.”
Now, you’ll probably deflect the questions by claiming.that I’ll just twist and lie about my opponents (exactly like my opponents and everyone else does, according to you) to have my way; or.by claiming that everything I do is not for ideology or morality, but for signaling “status” (like how, according to you, everyone does). In that case, allow me to ask one question: Why should we listen your opinion, when you’re someone who, by your own repeated admission throughout your own blog, is perfectly willing to say ANYTHING to put down the people who you dislike, and who isn’t interested in defending a specific position or your own morals, but solely to obtain satus and popularity among your peers?
You summarized me as the exact and literal opposite of my beliefs. You post on Something Awful, don’t you?
The answer to your questions is “Your question is invalid because you are lying about its premises and I know you are lying and I can fucking see you doing it.” You demanded I prove a falsehood I accused you of using!
It is in fact true that repeated, insistent assertions of the form –
“Literally all things said or done by all humans under all circumstances are examples of pure status-seeking behavior with no regard for truth or virtue, there are literally no exceptions to this, there is no good faith, all is doomed forever and ever.”
– do seem to contain themselves, along with all other discursive utterances, within their field of reference.
Which means that it’s actually reasonable for an interlocutor to ask: “OK, why are you any different? What exempts your own words and actions from the principles that you’ve just laid down? If I am to take what you say seriously…how could I possibly take what you say seriously, given that you’re participating in this discussion by emitting utterances, and apparently all utterances are worthless?”
I assume you have some kind of answer to this. And in fact I assume that getting a worthwhile conversation out of this line of reasoning is going to have to begin with that answer, since the answer would serve to provide some kind of asserted positive value that your interlocutors might use as a foundation for mutual intelligibility.
To actually take the view would require you to have noticed the things I am begging you to notice. If you have finally noticed the thing that fills your field of vision from every angle, then I don’t give a shit what your opinion of me is.
If you have not noticed this thing, then I answer your question with another question: why do you think the person lamenting the inexorability and all-consuming nature of this, specifically all that it annihilates and despoils, and how utterly worthless everything it produces is, is more likely than others to be engaging in that behavior?
I confess that I’m not sure what “take the view” means here.
I’m unhappy about a fair number of the same social / cultural phenomena that seem to be upsetting you, and I think that your explanations for them capture important partial truths…but I don’t think that all group-level human endeavors are doomed to immediate worthlessness and cruelty and failure, and indeed my own experience strongly suggests otherwise. Thus I assume that by your lights I count as “not having noticed the thing.” So I will, ah, respond to your question by saying:
Who said “more likely than others?” By your stated logic everyone is equally likely to be engaging in the behavior you describe, with a probability of 100%. That includes the various people with whom you’re engaging, and also yourself.
Somewhere, somehow, if your putting words on the internet is anything more than an exercise in empty Dadaism, you have to get to “…but you should be listening to me and not to the people who are disagreeing with me.” I am curious what bridge you use to get there, since that bridge – whatever it is – must reflect some conception of useful human engagement.
in before nazis twist this around and say we’re being intolerant
I read an interesting article once that said that in a tolerant society, the only way to keep it working was to become intolerant to intolerance if that makes sense.
It’s called the irony of tolerance or something like that. And it was written in the 1940’s. Give you one guess as to what inspired that article.
will claim and has claimed – in sincere belief – that they were only getting rid of the people who were intolerant toward them. The only way to pick out the claims at that point and decide who is accommodated is “Who do we like more? What kind of person do we innately like and want to reward, and what kind of person do we innately hate and want to punish?” This is the only way it has ever happened and the only way it will ever happen, ever, even if you live to be a trillion years old.
Popper is wrong. He is obviously wrong. “We can’t tolerate the intolerant” will always, with one hundred percent accuracy, map to “We can’t tolerate people the socially powerful dislike.” But the idea that we are tolerant and they are intolerant and so we can violate the principles we hate them for violating and it’s still all noble and righteous and good is just too satisfying. It’s too rewarding. It feels too good. Every single person without one single fucking exception will see themselves this way. The idea can never be cast off. It can never be defeated, and we can never move past it.
The cycle will never end. Humanity’s future is a flat, worthless, meaningless circle.
No, the way we pick out the claims is to look at who is advocating for discriminating against/deport/hurt groups of people for the sole reason said groups exist; and who doesn’t. That is objectively verifiable.
If you’re incapable of knowing the difference - especially if you feel the need to defend literal Nazis - that’s your problem, not mine. Stop claiming that your personal problems are “human nature”.
You are not and never will be capable of knowing the difference. You will only be capable of determining that the group you like is calling for “ethnic justice” and must be obeyed, while the group you dislike is intolerant and must be excised.
Your political foes will make the opposite conclusion based on their self-serving emotions. Then you scream at each other forever and ever. Everything becomes a popularity game. You mark the people you dislike as deserving of exclusion no matter what they said. We can literally see this entire process happening now. It does not stop happening.
The cycle does not end. Ever. There is no virtue and there is no restraint. Ever.
Yeah, I’ve found the guy who has a keen interest in making the people who oppose literal Nazis to be just as bad as Nazis. Also, one who believes that wanting to “defend people from bigotry” and wanting to “harm people for bigoted reasons” both stem from a desire of personal popularity, instead that from empathy and bigotry respectively. Good job.
Also, answer me these two questions:
Can you explain how “You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist” equals “Black people should be discriminated against, deported, and harmed (no reason given other than them being black)”?
Does
“You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or
harmed black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
target a specific ethnic group? If so, which one?
EDITED TO ADD: I’ve skimmed brazen’s blog, and I am now fully convinced that everything they do is for attention. Given that they’re throughly convinced that everyone does everything for attention and “status”, why should brazen consider themselves to be any different?
You are not and never will be capable of separating “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist” from “people who want things that in my opinion are bad for black people” from “people who are weak enough that I affirm my social status by hating them.”
You are not and never will be capable of distinguishing Actual Nazis from people who are weak enough that you affirm social status by hating them. The only way to stop you is to say you don’t get to kick people out of society for being Actual Nazis, because the attosecond you gain that power you confuse the Nazis for everyone who’s weaker than you and disagrees with your status-politics.
Your questions are valueless. It means nothing that you define the category of people you hate and want to harm in such a way that it’s virtuous and pure to do so. Your opponents can also lie and engage in motivated reasoning. They can claim they only hate thugs and criminals while you hate white people. Both of you are lying. You hate members of your ideological outgroup who are too weak to make you stop hurting them.
The only way to stop their hypocrisy is to stop your hypocrisy. The only way to stop your hypocrisy is to say “Okay, FINE, because you cannot be trusted to tell the difference, you don’t get to kick someone out even if they’re actually waving a Nazi flag and heiling left and right. Because you can’t stop yourself from claiming everyone you don’t like is doing that.”
But your hypocrisy will not be stopped. You will annihilate our society’s protection against Nazis, in the name of fighting Nazis. Because you cannot ever stop or restrain yourself.
All is lost.
You still reat that all those statements have the same meaning, but are incapable to explain how. So, let’s try this again.
QUESTION 1: Explain how the following statements have the same meaning. (No “Oh, you SAY one, but in reality you MEAN the other-” argument. That’s irrelevant to your claim that both messages say the same thing; as such, trying to pull again that excuse will result in an immediate failure.)
You aren’t allowed to call for discriminating against, deporting, or harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist.
Black people should be discriminated against, deported and harmed. (No reason given.)
Since you also claimed that other statements all have the same meaning, you now must prove that. Q1b: Explain, exactly, how all the following groups are identical. (Again, the same limitation to Q1 applies here.)
People who “call for harming black people for the sole reason that black people exist”
People who “want things that in my [Aridara’s] opinion are bad for black people”.
People who “are weak enough that I [Aridara] affirm my social status by hating them.”
Now, you’ll probably deflect the questions by claiming.that I’ll just twist and lie about my opponents (exactly like my opponents and everyone else does, according to you) to have my way; or.by claiming that everything I do is not for ideology or morality, but for signaling “status” (like how, according to you, everyone does). In that case, allow me to ask one question: Why should we listen your opinion, when you’re someone who, by your own repeated admission throughout your own blog, is perfectly willing to say ANYTHING to put down the people who you dislike, and who isn’t interested in defending a specific position or your own morals, but solely to obtain satus and popularity among your peers?
