July 2018

argumate:

A society is high-trust if citizens’ and organizations’ behavior towards each other is predictable. In such a society, actors follow broadly understood norms of behavior, supported by the rule of law. This is fundamental to the accumulation of social capital and economic growth.

Citizens in a low-trust society are challenged by divergent or opaque behavioral norms. This makes behavior of others unpredictable, impairing social capital and economic activity. These societies may experience high levels of corruption and inequality.

please remember that “high-trust” does not mean “trad”.

I…don’t think these definitions work.

You can have a low-trust society that’s extremely predictable if the predictable thing is untrustworthiness.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s how all the archetypical examples work.  If it’s 100% always true that people care only about their kinfolk, and always treat everyone else as either a victim to be exploited or a threat to be managed, then you have zero cooperation and zero trust – and perfect reliability. 

@theunitofcaring says:

People internalize that the only form of valuable contribution to society is to work a job that pays enough money to meet all their needs.

Maybe that’s true, at least in America.  We are kind of obsessed with money, and employment, and logistical self-sufficiency.

So let me add my voice to the chorus saying: that is a giant pile of horseshit, it has approximately zero correlation with any worthwhile concept of “value” or “contribution.”

And I say this for reasons that are pretty different from, say, @theunitofcaring‘s reasons.

Look – I’m not going to try to sell you on the line that all lives are equally worthwhile, or even that all lives are worthwhile at all.  Nor am I going to try to sell you on the Virtues of Small Pleasures and Simple Moments, or anything like that.  You’re allowed to set your own standards, and there are often good reasons to set them high.  But even if you have a very demanding, rigorous standard for “worthwhile life,” why in God’s name would it have anything to do with whether you can make a living in this hellpit society of ours? 

There are a lot of brilliant scholars out there who can’t get a job because, for whatever reason, they can’t quite fit into the tiny hypercompetitive perverse-incentives-out-the-wazoo world of academia.  There are a lot of genius artists who make no money from their art because its appeal is too narrow or too rarefied, and who make no money from anything else because they’re too busy making art.  There are a lot of excellent parents who are surviving on food stamps and hope because being a parent doesn’t pay anything no matter how good at it you are. 

There are a lot of people who are too fragile, too easily worn down, too screwed-up-in-the-head to be remotely employable by anyone – but who, in their one functional hour per day, create works that are enough to justify God’s ways to man. 

And, on the flipside, there are a lot of people who are paid quite a lot of money to do things that actively detract from the amount of good that exists in the universe.  Capitalism has a lot of virtues, but (at the very very least) there’s nothing inherently moral about its workings except in the most simplified models, and the distance between those models and reality is large. 

Being a financial burden on someone else sucks.  If you like, it’s a tick mark on the wrong side of the value ledger.  But let me say: if I were going to rank people by the abstract value of their lives, “are you making enough money to support yourself?” would be so useless a question on its own merits that I wouldn’t even ask it. 

Sigh.  The dynamic does not work the way that many people think it does.

In a culturally-mixed environment, confidently believing that you represent an overwhelming ideological majority…or, at least, acting like you represent an overwhelming ideological majority, which usually amounts to the same thing…is kind of a superpower. 

Many people are very happy to talk about potentially-charged subjects with their trusted allies.  Many fewer people are happy to talk about potentially-charged subjects with those who disagree with them.  And even if you’re the sort of bellicose person who’s happy to do that second thing, you probably want to build up to it; you want to do it when you have a lot of energy and mental clarity, when all your arguments are lined up in your head, etc.  This isn’t a factional trait, it applies to most of everyone. 

If you think that everyone around you is probably an ally, you’re likely to go ahead and start blithely talking about those potentially-charged subjects.  Your actual allies will happily talk back.  Everyone else will probably get quiet, not wanting to have the kind of discussion that’s actually a conflict.

This doesn’t need to iterate that many times before you’ve established a tacit-but-clear norm of “these people are allowed to say their piece in this space, but those people definitely have to shut up and suppress their thoughts.”  And it was accomplished without intentional action from anyone, without anyone understanding what happened. 