You summarized me as the exact and literal opposite of my beliefs. You post on Something Awful, don’t you?
The answer to your questions is “Your question is invalid because you are lying about its premises and I know you are lying and I can fucking see you doing it.” You demanded I prove a falsehood I accused you of using!
It is in fact true that repeated, insistent assertions of the form –
“Literally all things said or done by all humans under all circumstances are examples of pure status-seeking behavior with no regard for truth or virtue, there are literally no exceptions to this, there is no good faith, all is doomed forever and ever.”
– do seem to contain themselves, along with all other discursive utterances, within their field of reference.
Which means that it’s actually reasonable for an interlocutor to ask: “OK, why are you any different? What exempts your own words and actions from the principles that you’ve just laid down? If I am to take what you say seriously…how could I possibly take what you say seriously, given that you’re participating in this discussion by emitting utterances, and apparently all utterances are worthless?”
I assume you have some kind of answer to this. And in fact I assume that getting a worthwhile conversation out of this line of reasoning is going to have to begin with that answer, since the answer would serve to provide some kind of asserted positive value that your interlocutors might use as a foundation for mutual intelligibility.
listen nothing in sound design will ever come close to the sheer power of the sound of a lightsaber turning on
I truly 1000% believe that Star Wars would never have gotten as popular as it has without everything about the lightsaber being absolutely perfect.
And I also believe the lightsaber is the perfect weapon in any form of media ever.
It draws upon a traditional and iconic weapon: a sword. Swords have gravitas, an ethos, that I don’t think anything else has. People love swords. They’re dramatic, they allow posing, tense back and forth battles, tests of skill and chances to flourish and show off.
But it’s better than a sword, because it sounds fucking awesome. You know what’s even better for your sword fight? If they make a cool ass noise when they hit eachother. Like everything about a lightsaber sounds amazing. It turning on, when they clash, when they deflect something, hell even when they just sit there and HUM it sounds cool.
There’s also the different colors, and this is important because it allows there to be differentiation. Vader has red, Obi-Wan has blue, Luke gets green. They’re instantly recognizable and you can understand what side someone is on based on the color of their weapon. It also allows there to be a certain amount of personalization and customization, which is VERY IMPORTANT because you know what really gets people into your story? When they start imagining themselves in it. When people start thinking about themselves in Star Wars I guarantee one of the first three questions that will come up (if not the first) is what color lightsaber would you have.
Finally, this is a small thing but, lightsabers are just easy to carry around. You just turn the damn thing off the and blade goes away. It’s a very manageable prop to carry around, and then you get sweet noises and posing when it turns on.
Laser sword goes swoosh buzz hmmmmm and it’s rad
This is all true and accurate analysis, but I’m not reblogging it for that reason. I’m reblogging it because someone saying that –
Swords have gravitas, an ethos, that I don’t think anything else has.
People love swords. They’re dramatic, they allow posing, tense back and
forth battles, tests of skill and chances to flourish and show off.
– is my cue to point out that sword-romanticization is actually just one specific instance of military archaeo-tech romanticization. The tools with which your glorious mythologized ancestors fought are going to seem kind of magical, no matter what they were. We’re already seeing a bit of the later waves of that with cowboy revolvers, maybe even with weirdness like Girls und Panzer.
But none of this is anywhere near as cool as Bronze Age warrior-kings carrying around ceremonial stone-headed maces. Which they did. Because of course edged metal weapons are grim, gritty, vaguely-distasteful killer’s tools, while Stone Age clubs are elegant weapons from a more civilized time.
Galaxy brain: The fastest way to resolve Israeli-Palestinian tension is to claim the land ourselves and re-establish the Kingdom of Jerusalem, under the rule of the rightful successor to Baldwin I, once we figure out who that is.
it really really annoys me when religious people sort of elide the question of “okay, but does God exist the way that, say, my husband or poetry or the country of France exists?”
or treat it like an unimportant question that only unsophisticated r/atheism commenters who think every religion is fundamentalist Christianity would care about
if God exists the way that, say, my husband or poetry or the country of France exists, that is literally the most important fact about the universe. it is okay to ask the question.
This is a good and correct outlook, but “the country of France” is a terrible comparison example. The country of France is literally an intangible fiction, and its power in the material world comes solely from the fact that lots of people perceive it in the conceptual plane.
…and the fact that something as airily fictional as France can seem so real and fundamental is a pretty good illustration of why it makes sense to take conceptual entities seriously.
Disputes over the truth or falsehood of religion(s) always have a certain odd inanity to them, because all of the actual arguments in regular use are old and simple and tedious – often they’ve been advanced and counter-advanced for literal millennia, and even if not they always feel like the sort of thing an undergrad gets extremely excited about for a week or two
Teapots orbiting the sun, maybe sometimes a noble lie is better than the truth, if you really believe in X why don’t you believe in all its implications, where does value come from if it’s all atoms and the void, yadda yadda – it’s not that any of these are dead in the water discursively, or lacking in human resonance, it’s just that we’ve heard them all before oh so long ago, we even got tired of hearing them oh so long ago, and whatever it is that is making us have this argument, it can’t be that we find it fascinating to go over this undergrad shit one more time, now can it?
… and so everyone is open to the charge that they are fixating on some bit of undergrad shit that would ordinarily be beneath them, and must be fixating on it for personal reasons and not for its value as a pearl of pure reason, and what a waste, to see a person reduced to this obsessive reiteration of some bit of undergrad shit, what a sad waste indeed.
– except we know that we are not having this argument because we are so fascinated by this or that bit of undergrad shit, come on, we know that. We know we are all trotting out the undergrad shit again “for personal reasons.” The reason we are trotting it out again is that we cannot seem to understand each others’ personal reasons.
And it would be so nice to just talk about this freely and openly, as about any other personal matter, without the protective shield of the argument, which is always beneath all of us. (And yes, this applies just as well when the argument is something about the insufficiency of mere reason – did you think that wasn’t familiar undergrad shit, too?) It would be so nice. But for some reason this route is blocked to us, and must be forever blocked to us, and so we can only engage in these repetitive bouts, each clinging to the argument, as our forefathers have, yes, for millennia
and sometimes we will even include the fact that this is all undergrad shit as part of the argument, as our forefathers did (Chesteron did it better than we ever will), and still we are doing this, as it has been done for millennia, even though when you think about it that’s really quite sad, and quite pathetic
but for some reason, the other route is blocked to us
I would say that by the standards of religious debates, the rationalist approach “we can appropriate religious rituals without believing any of that” is fairly new. Or rather, not exactly new - communists have been doing that for a hundred years - but the part where people are self-aware about and recognize that emotional needs that drive people to religion are legitimate and need to satisfied instead of hand-waved, and where they don’t deny that what they’re doing has religious undertones and is specifically designed as such - that part is fairly new; communists get really upset when you point out that they’re literally worshiping mummies.
This is exactly, explicitly, what Reconstructionist Judaism has been doing since its inception. You can make an argument that it’s what the Romans were doing with the imperial cult.
Once there was a little girl to whom the touch of the world was unendurable. Bright lights and loud music left her tired and despairing; nothing in her tiny home could be the merest hint out of place, lest it make her weep; the very clothes she wore itched against her skin.
The little girl thought on this, and she said, obviously that is because I am a princess; everyone knows that princesses are delicate and easily damaged. Everyone knows that they can feel a single pea through fifty featherbeds. It is not that I am too sensitive for the world; instead it is that the world is too coarse for me.
Very well, said the wind, who had overheard, you are a princess, and it is right and proper that a princess should do as you do and feel as you feel. But remember, princesses must be perfect. Anything that was so very fragile, and imperfect, would be worthless. And, of course, you must grow up to be a queen.
And the little girl agreed that this was very fair.
The little girl grew older, and she noticed that speech pained her more than most. She flinched from jesting and mockery, even the most kindly-inclined, and a single harsh word would stay upon her thoughts for years. She shrank backward from people, knowing they all possessed a power to hurt her far beyond what they ever intended.
Well, said the girl, that is probably also because I am a princess; everyone knows that princesses are elegant and refined, and that their great courtesy leads them to find greater cruelty in insult. If I am very quiet and proper in response to whoever talks to me, presently they will understand, and be ashamed.
Naturally, said the wind, you are still a princess, and it is right and proper that a princess should be so versed in etiquette. But remember, princesses must be perfect; for if you are careless once, they will use it as an excuse for everything they do to you forever after. And, of course, you must grow up to be a queen.
And the little girl agreed that this was very fair.
At length the little girl grew old enough, and convinced enough that the world was coarse and terrible, that she went to build a kingdom of her own, in fulfillment of her promise that she would someday be a queen. She blanketed a world in quiet dark, and she coaxed roses all of ice to grow up from the earth. She set them in perfectly ordered beds, around fountains stilled in time, and she did not care for how the shards of her domain grew up slowly around her heart.
And the wind said, very well, majesty, this shall be your kingdom then. But remember, it must be perfect. Anything that was so fragile, and imperfect, would be worthless. And the queen said, I know.
social anomie and alienation aren’t great. if most people in the world don’t know what they want to do with their lives, that is a bad thing. but you know what’s worse? that same social anomie and alienation happening behind closed doors, with the threat of what you’re ‘supposed’ to do hanging over your head.
if you’ve ever met a group of single mormon women in their late ‘20s, you’ll know exactly what i mean. fuck, if you’ve met a group of mormon women in their late ‘20s in general you’ll know what i mean. there’s this pervasive sense of quiet desperation: “i don’t know what i wanted out of life, but it wasn’t this.”
even the women who did everything ‘right’- got married between the ages of 18 and 20 to a young man they met in college after he served his mission, had between 2 and 5 children, live as a homemaker in a nice house in the suburbs, go to the temple/pray/read their scriptures regularly, go to church every week- even they are unhappy. they say things like “i could have been anything i wanted, but i chose to raise children”, or “i wanted to be a [vocation] but god had other plans for me”. and behind closed doors, they take xanax or get high on pain meds and try to deal with the responsibilities they’re stuck with.
they did everything they were ‘supposed’ to do, but it wasn’t what they really wanted. so they’re miserable and alienated and feel alone, even though they ‘have’ a strong faith community and a society that encourages/strongarms them into a particular social role.
i honestly think alienation isn’t a problem isolated to the modern-day West. it’s just that after 1918 people started talking about it, because the War and the Flu destroyed everything people knew about how things ‘should’ be. if you’re stuck in a world you can’t change, surrounded by people you hate? no shit you’re going to feel alienated and isolated, whether you’re a mediaeval dirt farmer or a ‘20s jazz swinger or a Silicon Bay programmer.
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations. it’s harder than ever to decide what you want to be when you grow up, and literally everyone in a kid’s life is going to try to push them away from stuff that could be meaningful.
want to be a firefighter/policeman/construction worker/lumberjack/fisherman? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you happen to be unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because vagina’). want to be a baker/florist/tailor/chef/nurse? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you’re unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because penis’).
want to be a writer/artist/filmmaker/actor/puppeteer? “good luck saying ‘you want fries with that?’!”, with a side of ‘that’s for girls/boys’. want to be a scientist/programmer/engineer/doctor/astronaut? good luck being told ‘you’re not smart enough’, with a side of ‘you can’t do this if you have a vagina’.
want to be a professor? a homemaker? a stay-at-home parent? an entrepreneur? a stripper? a lawyer? no matter what you pick, you’re gonna get shoved away from it in ways both big and small.
our society as it currently exists is designed to funnel people into white-collar office work. and while that kind of work is necessary, a) a lot of it doesn’t actually provide any value and b) most people do not find it very satisfying.
an author i like coined the term ‘voker’- someone who does what they love for the love of the thing. right now, it’s very, very hard to be a voker- because of the pressures of capitalism, because sexism, and because our society does not value Love Of The Thing, it values Joyless Work.
i suspect if we made it easier to be a voker, a lot of our problems with social anomie would dissipate like smoke on the wind.
This train of thought is…important, and very much worth talking about. Probably I’ll spit out several responses, over the course of a while, as thoughts come to me.
First round:
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations.
This is 100% accurate. But it’s not like the problem boils down to Vocations vs. White-Collar Office Work, with the latter thing being some sort of special socially-favored activity that gets total approval from all corners. Literally every job is devalued, including white-collar office work.
If you’re a regular middle-management type, lots of people will look down their noses at you for being a soulless boring drone whose existence is wholly meaningless, just like it was back in the ‘60s. If you’re a high-flying financier or CEO, lots of people will tell you that you’re the worthless parasitic scum destroying society. If you’re a Tech Innovator type…I don’t think you need me to list all the widespread nasty stereotypes about Silicon Valley douchebags.
(And, even in other fields, the mechanisms of devaluation go well beyond the ones you list. If you’re an unsuccessful artist, yes, you’ll hear lots of “want fries with that?” jokes – and if you’re a successful artist, people will line up around the block to explain why your work is terrible / weak / socially-destructive.)
@bambamramfan is wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this: most people aren’t super-thick-skinned, most people don’t have the wherewithal to deal well with scorn, and a diverse complex society with wide-open high-bandwidth communication channels means that everyone is getting the world’s scorn pumped directly into his brain.
Your parents expect one thing of you, your (potential) mate(s) another, your kids a third, and already you’re totally fucked, even before you start factoring in “any friends you might have” or “the internet.”
The “everyone should be a voker, and that will solve our problems” idea is super dangerous, but…that’s for another time.
It occurs to me that part of why I’m so anti-tight-knit-communities and anti-identity is that I link those things with immunity to scorn.
This may be psychologically unrealistic. It probably is.
But on the other hand, people really don’t care about scorn from “those people over there.” If you tell a random suburban American that Bangladeshis are filled with contempt for his life choices, they will not care.
(Hell, if you tell a partisan Republican that The Libs are filled with contempt for his choices, he will often react with glee).
My resistance to community is a refusal to accept judgment from anyone except the friends that I have specifically chosen to give that power to. I’m not part of your “community” and I don’t have to accept your judgment. Because until I’ve decided that I trust your judgment—you, in particular—then you’re one of those people “over there”.
Hrm.
In the broadest sense, humans are actually very bad (thus far) at correctly calibrating their brains in response to “this person is far away [literally or metaphorically] and doesn’t matter to my life.” This is, in large part, an incomplete-adaptation-to-a-rapidly-changing-environment thing. Different people are better or worse at managing the calibration – and I suspect that, as such things go, you and I both are extreme outliers in terms of ability-to-think-of-people-as-not-mattering (without having to resort to horrible hacks like verminization*) – but I don’t think anyone is really excellent at it in an absolute sense.
*And, let’s be clear, verminization is a hack designed to achieve exactly this.
On the plus side, this means that your bleeding compassionate heart will sometimes respond to depictions of far-away suffering people with psychological modules that were designed for dealing with community members whose goodwill is a matter of long-term relevance to your welfare.
On the minus side, it means that when a Bangladeshi leaves you a comment on telling you that you should delete your blog and then kill yourself, it can be hard for many people to muster up a healthy level of indifference. People who are talking to you are obviously right there, and maybe they’ll start building coalitions against you!
In a practical sense, I suspect that community – “real” community, anyway – is overall a tool that does more to allow for this kind of thinking than to inhibit it. No one is an island, not really, but if you are very sure who “your people” are then you’re likely to have an easier time dismissing anyone who falls outside that circle. The most neurotic people-pleasers are those poor souls who think that everyone they encounter is a potential friend, ally, and rival all at once.
Identity is definitely a tool that allows for this kind of thinking. “I yam what I yam, I know what I yam, and I have no interest in being anything else” is one of the most solid possible foundations for ignoring social and cultural pressures.
I think this is a good response. (And I always value engaging with you on these issues).
You’re right that verminization (othering?) is a tool people use to accomplish this not-mattering. Probably one reason I feel like I basically like most people and want them to be happy is that I can do that without having to actually care what they think of me. (Related: I’m good at having boundaries and saying no).