Hell, this works even if the talkers are very much in the minority with regard to their opinions, so long as they’re too dense to realize it. 

So I play this mobile game.  It’s a “gacha” (gachapon) game; by means of a lottery-style mechanic, you acquire characters to serve in your stable of magical fighters, as though they were Pokemon or something. 

There’s one particular character whom I like a lot, who’s reasonably popular with the fanbase and who plays an important role in the plot.  I expected, as many people did, that at some point he was going to become acquirable through the gacha.  Instead, at a critical plot juncture, he died.  The manner of his death is complicated, but it essentially amounts to the game jumping up and down and yelling, “THIS IS A REAL SACRIFICE, NO BACKSIES, HE IS GONE FOREVER, YOU SHOULD FEEL VERY VERY SAD.” 

And it’s funny – I find myself really wanting the game to bring him back.  I want his sacrifice to be cheapened, I want the permanence of death to be made narratively meaningless, so that I can roll him in the gacha and have him on my team of dudes. 

Which feels a little strange.  This is not normally how I feel about death in media, as you can probably tell from the kind of language I used in the preceding paragraph. 

Maybe this is me losing hold of my artistic integrity, or something.  But I’m not the artist here, I’m the audience, and honestly there’s something that seems very right about this feeling.  A character died, and I’m not looking at it from a critical distance, nodding sagely and noting that it’s all very meaningful and dramatically-appropriate.  I want him back.  This is much closer to how death feels in the real world. 

It is, I suppose, a testament to the ways that the structures of different artistic media – even structural components that seem entirely commercial, or technical, rather than artistic in their origin – can be exploited for remarkable effects.

A book, or a movie, or even a normal-type video game, is fundamentally timeless in some important way.  The work is what it is, and it’s always there.  Aerith dies at the end of Disc I, but it’s more truthful to say that Aerith will be alive until the end of time.  We have perfect access to her essence and her narrative.  We can go back and play Disc I whenever we want.  Writing Aerith fanfic, or getting dolled up in Aerith cosplay, doesn’t feel any less meaningful because she’s dead; she’s already been written into the Akashic Wikipedia.  And while it’s true that she could have done other things within the FFVII plot had she survived, there’s a clear sense in which she died “at the right time,” her story was given meaning by the circumstances of her death, etc.

But this stupid mobile game advances with time, and has random events constantly cropping up.  The dead guy isn’t there to engage with them.  That’s a real loss.  And it’s especially a loss because the game has a “made permanently available for narrative communion” status (having the character in your stable), and this guy is excluded from it, so…it’s a tragic loss of potential, or so it seems. 

thathopeyetlives:

silver-and-ivory:

thathopeyetlives:

freuds-cokedealer:

““Anti-semitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because anti-semitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have”

— Moishe Postone

I… Don’t get what this means entirely.

What part of it are you unsure about?

- what’s seemingly emacipatory about anti-semitism?

- is that even attractive to the Left?

- anti-semitism has been around a lot longer than capitalism.

- most recent left wing anti-semitism has consisted of either 1. Stanning bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists and calling any Jew who worries about this a Zionist Imperialist, 2. Purity-testing Jews to require them to be anti-zionist, and 3. Treating Jewish solidarity as hostile because it isn’t controlled by the Woke like black / gay / etc solidarity is. So I’m not really seeing the quasi-liberatory side.

The uncharitable explanation: For “emancipatory,” read “leftist.” 

The more-reasonable explanation: Most forms of racism and ethnic hatred center on the vilification of an “other” who is depicted as a lower life form – lazy, stupid, incompetent, threatening only in its numbers and its capacity for violence.  Spending all your time dwelling on your hatred of rats is demeaning and poisonous to the soul, even completely leaving aside the part where the “rats” are actually people.  Antisemitism, as it is commonly practiced, involves vilifying a very different kind of “other.”  Jews are portrayed as sinister, canny, deceptive, manipulative masterminds of great power.  There is something ennobling about being the hero who faces off against such a villain, and so antisemitism possesses an intellectual draw that other forms of racism and ethnic hatred lack.  