And you’re probably right that I’m overestimating how good people are at this. Relevantly related is the anon response I also got:
I do not think people are so unconcerned with how they are perceived by outsiders. Like, the response I see to anti-Americanism from my (conservative, community-centric) American social environment is not unconcern, it’s -defensiveness-, which suggests a degree of care, however oppositional.
And anon is probably right, much to my bafflement. If they can’t actually physically hurt you, why care what they think?
Your last couple of points, about community and identity, are helpful to putting my finger on what, exactly, I’m objecting to.
There’s a sense in which I have a community. There’s a sense in which I have several communities.
The sense in which I’m opposed to community is the sense in which they’re given objects, prior to me. My community is the community of people whom I have chosen to form ties with. Which isn’t the sort of deeply-rooted community that most people extolling communities seem to value. (I sometimes say that what I’m opposed to is rootedness—the idea that I’m bound by my precursors and my family and by other ties I didn’t freely choose).
But this doesn’t mean I don’t have a community, because I have dozens of people whom I have formed those ties with.
And I would say something similar about identity. The part of identity that always concerns me is the part that involves labels and constraints. I have a very strong sense of identity, of who I am. And that sense is: “I am me.”
Consequently I don’t need to adopt labels. Which means I don’t have to conform myself to what other people think about my labels, or to people who can control whether I “really” qualify for a label. I am me, and if i don’t fit some label, so much the worse for that label.
And that sense is: “I am me.”
Consequently I don’t need to adopt labels.
I mean, you kinda do.
Maybe they’re totally internal labels; maybe they don’t correspond to concepts or categories that any other humans would recognize. And, depending on the way your mind works, maybe maybe the labels are written in Chomskyian mentalese and never translated into English. But if you want your identity to be doing any cognitive work for you, its components need to exist on an abstracted level, rather than simply being “what it is like to experience life as me.” You need to be able to look at objects or experiences or other people and say “this is ego-syntonic, but that is ego-dystonic.” You need to be able to contemplate courses of action and say “this is consonant with who I am, but that leads to identity dissonance.” Which means that you need some kind of bird’s-eye-view picture of your ego, something that doesn’t change shape with every impulse and new idea and blood sugar crash. And that picture, itself, is the only label that fundamentally matters; the rest is just creating subdivisions and internal correspondences for easier filing.
Once you’ve acknowledged this, it’s a short step to saying “certain things will become much easier if I try to make my labels legible in the vocabulary and symbolism of the people around me.” Which is itself a short step to “I will get lots of support and validation for certain components of my identity in exchange for altering them slightly to make them more legible to others.” (If you’ve got the skills and the moxie, you can try to export your own vocabulary and symbolism so that your internal-use labels will be recognized on a wider scale, but that isn’t always easy.)
The sense in which I’m opposed to community is the sense in which
they’re given objects, prior to me. My community is the community of
people whom I have chosen to form ties with. Which isn’t the sort of deeply-rooted community that most people extolling communities seem to value.
So, let me be clear: my instincts are entirely in line with yours here. I hate the way that community rules and norms can serve to constrain individual options; my default attitude tends to be “I will do what I want, and hang out with whom I want, and if you don’t like any part of it than you can either deal or go fuck yourself.” (In particular, I am very allergic to social communities with formal bureaucratic rules that theoretically aren’t subordinate to personal discretion.)
But honestly compels me to admit that community infrastructure has a lot of logisticaladvantages.
I mean, in simplest terms: if your two friends are also friends with each other, there’s a lot you can do in terms of group planning, collective resource banking, etc. The benefits of the friendship scale up incredibly well. If your two friends don’t want anything to do with each other, you don’t get any of that. And as you pull in more people, and “all these people just naturally like each other a whole lot” becomes less and less reliable as a binding mechanism, community-buildingis the thing that allows the scaling to continue.
And even for someone as prickly as I am, this can work pretty well in the best cases. “Look, X isn’t my favorite guy, but he’s clearly a group member in good standing and he has lots of strong relationships with lots of people who matter to me, so in a lot of circumstances I’m just going to acknowledge that he belongs in my sphere” – that is useful stuff, it lets you have a large group that can do large-group-scale things without constantly wrangling and negotiating every dyadic connection.
(It’s especially useful if you acknowledge that the authority and reach of the community-as-an-entity are limited, but…separate discussion.)
social anomie and alienation aren’t great. if most people in the world don’t know what they want to do with their lives, that is a bad thing. but you know what’s worse? that same social anomie and alienation happening behind closed doors, with the threat of what you’re ‘supposed’ to do hanging over your head.
if you’ve ever met a group of single mormon women in their late ‘20s, you’ll know exactly what i mean. fuck, if you’ve met a group of mormon women in their late ‘20s in general you’ll know what i mean. there’s this pervasive sense of quiet desperation: “i don’t know what i wanted out of life, but it wasn’t this.”
even the women who did everything ‘right’- got married between the ages of 18 and 20 to a young man they met in college after he served his mission, had between 2 and 5 children, live as a homemaker in a nice house in the suburbs, go to the temple/pray/read their scriptures regularly, go to church every week- even they are unhappy. they say things like “i could have been anything i wanted, but i chose to raise children”, or “i wanted to be a [vocation] but god had other plans for me”. and behind closed doors, they take xanax or get high on pain meds and try to deal with the responsibilities they’re stuck with.
they did everything they were ‘supposed’ to do, but it wasn’t what they really wanted. so they’re miserable and alienated and feel alone, even though they ‘have’ a strong faith community and a society that encourages/strongarms them into a particular social role.
i honestly think alienation isn’t a problem isolated to the modern-day West. it’s just that after 1918 people started talking about it, because the War and the Flu destroyed everything people knew about how things ‘should’ be. if you’re stuck in a world you can’t change, surrounded by people you hate? no shit you’re going to feel alienated and isolated, whether you’re a mediaeval dirt farmer or a ‘20s jazz swinger or a Silicon Bay programmer.
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations. it’s harder than ever to decide what you want to be when you grow up, and literally everyone in a kid’s life is going to try to push them away from stuff that could be meaningful.
want to be a firefighter/policeman/construction worker/lumberjack/fisherman? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you happen to be unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because vagina’). want to be a baker/florist/tailor/chef/nurse? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you’re unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because penis’).
want to be a writer/artist/filmmaker/actor/puppeteer? “good luck saying ‘you want fries with that?’!”, with a side of ‘that’s for girls/boys’. want to be a scientist/programmer/engineer/doctor/astronaut? good luck being told ‘you’re not smart enough’, with a side of ‘you can’t do this if you have a vagina’.
want to be a professor? a homemaker? a stay-at-home parent? an entrepreneur? a stripper? a lawyer? no matter what you pick, you’re gonna get shoved away from it in ways both big and small.
our society as it currently exists is designed to funnel people into white-collar office work. and while that kind of work is necessary, a) a lot of it doesn’t actually provide any value and b) most people do not find it very satisfying.
an author i like coined the term ‘voker’- someone who does what they love for the love of the thing. right now, it’s very, very hard to be a voker- because of the pressures of capitalism, because sexism, and because our society does not value Love Of The Thing, it values Joyless Work.
i suspect if we made it easier to be a voker, a lot of our problems with social anomie would dissipate like smoke on the wind.
This train of thought is…important, and very much worth talking about. Probably I’ll spit out several responses, over the course of a while, as thoughts come to me.
First round:
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations.
This is 100% accurate. But it’s not like the problem boils down to Vocations vs. White-Collar Office Work, with the latter thing being some sort of special socially-favored activity that gets total approval from all corners. Literally every job is devalued, including white-collar office work.
If you’re a regular middle-management type, lots of people will look down their noses at you for being a soulless boring drone whose existence is wholly meaningless, just like it was back in the ‘60s. If you’re a high-flying financier or CEO, lots of people will tell you that you’re the worthless parasitic scum destroying society. If you’re a Tech Innovator type…I don’t think you need me to list all the widespread nasty stereotypes about Silicon Valley douchebags.
(And, even in other fields, the mechanisms of devaluation go well beyond the ones you list. If you’re an unsuccessful artist, yes, you’ll hear lots of “want fries with that?” jokes – and if you’re a successful artist, people will line up around the block to explain why your work is terrible / weak / socially-destructive.)