The thing about episodic serial media is that it can establish the myth in some episodes (probably most of them) and then explore the myth in others (probably the best-known and best-beloved ones).  Knightfall and The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth are all super great, but they wouldn’t work if we didn’t already have a very clear understanding of Batman, and we have a very clear understanding of Batman because there have been one hojillion comics and TV episodes in which he’s doing the Basic Batman Shtick. 

If you’re trying to reboot the work in compressed form, you can’t do this. 

This creates a hideous dilemma: people will want your Very Most Iconic plotlines and characters and so forth, but odds are those things are iconic precisely because they do unusual things to the status quo, and you haven’t actually set up the status quo yet.  Superman breaking his no-killing rule means something very different if we haven’t gone through hundreds of issues of him never ever doing that.  Irene Adler outwitting Sherlock Holmes means something very different if we don’t have a cushion of three dozen stories in which no one can ever outwit Sherlock Holmes. 

thathopeyetlives:

balioc:

One other thing –

(– which I really should have mentioned before, but it didn’t quite click for me until a friend raised the issue –)

– look.  Universal schooling serves a number of purposes, some of which conflict with each other, some of which are best served using different methodologies.  One of these purposes is social acculturation, which is the thing that certain sorts of people like to refer to as “indoctrination.” 

Or, in other words: these are the norms, rules, and values of mainstream society within the civilization that is running the school system. 

Up to a point, I think that this is an important and valuable function, and furthermore I think that mandatory universal schooling is actually a pretty good way to achieve that function.  I’ll go so far as to say that schooling for this specific purpose (as opposed to schooling for the development of academic skills, etc.) should not be evadeable through private schooling or homeschooling or what-have-you.  Think of it, if you like, as the information-distribution mechanism of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Archipelago.  A lot of kids are raised in cultures that are super bad for them, one way or another, and a lot of people are inclined to try and hold their cultures together through a regime of parochial ignorance; it’s actually very important to ensure that everyone gets to hear “whatever life looks like for you, you can always run away to Normieland and participate in Normie Culture, which is X and Y and Z.”  Classes aren’t necessarily the best imaginable way to do this, but they’re a lot better than e.g. rumspringa. 

[Ideally there would be cultural education for a variety of available social alternatives, but this is and-a-pony-while-we’re-at-it thinking.] 

Note that I say this as someone who expects to be raising at least one child, someday, with some fairly out-of-the-mainstream ideas. 

BUT

There is a big, big, big difference between “understanding a suite of values” and “professing a suite of values.”  

Demanding that a student be able to sandbox-model normie culture is totally reasonable.

But if a mandatory universal school system is making its students sign off on “normie culture [or any other culture] is Right and Good” in order to pass their classes, that is monstrous, it is an affront both to my ethics and to basic American constitutional ethics, and I strongly support efforts to change that particular bit of educational policy. 

I actually proposed an “interview” process that’s meant to accomplish this.

It was designed specifically for minimum impact against anything other than serious isolation, and I agree that actual isolation isn’t good.

And yet…

What civilization is this, dripping with the slimy issue of its sins? Why do we look to the East, to Poland, Russia, Israel?

…we don’t?

I’m sorry, I can’t parse this at all.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

In any practical context, metaethics doesn’t matter.  All the major standard metaethical systems (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) cash out in pretty much the same ways.  Object-level moral differences between one person and another are much likelier to spring from questions like “what are your guiding rules?” or “what are the factors in your calculus?” or “which virtues do you most favor?” than from metaethical differences.  It’s impossible for anyone to apply any of those systems purely without a heavy (often-unacknowledged) admixture of the other two, due to the limitations of human hardware.  Hell, each of those systems can sandbox and encompass the other two with no difficulty. 

…it’s telling that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the self-appointed high priest of consequentialism, write a Manual of Morality that consists largely of (a) important rules to follow and (b) important virtues to cultivate. 

Which is all to say: please stop using metaethics as a basis for tribalist identitarianism.  It really doesn’t make any sense.

I sympathize with the last line, but this has some problems.

There’s a stark gap between “metaethics doesn’t matter” and “by and large most people don’t have different metaethics” (and between that and “… most groups don’t have different metaethics.”) 

If you take the model (intuitive to begin with, but greatly expanded by Scott today) that most people start from vague practical intuitions, and then backsolve for terminal values behind them, and then make future decisions based on those frankly made up terminal values, then it’s easy to see that they do the same for metaethics too. And just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it’s not very real to them. Someone can just have a life path that led them to fundamentally feel “deontology is the way to make decisions” and they really will fight to the death for that.

On a group level, this usually doesn’t get discussed and all of the group’s morality becomes some vague hodge-podge of things that sound good to everyone, so you can sometimes get very surprising splits in otherwise similar tribal members about whether their foundational virtue was say, compassion or justice. Splits that it becomes nigh impossible to move either person off of. I can think of no way in which this doesn’t matter.

And even though on the group level it’s fuzzier, because everything on the group level is fuzzier, it’s not hard to say “the stories that form the core of the culture of this tribe have a certain metaethical consistency, which is at odds with the stories that form the core of the culture of that tribe.” Now you can always, always point out individual exceptions to that sort of folk and myth sociology, but what of it. We either think it’s meaningful to aggregate those sorts of cultural traditions across people, or we don’t, and metaethics isn’t particularly weaker to generalize about than say, “what sort of man feminists want.”

***

(You can take the Marxist route and say “all ideologies are just off springs of social pressure and material interests” which might even be true, but is fairly useless once those belief systems have been formed, and people will (sometimes) very clearly violate social pressure and material interests to stay loyal to the belief system they made up to justify the prior.)

It is very true that different people have importantly different moral intuitions and moral practices, but this is – in theory, and mostly in practice – totally orthogonal to any consideration of metaethics.  Compassion versus justice is not a metaethical issue, it’s a virtue-prioritization issue within virtue ethics.  “I care about small hard-to-track benefits that accrue to people far away” is not a consequentialist position, it’s an object-level position; and, indeed, many of the people who espouse it do so on the grounds that thinking in such a way is virtuous.  You can get to any single position through the right deontic rules or the right consequentialist values or the right favored virtues. 

C v J was just an example. I don’t see purely metaethical considerations being any different.

I have of late taken a soft deontological position. Consequentialism suffers from our inability to predict a chaotic universe, and it’s important to do things that you think are good in of themselves, and not based on distant benefits. You may call this “a shorthand and practical limitation on consequentialism”, but as actually practiced it really feels like a metaethical foundation.

When I hear people say “deterrence” my skin crawls. You don’t know shit about the effects of locking up that kid for 5 years on the broader incidence of hate crimes. I am filled with passionate loathing for consequentialist thinking that dismisses immediate harms for extremely hazy and unpredictable future results, loathing I can rarely express in polite society. I don’t express it because I don’t think someone can really be convinced without getting to my most fundamental beliefs (everything you trust is unreliable and chaotic.)

That certainly feels like a metaethical difference from my interlocutor, and is an important part of predicting me. 

Similarly, I think many people (both in Southern honor culture, and modern progressive culture) have a system of thinking and moral action that looks a lot more like virtue ethics than like consequentialism (even if they would vary in how they explain it.)

“Well, if we put together a coalition to run this unpleasant potentially-dangerous person out of town on a rail, the concrete immediate easily-predictable outcome is that…the unpleasant potentially-dangerous person won’t be around anymore.  Which sounds great.  Sure, there might be some kind of fuzzy second- or third-order effect with consequences for local norms, but – that sounds like something we can’t actually understand, in an unreliable and chaotic universe.” 

Also, once upon a time we had a conversation about keeping congressmen’s kids out of jail for drug use.

I suppose I can’t know for sure how your thinking looks from the inside, but I would be very surprised if you actually hewed to this alleged deontic principle in a consistent way.

bambamramfan:

balioc:

In any practical context, metaethics doesn’t matter.  All the major standard metaethical systems (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) cash out in pretty much the same ways.  Object-level moral differences between one person and another are much likelier to spring from questions like “what are your guiding rules?” or “what are the factors in your calculus?” or “which virtues do you most favor?” than from metaethical differences.  It’s impossible for anyone to apply any of those systems purely without a heavy (often-unacknowledged) admixture of the other two, due to the limitations of human hardware.  Hell, each of those systems can sandbox and encompass the other two with no difficulty. 