@bambamramfan is wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this: most people aren’t super-thick-skinned, most people don’t have the wherewithal to deal well with scorn, and a diverse complex society with wide-open high-bandwidth communication channels means that everyone is getting the world’s scorn pumped directly into his brain.
Your parents expect one thing of you, your (potential) mate(s) another, your kids a third, and already you’re totally fucked, even before you start factoring in “any friends you might have” or “the internet.”
The “everyone should be a voker, and that will solve our problems” idea is super dangerous, but…that’s for another time.
It occurs to me that part of why I’m so anti-tight-knit-communities and anti-identity is that I link those things with immunity to scorn.
This may be psychologically unrealistic. It probably is.
But on the other hand, people really don’t care about scorn from “those people over there.” If you tell a random suburban American that Bangladeshis are filled with contempt for his life choices, they will not care.
(Hell, if you tell a partisan Republican that The Libs are filled with contempt for his choices, he will often react with glee).
My resistance to community is a refusal to accept judgment from anyone except the friends that I have specifically chosen to give that power to. I’m not part of your “community” and I don’t have to accept your judgment. Because until I’ve decided that I trust your judgment—you, in particular—then you’re one of those people “over there”.
Hrm.
In the broadest sense, humans are actually very bad (thus far) at correctly calibrating their brains in response to “this person is far away [literally or metaphorically] and doesn’t matter to my life.” This is, in large part, an incomplete-adaptation-to-a-rapidly-changing-environment thing. Different people are better or worse at managing the calibration – and I suspect that, as such things go, you and I both are extreme outliers in terms of ability-to-think-of-people-as-not-mattering (without having to resort to horrible hacks like verminization*) – but I don’t think anyone is really excellent at it in an absolute sense.
*And, let’s be clear, verminization is a hack designed to achieve exactly this.
On the plus side, this means that your bleeding compassionate heart will sometimes respond to depictions of far-away suffering people with psychological modules that were designed for dealing with community members whose goodwill is a matter of long-term relevance to your welfare.
On the minus side, it means that when a Bangladeshi leaves you a comment on telling you that you should delete your blog and then kill yourself, it can be hard for many people to muster up a healthy level of indifference. People who are talking to you are obviously right there, and maybe they’ll start building coalitions against you!
In a practical sense, I suspect that community – “real” community, anyway – is overall a tool that does more to allow for this kind of thinking than to inhibit it. No one is an island, not really, but if you are very sure who “your people” are then you’re likely to have an easier time dismissing anyone who falls outside that circle. The most neurotic people-pleasers are those poor souls who think that everyone they encounter is a potential friend, ally, and rival all at once.
Identity is definitely a tool that allows for this kind of thinking. “I yam what I yam, I know what I yam, and I have no interest in being anything else” is one of the most solid possible foundations for ignoring social and cultural pressures.
social anomie and alienation aren’t great. if most people in the world don’t know what they want to do with their lives, that is a bad thing. but you know what’s worse? that same social anomie and alienation happening behind closed doors, with the threat of what you’re ‘supposed’ to do hanging over your head.
if you’ve ever met a group of single mormon women in their late ‘20s, you’ll know exactly what i mean. fuck, if you’ve met a group of mormon women in their late ‘20s in general you’ll know what i mean. there’s this pervasive sense of quiet desperation: “i don’t know what i wanted out of life, but it wasn’t this.”
even the women who did everything ‘right’- got married between the ages of 18 and 20 to a young man they met in college after he served his mission, had between 2 and 5 children, live as a homemaker in a nice house in the suburbs, go to the temple/pray/read their scriptures regularly, go to church every week- even they are unhappy. they say things like “i could have been anything i wanted, but i chose to raise children”, or “i wanted to be a [vocation] but god had other plans for me”. and behind closed doors, they take xanax or get high on pain meds and try to deal with the responsibilities they’re stuck with.
they did everything they were ‘supposed’ to do, but it wasn’t what they really wanted. so they’re miserable and alienated and feel alone, even though they ‘have’ a strong faith community and a society that encourages/strongarms them into a particular social role.
i honestly think alienation isn’t a problem isolated to the modern-day West. it’s just that after 1918 people started talking about it, because the War and the Flu destroyed everything people knew about how things ‘should’ be. if you’re stuck in a world you can’t change, surrounded by people you hate? no shit you’re going to feel alienated and isolated, whether you’re a mediaeval dirt farmer or a ‘20s jazz swinger or a Silicon Bay programmer.
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations. it’s harder than ever to decide what you want to be when you grow up, and literally everyone in a kid’s life is going to try to push them away from stuff that could be meaningful.
want to be a firefighter/policeman/construction worker/lumberjack/fisherman? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you happen to be unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because vagina’). want to be a baker/florist/tailor/chef/nurse? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you’re unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because penis’).
want to be a writer/artist/filmmaker/actor/puppeteer? “good luck saying ‘you want fries with that?’!”, with a side of ‘that’s for girls/boys’. want to be a scientist/programmer/engineer/doctor/astronaut? good luck being told ‘you’re not smart enough’, with a side of ‘you can’t do this if you have a vagina’.
want to be a professor? a homemaker? a stay-at-home parent? an entrepreneur? a stripper? a lawyer? no matter what you pick, you’re gonna get shoved away from it in ways both big and small.
our society as it currently exists is designed to funnel people into white-collar office work. and while that kind of work is necessary, a) a lot of it doesn’t actually provide any value and b) most people do not find it very satisfying.
an author i like coined the term ‘voker’- someone who does what they love for the love of the thing. right now, it’s very, very hard to be a voker- because of the pressures of capitalism, because sexism, and because our society does not value Love Of The Thing, it values Joyless Work.
i suspect if we made it easier to be a voker, a lot of our problems with social anomie would dissipate like smoke on the wind.
This train of thought is…important, and very much worth talking about. Probably I’ll spit out several responses, over the course of a while, as thoughts come to me.
First round:
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations.
This is 100% accurate. But it’s not like the problem boils down to Vocations vs. White-Collar Office Work, with the latter thing being some sort of special socially-favored activity that gets total approval from all corners. Literally every job is devalued, including white-collar office work.
If you’re a regular middle-management type, lots of people will look down their noses at you for being a soulless boring drone whose existence is wholly meaningless, just like it was back in the ‘60s. If you’re a high-flying financier or CEO, lots of people will tell you that you’re the worthless parasitic scum destroying society. If you’re a Tech Innovator type…I don’t think you need me to list all the widespread nasty stereotypes about Silicon Valley douchebags.
(And, even in other fields, the mechanisms of devaluation go well beyond the ones you list. If you’re an unsuccessful artist, yes, you’ll hear lots of “want fries with that?” jokes – and if you’re a successful artist, people will line up around the block to explain why your work is terrible / weak / socially-destructive.)
@bambamramfan is wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this: most people aren’t super-thick-skinned, most people don’t have the wherewithal to deal well with scorn, and a diverse complex society with wide-open high-bandwidth communication channels means that everyone is getting the world’s scorn pumped directly into his brain.
Your parents expect one thing of you, your (potential) mate(s) another, your kids a third, and already you’re totally fucked, even before you start factoring in “any friends you might have” or “the internet.”
The “everyone should be a voker, and that will solve our problems” idea is super dangerous, but…that’s for another time.
...would you want to have someone doing the domestic service thing for you? I mean, it seems like a lot of pressure on the people accepting it.
I could certainly imagine it working out, given the right servant and the right circumstances.
Those are some heavy-duty qualifiers, to be clear. I am a prickly misanthrope who doesn’t deal well with most human beings; engaging with someone through a domestic-service relationship definitely wouldn’t ameliorate any of the problems there, and would probably make them much worse. Unless we’re talking about people who are handpicked for compatibility, I’m much happier in the arm’s-length world of service-for-money rather than the messier and more fraught world of service-for-loyalty.
In general, I imagine that “having a servant” is something that can be done well or badly, and that requires practice and care and genuine good faith in order to do well. You have to be able to impose burdens that are genuinely mutually beneficial. But I think a lot of people would in fact go for that, especially if it were more normalized. I gather that even now quite a few people have personal relationships that function along more or less those lines.
Balioc are you serious about this? Maybe I'd love to put a round between the guy's eyes, but that's impractical because I'd go to jail. So I'm forced to peruse practical options like using the justice system to fuck him over as much as possible. Nothing complicated. It's not about how I think things should be, the system is there for me to use, so I use it.
OK, to start with: I think people are reading way too much into my “go take vengeance yourself, if you want it” comments. Which is understandable, I suppose. But let me be clear – I imagine that, for the vast majority of people, “engage in vigilante retribution and bear the wrath of the state” is not going to be worth the cost, even a little bit. It’s not much of a real option and I don’t mean to imply that it is. (This is, again, completely leaving aside any abstract question of whether or not vigilante retribution is ethical.)
**********
“So I’m forced to peruse practical options like using the justice system to fuck him over as much as possible.”
…does that help? At all?
If a piano fell on his head, if an alligator emerged from the sewer and savaged him, would that be justice?
To the extent that your feelings are “I’m mad at this guy and I want him to suffer in any way that I can get,” that’s fine, sort of – at the very least, it’s a totally coherent and explicable position – but it’s also probably not the kind of thing that anyone else has very much reason to support, or the kind of thing that society-at-large has an interest in indulging. (For example, people often feel just that way even if they don’t have legitimate grievances – “that bitch got the promotion instead of me” can certainly inspire raw vengefulness.)
The claim seems to be that “victims’ desire for closure” is a different kind of psychological animal. That it’s not just a retributive impulse, but rather a need to see some kind of abstract principle of right conduct manifested through social action.
I understand that need, at least a little bit. What I don’t understand is why anyone thinks that it can be met by administrative action. To my eyes, “the jury convicted him and he went to jail” has about as much power-of-abstract-justice in it as “a piano fell on his head.” If I take vengeance personally, I know exactly what the grievance is, what harm was done, what punishment is demanded by my sense of justice, what the relevant character traits of the perpetrator and the victim are, etc. etc. The state has access to none of this stuff, and is blind and deaf with regards to actual justice.
“You know, ancient proverbial wisdomly truth. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for the rest of his life.”
“Ah, so you want to teach a man to-”
“Also no.“
I believe the argument is more “a man who learns to fish is fed for a lifetime, so the very least we can do is stop this program that, through the incentives it creates, is essentially paying people in fish to not learn how to fish”
like I don’t think you understand A: how much conservatives and/or libertarians think government intervention is more harmful than doing absolutely nothing at all and B: how much evidence they have for this position. if you think that Something Must Be Done and the worst thing to do is nothing at all, then of course they look heartless and wicked, but the Let’s Stop Making Things Actively Worse Movement rejects those premises so it’s unfair to cast them in such a way
I’m referring to a two-pronged approach of dismantling any kind of welfare system or safety net because giving people fish is inherently unvirtuous, combined with strong support for anti-intellectualism for plebs, an all-out assault against public fishing schools and fishing colleges, meaning taking away both fish and the opportunity to fish.
Now this problem leads to a sort of vague “eh now business is good and cool, fisheries will surely employ ten million fishermen” where naturally a fishery would rather hire as little fishermen as possible, especially as you just denied them the ability to learn how to fish.
“I’m referring to a two pronged approach of trying to dismantle a system that they think is actively making things worse, combined with attacking another governmental system that is well-known for wasting preposterous amounts of money to no productive end whatsoever and being astonishingly resilient against efforts to make it do useful things. There’s no way they could believe they had a good reason to attack such a system, I must have caught them out!”
I don’t think you get what they actually believe and I don’t think you get how much actual evidence they have for it, because it’s a lot. Most American government interventions actually are making things worse than doing nothing, actually, in real life in the world, and they will never ever go away and they will never ever get better because How Dare You Not Try To Do Something.
I’m going to say “citation extremely needed” because I don’t want to outright say “you are lying, and intentionally so”.
People who want to dismantle welfare and education (again, this a two-pronged approach) have zero interest whatsoever in actually trying something. To imply that their two-pronged approach is not imbecilic, but rather very economy and highly trickle-down, they intentionally cherrypick evidence. It works like this:
A program provides free lunches for children. Most of them are fed. Some of them are not. Now, there’s a headline in this, and a good conclusion: “STUPID DUMB STATE fucks up AGAIN, dismantle this”.
If the program gets dismantled, then naturally no children get free lunches, no lunches are provided, and children go hungry. Since starving children are taught the value of food by this, this is to be considered highly successful.
Note the (in another sense) two-pronged approach: the suffering is considered a success and is a benefit from a deontological standpoint, but otherwise you pretend your approach is utilitarian.
they will never ever get better because How Dare You Not Try To Do Something.
in what fucking universe do people not get yelled at by their own teamif they try to institute, say, free universal health care in America?
Taking away people’s fish and the ability to fish is precisely considered doing something.
The attention of the popular is always and exclusively and universally baleful for the unpopular. All programs to help the impoverished, the lower-class – the unpopular – require the attention of the popular to be upon them. All societal imperatives to “help the needy” mean “Punish the have-nots to emotionally reward the haves” because that is the thing that happens every single time every single time every single time without one single solitary exception that the popular interact with the unpopular. Popularity devours any such program or imperative, and any capacity to do useful things is devoured and replaced with not doing useful things but serving the emotions of the popular. Nothing that is useful can survive. Nothing that does what it is supposed to do can survive. It will be outcompeted by the functionless, because the functionless does not waste any aspect of its existence on having function and thus devotes all aspects of its existence to flattering the emotions of the popular. And the popular are all.
People were mocking a Republican who said that we should cancel the school lunch program because it hasn’t produced results, which clearly means he hates children and all negative emotional valence terms are true of him and hate hate contempt hate destroy contempt hate annihilate hate contempt. If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might possibly be producing is negative utility. Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape.
Does it work? Does it function? Does it have fucking functionality? Can you imagine how such a program might not function, or does trying to imagine how it doesn’t work just make you start vomiting your contempt? I can think of a real easy way that it doesn’t function – the interventions it gives are insufficient to actually have a positive outcome, because they are designed around the emotional needs of the popular and not the actual needs of the people it helps, and the administrative overhead massively outweighs any positive utility, as it always has and always will forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. If we are not allowed to ask if it functions, it does not function. If it does not function, then it is another window through which the baleful eye of the popular gazes the unpopular into nothingness. If so, it should be closed, and it never ever will and death is the only escape.
People might be able to teach themselves to fish, when the popular are not holding them down and shrieking into their mouths about how only the popular can help them. The libertarian wing of the GOP is the only remaining part of them that has not been devoured by popularity. Trump doesn’t want to free the unpopular from the attention of the popular, he wants to hold them down and shriek a slightly different message into their mouths and prevent them from ever doing anything useful because useful things aren’t made specifically to flatter his endlessly hungry emotions. The libertarians are only empowered to do things because he isn’t paying attention to them, because as it has always been in the entirety of human history, useful things can only happen outside the attention of the popular. The only freedom can be found away from the attention of the popular. Useful things can only possibly happen outside the gaze of the popular. And any attempt to escape it results in the endless shrieks that you must oppose the wonderful, pure, noble, virtuous causes that the popular wrap themselves in in order to justify their limitless hunger to annihilate utility.
>If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might possibly be producing is negative utility.
So, is it that you don’t comprehend or that you don’t accept that “children being fed” is the result of this program? I don’t understand how you’re looking at a the criticism a republican received for saying “this program intended to give a meal to American children in their developing years is not providing results and we should probably get rid of it” and seeing him as unfairly maligned for asking The Real Questions.
> does it work
Yes, it feeds children. I was waiting for the part where you might establish in which providing poor children a meal is a popular scapegoat from a real issue, a real negative outcome, but it sounds like you’re being hypothetical about a concrete example
>I can think of a real easy way [this program I presume] doesn’t function
You did not actually provide this real easy way. I don’t know what the following had to do with the former
So, is it that you don’t comprehend or that you don’t accept that “children being fed” is the result of this program? I don’t understand how you’re looking at a the criticism a republican received for saying “this program intended to give a meal to American children in their developing years is not providing results and we should probably get rid of it” and seeing him as unfairly maligned for asking The Real Questions.
“Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape.