…it’s telling that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the self-appointed high priest of consequentialism, write a Manual of Morality that consists largely of (a) important rules to follow and (b) important virtues to cultivate. 

Which is all to say: please stop using metaethics as a basis for tribalist identitarianism.  It really doesn’t make any sense.

I sympathize with the last line, but this has some problems.

There’s a stark gap between “metaethics doesn’t matter” and “by and large most people don’t have different metaethics” (and between that and “… most groups don’t have different metaethics.”) 

If you take the model (intuitive to begin with, but greatly expanded by Scott today) that most people start from vague practical intuitions, and then backsolve for terminal values behind them, and then make future decisions based on those frankly made up terminal values, then it’s easy to see that they do the same for metaethics too. And just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it’s not very real to them. Someone can just have a life path that led them to fundamentally feel “deontology is the way to make decisions” and they really will fight to the death for that.

On a group level, this usually doesn’t get discussed and all of the group’s morality becomes some vague hodge-podge of things that sound good to everyone, so you can sometimes get very surprising splits in otherwise similar tribal members about whether their foundational virtue was say, compassion or justice. Splits that it becomes nigh impossible to move either person off of. I can think of no way in which this doesn’t matter.

And even though on the group level it’s fuzzier, because everything on the group level is fuzzier, it’s not hard to say “the stories that form the core of the culture of this tribe have a certain metaethical consistency, which is at odds with the stories that form the core of the culture of that tribe.” Now you can always, always point out individual exceptions to that sort of folk and myth sociology, but what of it. We either think it’s meaningful to aggregate those sorts of cultural traditions across people, or we don’t, and metaethics isn’t particularly weaker to generalize about than say, “what sort of man feminists want.”

***

(You can take the Marxist route and say “all ideologies are just off springs of social pressure and material interests” which might even be true, but is fairly useless once those belief systems have been formed, and people will (sometimes) very clearly violate social pressure and material interests to stay loyal to the belief system they made up to justify the prior.)

It is very true that different people have importantly different moral intuitions and moral practices, but this is – in theory, and mostly in practice – totally orthogonal to any consideration of metaethics.  Compassion versus justice is not a metaethical issue, it’s a virtue-prioritization issue within virtue ethics.  “I care about small hard-to-track benefits that accrue to people far away” is not a consequentialist position, it’s an object-level position; and, indeed, many of the people who espouse it do so on the grounds that thinking in such a way is virtuous.  You can get to any single position through the right deontic rules or the right consequentialist values or the right favored virtues. 

In any practical context, metaethics doesn’t matter.  All the major standard metaethical systems (consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics) cash out in pretty much the same ways.  Object-level moral differences between one person and another are much likelier to spring from questions like “what are your guiding rules?” or “what are the factors in your calculus?” or “which virtues do you most favor?” than from metaethical differences.  It’s impossible for anyone to apply any of those systems purely without a heavy (often-unacknowledged) admixture of the other two, due to the limitations of human hardware.  Hell, each of those systems can sandbox and encompass the other two with no difficulty. 

…it’s telling that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the self-appointed high priest of consequentialism, write a Manual of Morality that consists largely of (a) important rules to follow and (b) important virtues to cultivate. 

Which is all to say: please stop using metaethics as a basis for tribalist identitarianism.  It really doesn’t make any sense.

One other thing –

(– which I really should have mentioned before, but it didn’t quite click for me until a friend raised the issue –)

– look.  Universal schooling serves a number of purposes, some of which conflict with each other, some of which are best served using different methodologies.  One of these purposes is social acculturation, which is the thing that certain sorts of people like to refer to as “indoctrination.” 

Or, in other words: these are the norms, rules, and values of mainstream society within the civilization that is running the school system. 

Up to a point, I think that this is an important and valuable function, and furthermore I think that mandatory universal schooling is actually a pretty good way to achieve that function.  I’ll go so far as to say that schooling for this specific purpose (as opposed to schooling for the development of academic skills, etc.) should not be evadeable through private schooling or homeschooling or what-have-you.  Think of it, if you like, as the information-distribution mechanism of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Archipelago.  A lot of kids are raised in cultures that are super bad for them, one way or another, and a lot of people are inclined to try and hold their cultures together through a regime of parochial ignorance; it’s actually very important to ensure that everyone gets to hear “whatever life looks like for you, you can always run away to Normieland and participate in Normie Culture, which is X and Y and Z.”  Classes aren’t necessarily the best imaginable way to do this, but they’re a lot better than e.g. rumspringa. 

[Ideally there would be cultural education for a variety of available social alternatives, but this is and-a-pony-while-we’re-at-it thinking.] 

Note that I say this as someone who expects to be raising at least one child, someday, with some fairly out-of-the-mainstream ideas. 

BUT

There is a big, big, big difference between “understanding a suite of values” and “professing a suite of values.”  

Demanding that a student be able to sandbox-model normie culture is totally reasonable.

But if a mandatory universal school system is making its students sign off on “normie culture [or any other culture] is Right and Good” in order to pass their classes, that is monstrous, it is an affront both to my ethics and to basic American constitutional ethics, and I strongly support efforts to change that particular bit of educational policy. 

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.

Eh.  Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent.  The metaphor still holds.

Is there any such character they do like?

The one who comes to mind is Fury Road Max Rockatansky.  (Which, yes, ha ha irony given the title of the movie, but even so.) 

How can a character who was the protagonist of three movies be a character who keeps with the directive to never be a protagonist and never have the camera follow his viewpoint? If familiarity breeds contempt, why do they not feel contempt for him? Aren’t his ambitions important in the context of the movie? (I don’t remember, I saw it with a bunch of other people doing something else and wasn’t paying attention)

Also what shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate? Is it that he’s heterosexual? I can’t think of anything else. 

* I’m pretty sure the woke types who salivate over Fury Road have mostly never seen another Mad Max movie and don’t care to do so.  (It’s also true that Mad Max basically doesn’t have ambitions that carry over from one narrative to the next.)  In the thinkpieces etc. that I’ve seen, his MM:FR incarnation is usually described as “tough manly resourceful dude who shows up out of nowhere and decides to assist Furiosa and her posse-of-damsels simply because it’s the right thing to do.”

* “What shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate?” …le sigh, there’s a well with no bottom.

The whole thing is anime, so that’s a big strike against it right there.  The Senshi are wearing slightly-fetishized-or-at-least-slightly-fetishizable short-skirted outfits, so that’s another big strike.  Usagi doesn’t act even a little bit like a Strong Female Character, so we’re already deep in shit, everything about the show is toxic (except maybe through a hazy nostalgic veil of “I once watched this show about magical girl warriors and remember no details”).  And Tuxedo Mask gets hit with the horns effect as much as any other part of it.

But of course it’s worse than that.  In his first appearances, Tuxedo Mask, who is portrayed as “good at combat” and “confident,” swoops in and saves Sailor Moon, who at that point is portrayed as “incompetent” and “scared.”  This is a gross violation of every rule of Acceptable Woke Action Writing.  It is (more or less) understood that, in real life, women are often going to be less physically-action-capable and that this matters – hence all the arguments about women being perpetually in fear of their physical safety, etc. – but in Fun Fiction you’re not allowed to portray this, because the desirable fantasy is the Badass Woman. 

Even more importantly, Usagi and Mamoru slowly build up to their actual fantasy/destiny of togetherness, which is: Ye Olde Heteronormative Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale with gender roles out the wazoo.  Endymion/Tuxedo Mask/Mamoru looks and talks and even acts like your classic romance Prince, strong and dashing and protective…and in the context of that relationship, Usagi looks and talks and acts like a Princess, blushing and emotional and happy to be protected.  I’ll be honest, my memory of Sailor Moon is super sketchy and so I can’t point to details, but at the very least the signifiers are there: the prince outfit, the long white dress, the couple pose, the “destined to love each other” motif, the metaphysically gendered nature of it all.  And the woke coalition hates, hates, hates the Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale.