“
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
Yes, it feeds children. I was waiting for the part where you might establish in which providing poor children a meal is a popular scapegoat from a real issue, a real negative outcome, but it sounds like you’re being hypothetical about a concrete example
“Giving children lunches is not a religious sacrament, it is something we allegedly do because it has a positive outcome. If we are not allowed to ask “Is this thing we did, that is supposed to have a positive outcome, actually having a positive outcome?” because that means you don’t want to give people positive outcomes, then all is lost forever and death is the only escape. “
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
You did not actually provide this real easy way. I don’t know what the following had to do with the former
You are pretending to be stupid and incomprehending in order to posture at moral and intellectual superiority. This will work because words do not matter and only noises matter, there is no meaning, there is only the endless shrieking song of popularity. You shriek status and status will be shrieked back into you. That will be all that matters and all that is left.
All is lost forever.
Death is the only escape.
…ok, look, I’m fairly sure that you’re letting your general-purpose metaphors drag you away from the logic of the specific issue at hand. Although, to be fair, your interlocutors aren’t doing a stellar job of articulating their side of things. Let me give it a shot –
You say: “Can you imagine how such a [public welfare] program might not function?”
There are a lot of plausible ways that a program might not function, of course, but ultimately they devolve to two:
1. The program performs its task inefficiently. It does in fact provide benefit to its recipients, but too many resources are expended to be worth the good that is done.
2. The program actively harms its recipients, probably by creating some kind of weird perverse incentive structure. (Meager benefits that disappear at a certain level of income or wealth, which basically pay the recipients a pittance in exchange for never working or saving, are a classic example here.)
American conservatives love to talk about welfare programs having issues of the second kind, and most of the standard conservative soundbites on the topic reference that kind of problem. This is more convincing with regard to some programs than others, and it’s really not convincing at all when it comes to school lunches. (If you think otherwise…I would, ah, love to hear your argument.) The benefits are given in kind, and they’re given directly to kids who really shouldn’t have any acquiring-lunch-related incentives to begin with.
These programs do in fact benefit poor kids, in a clear and obvious and
easily-discernible way. They’re eating lunch, which they don’t have to
pay for themselves. It’s real. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You can
too, if you go to any poor school in a big city.
It’s not like all the money is getting stolen by warlords.
So we’re talking about efficiency.
Could I be convinced that a school lunch program was inefficient, and really ought to be improved? Yes, certainly.
Could I be convinced that a school lunch program was inefficient, and that therefore our first response should be to scrap it? That would be a lot harder.
I would rather feed the country’s poor schoolkids for $X than for $2X (assuming equivalent levels of nutrition etc. etc.), but I would rather spend $2X – even if the extra money were being wasted by the most odious bureaucracy imaginable – than spend $0 on feeding no poor schoolkids at all. At least, this is true at any remotely-plausible funding level.
But American liberals / leftists really really don’t trust American conservatives about this, and they’re right not to trust them, because those conservatives have a long history of trying to “fix” flawed inefficient welfare programs by replacing them with nothing.
And this is the heart of the actual argument. “If we are not allowed to ask if a school lunch program is having
results, then that program is functionless and the only thing it might
possibly be producing is negative utility” – the proper response here is “The program is obviously having results and generating positive utility; just ask any of the recipients. You’re saying the results aren’t good enough, and maybe you’re even right about that, but your inquiries are all designed to conflate suboptimal programs that need to be improved with negative-utility programs that need to be destroyed.”
You say “I don’t think you get…how much actual evidence they have for [welfare programs being negative-utility].”
I confess: I would be very interested in seeing such evidence. Not broad generalizations about the satanic powers of popular people and the apocalyptic consequences of all their works, but, y’know, evidence.
This is going to be a tough sell. The very-standard-issue conservative arguments – the ones explaining how the poor would be Motivated to Do Real Work, if only we didn’t coddle them – are not convincing, at least not in any form that I’ve seen. Certainly the welfare recipients themselves, who are the ones supposedly caught in the baleful Sauron’s-eye, are not clamoring for welfare programs to be dismantled. But maybe you’ve got something I’m not expecting.
And if your complaint is that welfare programs are badly managed and inefficient, well, you’ll get no argument at all from me. I will happily get behind anyone’s call to make the welfare system less stupid and needlessly hurtful. But then you’re in the position of weighing bad welfare programs against no welfare programs, and you’re actually going to have to sell the idea that the latter is a remotely reasonable choice.
I am flabbergasted, though, at your ideas about domestic work as fulfilling. To my mind, outside of a few hobby implementations like recreational baking, housework and carework are the absolute epitome of soul-killing work. Domestic work is futile, boring, repetitive, endless Sisyphean drudgery. Those kinds of tasks are sludge in the day and my quality of life rises to the extent I am able to minimize the number of minutes per day allocated to them. The perfect-world ideal is 0 minutes per day.
I would literally rather spend a given hour lying on the couch playing a match 3 game, which produces zero value (well, it provides my brain’s back office with background decompression time by occupying the restless antsy front brain, but this probably wouldn’t have utility if I weren’t dealing with the effects of chronic overwork due to the decades of continuous full-time employment people think is such a holy grail for human fulfillment mumble; I am prepared to ascribe it zero value) but which also imposes no torture-grade tedium or backbreaking effort, than spend that hour cleaning my apartment or cooking a workaday meal, which produces high but utterly ephemeral short-term value (i.e., if cost:benefit favors doing it it favors doing it regularly and often) but which is extremely tedious and frequently uncomfortable.
I think that this preference is perhaps toward the far end of normal – most people have better motor skills etc than I do which allow them to at least somewhat enjoy activities like cooking, which decreases the cost side; probably most people put higher value on household-level social cohesion and homemaking than I do, which increases the benefit side – but I think that it is within the broadly understandable and relatable spectrum of feelings and is not a totally idiosyncratic and personal weirdness. I am genuinely surprised to my core by seeing this sort of work held up as the obvious answer to the soul-nourishing and fulfilling work in a theoretical post-scarcity future question.
Something something grumpy mumbling about gender and gender failure and the differential damage done by male and female socialization.
I mean, I’m the wrong person to ask about the details of the psychological mechanisms here.
But my impression is that, well, people have a wide range of tolerances for tedium. And I have some sense that “perform a simple task that requires little complex thought and has little risk of failure, but demands enough effort that you can feel that you’ve made a difference by performing it as opposed to not, and know that in so doing you are making life better for someone whose welfare and gratitude matter to you” captures much of the benefit that many people get from the not-being-idle thing.
If the government can’t possibly do anything resembling justice, then
what IS it supposed to be doing? If people think we should have a
government at all, then I would expect them to feel a need for that
government to settle issues in ways that they consider
reasonable/satisfying (mostly, on average, etc), or else what is the
point?
Different things are getting combined here, through legerdemain. Or, at least, that is how it seems to me.
There are obviously lots of very helpful things that the government can be doing.
Even just limiting ourselves to the very narrow arena of law enforcement:
I expect the government to protect me from crime, to the fullest extent that it can do so (without putting intolerable strain on other values, something something civil liberties). In the name of doing this, I expect the government to provide reasonable levels of deterrence to would-be criminals. If in fact I am victimized, I expect the government to provide me with fair material restitution for my loss. If I come under suspicion, I expect the government to provide me with expeditious due process of law. Etc. etc.
I do not expect the government to make me feel better about the situation, or to give me “closure,” or to reflect any sacred abstract principle. All those things seem well outside its powers.
…I suppose, if you want to play nit-picky games, you can ask “don’t you at least expect the actual criminal codes of the government to be just and to reflect justice?” And the answer there is…no, I don’t, not really. Justice would smile upon first-degree murder in certain cases, and would make rude words a hanging offense in others, based on circumstantial details to which no government could possibly have access. Justice would require a sublimity of understanding, and a grasp of nuance, that isn’t even theoretically achievable at the level of a large-scale institution. As a practical matter, I expect the government to agree with my sense of justice in a very broad-brush sense on certain important matters (like “murder and theft are usually bad”), because as a practical matter most humans tend to think the same way about a lot of things, but that serendipity ends well before the point where I would entrust the state with my psychological or spiritual satisfaction.