Almost all of this is why they would hate the whole show, or Usagi as well as Mamoru. From all the Sailor Moon Crystal reviews and clickbait I find from feminist sites while trying to look for anything related to the franchise, this does not appear to be the case. Even when Usagi is taking up way too much attention and focus, the way they decry white men doing (the other four Inner Senshi spend like 6 minutes of season 1 of SMC fighting, and 21 minutes knocked out on the floor powerless and beseeching Usagi to fight on), they don’t identify Usagi as the problem or hate her for it. 

I think it’s way simpler. Hatred of white men is a status belief. They hold that belief for status. Those who let it infect their personality, hate white men and want them degraded, so when they ask for what makes a good white man, they give degrading answers, and when presented with that character, hate him because he is a white man and want him degraded. Those who do not let this status belief infect their personality give the answers they think Wokeness demands, because it is a status belief, but these answers have no correlation whatsoever to their preferences. 

To start with, it’s possible that our differing perceptions/interpretations here can be partly explained by “woke culture is no more a monolith than any other culture, and our central mental referents are different people with different favored talking points.”  But –

Hatred of white men is a status belief.

– rings false to me, at least as it would apply here.  I see where you’re getting this from, but…given that this cultural movement falls all over itself to gush about the wonderfulness of Captain America and Thor and Steven Universe (and Mad Max), “Tuxedo Mask is a white man” doesn’t seem like it gets you nearly far enough.

Other than Steven Universe, those guys express masculine traits that Wokeness loves but claims to despise. Tuxedo Mask has masculine traits that Wokeness despises but claims to love. Because it is a status belief, it is invoked when it is convenient. It is convenient to invoke the status belief against someone who you already hate because of his lack of masculinity. 

The people responding to the playwright in the article we are talking about, hate white men as a status belief. Because it is a status belief, when they report what they want, their reports are not accurate, and when presented with what they say they want, they react with hatred and revulsion. 

Other than Steven Universe, those guys express masculine traits that Wokeness loves but claims to despise. Tuxedo Mask has masculine traits that Wokeness despises but claims to love.

Unpack this?  I’m unable to see a way to make this work.  Is the claim that Tuxedo Mask is despised because he’s a loser?

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.

Eh.  Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent.  The metaphor still holds.

Is there any such character they do like?

The one who comes to mind is Fury Road Max Rockatansky.  (Which, yes, ha ha irony given the title of the movie, but even so.) 

How can a character who was the protagonist of three movies be a character who keeps with the directive to never be a protagonist and never have the camera follow his viewpoint? If familiarity breeds contempt, why do they not feel contempt for him? Aren’t his ambitions important in the context of the movie? (I don’t remember, I saw it with a bunch of other people doing something else and wasn’t paying attention)

Also what shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate? Is it that he’s heterosexual? I can’t think of anything else. 

* I’m pretty sure the woke types who salivate over Fury Road have mostly never seen another Mad Max movie and don’t care to do so.  (It’s also true that Mad Max basically doesn’t have ambitions that carry over from one narrative to the next.)  In the thinkpieces etc. that I’ve seen, his MM:FR incarnation is usually described as “tough manly resourceful dude who shows up out of nowhere and decides to assist Furiosa and her posse-of-damsels simply because it’s the right thing to do.”

* “What shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate?” …le sigh, there’s a well with no bottom.

The whole thing is anime, so that’s a big strike against it right there.  The Senshi are wearing slightly-fetishized-or-at-least-slightly-fetishizable short-skirted outfits, so that’s another big strike.  Usagi doesn’t act even a little bit like a Strong Female Character, so we’re already deep in shit, everything about the show is toxic (except maybe through a hazy nostalgic veil of “I once watched this show about magical girl warriors and remember no details”).  And Tuxedo Mask gets hit with the horns effect as much as any other part of it.

But of course it’s worse than that.  In his first appearances, Tuxedo Mask, who is portrayed as “good at combat” and “confident,” swoops in and saves Sailor Moon, who at that point is portrayed as “incompetent” and “scared.”  This is a gross violation of every rule of Acceptable Woke Action Writing.  It is (more or less) understood that, in real life, women are often going to be less physically-action-capable and that this matters – hence all the arguments about women being perpetually in fear of their physical safety, etc. – but in Fun Fiction you’re not allowed to portray this, because the desirable fantasy is the Badass Woman. 