Both the libertarians and the socialists have a point when they accuse each other’s favored economic systems of catering largely to fake demand.
A government acquires its wealth through coercion and spends it according to the logic of internal politics, which is often insane, and which often has nothing to do with doing any real good for anyone. See, e.g., absurd bloated procurement contracts for jet fighters that the military won’t actually use. Or, to go slightly farther afield, @slatestarscratchpad‘s pointless extra years of required training for doctors (which is feasible because medical schools have a government-backed guild monopoly on doctoring jobs). This kind of distortion would not occur in a truly free market!
…but in a truly free market, vast swathes of the economy would be devoted to helping the stupendously rich compete in zero-sum status games against each other, or (at best) to helping them to gain trivial increases in personal welfare at staggering cost. It’s more profitable to build gold-plated yachts than to feed the poor, since the poor don’t have any money. But a sane civilization is not going to dedicate lots of resources to meeting the demand for gold-plated yachts, because from a dictator’s-eye standpoint that demand basically isn’t real, it’s a psychological triviality that happens to be backed with absurd resources.
I am honestly not sure how you navigate this Scylla-and-Charybdis setup in a world of severely limited resources. The best I’ve got is pretty much the same as the local conventional wisdom: “a largely unregulated market with colossal jackboot-enforced levels of wealth redistribution.” But, at the very least, I always get a bit antsy when I find myself agreeing with the conventional wisdom.
Multiple people have replied to this with good points including me so why are people still reblogging this clearly false point. Again, luxury goods are 1/79 of global GDP. The world where the ultra rich exist and can spend huge amounts of money on gold-plated yachts is real, and they mostly don’t.
“Gold-plated yachts” is serving as a synecdoche here. If you prefer, sub in “bidding up the price of real estate in the most desirable cities” or “allowing education and health costs to rise to stratospheric levels” or “building pointless corporate sub-empires.”
the only thing i know about this (and i’m not looking up to see if this is misremembered, remembered correctly as a fable, or a thing that actually somehow happeend, because i’m not going to give up the one thing i got here) is that the king gathered jewish, christian, and islamic scholars together and officially converted the country to whoever had the best arguments, which is pretty cool, again at least as a myth
but wait! i guess that’s not super controversial. okay here’s an vaguely related controversial opinion: as far as I can tell, almost nobody has been intellectually convinced of traditional polytheism of any sort; they didn’t really try to convince each other, once intellectuals started discussing the topic the monotheists almost always won out even prior to seizing state power
there are multiple independent lines of thought where attempts to systematize pagan religion led in a monotheist direction, and as best i can tell all modern neopagans are just doing it for the aesthetics, or at most as an aesthetic gloss on their being intellectually convinced of “some kind of weird thing that’s hard to define but would be inappropriate to aesthetically dress up in the kind of monotheism i was exposed to.” i guess there’s julian the apostate but he seems to be in violation of a clear trendline, and there are probably ways in which terms like “pagan” are not super useful but it seems the same claims translated into more sophisticated langauge will still be correct. ofc if i’m wrong here i’d love to be pointed to sources that point out how
@multiheaded1793 suggested i ask @anaisnein re: the intellectual foundations of /arguemnts for neopaganism, and i super respect both of them so i remain very curious!
The Infamous Brad is an intellectually-committed Greek pagan reconstructionist. As far as I can tell he believes in the historical existence of his deities, like for serious.
– which I am not reblogging, because I’m quite sure that no one would benefit from my thoughts being incorporated into that thread –
– and with the explicit proviso that this is just vague emotional from-the-gut what-feels-right talk, not any kind of argument for any cohesive position on anything –
– is it just me, or is there something really creepy and wrong about the idea that someone might find valuable soul-affirming “closure” in an act of punishment undertaken by the administrative state?
Leaving aside any abstract question of whether vengefulness is good, bad, potentially-justified, whatever: if you have a need for vengeance, and you’re willing to stand by it, go take vengeance. Yourself. Like a man, as they say, even if you’re not in fact a man, because that’s not even slightly the relevant part.
Or don’t, because you value the rule of law and you have wise concerns about the merits and the consequences of vigilante justice. Then you live with the outcome that society deems best, because that’s the most important thing. That works too.
But there’s something very childish, very whiny and entitled, about expecting the Authorities to salve the wounds of your heart. Why the hell should that be their job? What could possibly make them qualified to do it? How could that mandate not warp their universal priorities beyond recognition?
And that’s not even the worst of it, or so says my gut. The worst of it is the idea that – to call on @bambamramfan‘s Lacanian vocabulary for a moment – you accept the administrators as a legitimate mouthpiece for the Big Other. That you believe in your soul that an administrative state decision can actually communicate anything about whether or not the offense really was serious, or about whether some important abstract entity like Society or God regards it as such. Your soul should really not give a shit what the administrative state thinks about anything. The administrative state can’t possibly be worthy of that.
What? The government is supposed to do justice. It makes sense to want it to actually do justice.
people want that kind of affirmation from /society/, and that ‘do it
yourself’ and ‘ignore it’ both fail to offer that. in a democratic
country the govt gets a lot of its emotional+moral weight from its claim
to be the voice of society on law and order.
I understand, abstractly, that people want these things. I do not, in my heart, understand why. The fact that people think that these things are achievable, even in theory, strikes me as profoundly and unsettlingly wrong – like a Zalgo-text glitch in the workings of the mind, or something.
The government can’t possibly “do justice.” It doesn’t have any of the relevant information. It doesn’t have the slightest clue who you are, what matters to you, what kind of injury was done to your spirit and your story, what makes the offense so inappropriate and so heinous. At best it can reduce you to a one-dimensional bureaucratic caricature, and the crime to another one-dimensional bureaucratic caricature, and make some pronouncements about the relationship of those things that will have no real reflection on the actual meaningful facts of the case (which are certain to be wholly individual and mostly psychological or spiritual).
The government can make things better, in a broad-brush social-policy kind of way. It can provide good incentives, and deterrences, and useful restitutions, and whatnot. But there won’t be any justice in it, not a shred, except maybe by sheerest accident.
As for people wanting “that kind of affirmation from society”…“society” doesn’t exist in the relevant sense, it doesn’t have a mind to conceive or a heart to condemn. There are a bunch of people, who will presumably have a bunch of varied opinions as people do, and even if you particularly care what they think – which you shouldn’t, unless you know them personally or something, that way lies social-media-style madness – you really shouldn’t care what some random jury thinks, or something.
I don’t understand why anyone believes the government’s claim to represent society on matters of moral import. Even in a democracy. How could it possibly? How much does government policy reflect the desires of anyone you know, on anything?
Sigh. I gather that I’m some kind of outlier on this, or something. But it all seems so weird.
– which I am not reblogging, because I’m quite sure that no one would benefit from my thoughts being incorporated into that thread –
– and with the explicit proviso that this is just vague emotional from-the-gut what-feels-right talk, not any kind of argument for any cohesive position on anything –
– is it just me, or is there something really creepy and wrong about the idea that someone might find valuable soul-affirming “closure” in an act of punishment undertaken by the administrative state?
Leaving aside any abstract question of whether vengefulness is good, bad, potentially-justified, whatever: if you have a need for vengeance, and you’re willing to stand by it, go take vengeance. Yourself. Like a man, as they say, even if you’re not in fact a man, because that’s not even slightly the relevant part.
Or don’t, because you value the rule of law and you have wise concerns about the merits and the consequences of vigilante justice. Then you live with the outcome that society deems best, because that’s the most important thing. That works too.
But there’s something very childish, very whiny and entitled, about expecting the Authorities to salve the wounds of your heart. Why the hell should that be their job? What could possibly make them qualified to do it? How could that mandate not warp their universal priorities beyond recognition?
And that’s not even the worst of it, or so says my gut. The worst of it is the idea that – to call on @bambamramfan‘s Lacanian vocabulary for a moment – you accept the administrators as a legitimate mouthpiece for the Big Other. That you believe in your soul that an administrative state decision can actually communicate anything about whether or not the offense really was serious, or about whether some important abstract entity like Society or God regards it as such. Your soul should really not give a shit what the administrative state thinks about anything. The administrative state can’t possibly be worthy of that.