Even more importantly, Usagi and Mamoru slowly build up to their actual fantasy/destiny of togetherness, which is: Ye Olde Heteronormative Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale with gender roles out the wazoo.  Endymion/Tuxedo Mask/Mamoru looks and talks and even acts like your classic romance Prince, strong and dashing and protective…and in the context of that relationship, Usagi looks and talks and acts like a Princess, blushing and emotional and happy to be protected.  I’ll be honest, my memory of Sailor Moon is super sketchy and so I can’t point to details, but at the very least the signifiers are there: the prince outfit, the long white dress, the couple pose, the “destined to love each other” motif, the metaphysically gendered nature of it all.  And the woke coalition hates, hates, hates the Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale.

Almost all of this is why they would hate the whole show, or Usagi as well as Mamoru. From all the Sailor Moon Crystal reviews and clickbait I find from feminist sites while trying to look for anything related to the franchise, this does not appear to be the case. Even when Usagi is taking up way too much attention and focus, the way they decry white men doing (the other four Inner Senshi spend like 6 minutes of season 1 of SMC fighting, and 21 minutes knocked out on the floor powerless and beseeching Usagi to fight on), they don’t identify Usagi as the problem or hate her for it. 

I think it’s way simpler. Hatred of white men is a status belief. They hold that belief for status. Those who let it infect their personality, hate white men and want them degraded, so when they ask for what makes a good white man, they give degrading answers, and when presented with that character, hate him because he is a white man and want him degraded. Those who do not let this status belief infect their personality give the answers they think Wokeness demands, because it is a status belief, but these answers have no correlation whatsoever to their preferences. 

To start with, it’s possible that our differing perceptions/interpretations here can be partly explained by “woke culture is no more a monolith than any other culture, and our central mental referents are different people with different favored talking points.”  But –

Hatred of white men is a status belief.

– rings false to me, at least as it would apply here.  I see where you’re getting this from, but…given that this cultural movement falls all over itself to gush about the wonderfulness of Captain America and Thor and Steven Universe (and Mad Max), “Tuxedo Mask is a white man” doesn’t seem like it gets you nearly far enough.

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.

Eh.  Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent.  The metaphor still holds.

Is there any such character they do like?

The one who comes to mind is Fury Road Max Rockatansky.  (Which, yes, ha ha irony given the title of the movie, but even so.) 

How can a character who was the protagonist of three movies be a character who keeps with the directive to never be a protagonist and never have the camera follow his viewpoint? If familiarity breeds contempt, why do they not feel contempt for him? Aren’t his ambitions important in the context of the movie? (I don’t remember, I saw it with a bunch of other people doing something else and wasn’t paying attention)

Also what shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate? Is it that he’s heterosexual? I can’t think of anything else. 

* I’m pretty sure the woke types who salivate over Fury Road have mostly never seen another Mad Max movie and don’t care to do so.  (It’s also true that Mad Max basically doesn’t have ambitions that carry over from one narrative to the next.)  In the thinkpieces etc. that I’ve seen, his MM:FR incarnation is usually described as “tough manly resourceful dude who shows up out of nowhere and decides to assist Furiosa and her posse-of-damsels simply because it’s the right thing to do.”

* “What shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate?” …le sigh, there’s a well with no bottom.

The whole thing is anime, so that’s a big strike against it right there.  The Senshi are wearing slightly-fetishized-or-at-least-slightly-fetishizable short-skirted outfits, so that’s another big strike.  Usagi doesn’t act even a little bit like a Strong Female Character, so we’re already deep in shit, everything about the show is toxic (except maybe through a hazy nostalgic veil of “I once watched this show about magical girl warriors and remember no details”).  And Tuxedo Mask gets hit with the horns effect as much as any other part of it.

But of course it’s worse than that.  In his first appearances, Tuxedo Mask, who is portrayed as “good at combat” and “confident,” swoops in and saves Sailor Moon, who at that point is portrayed as “incompetent” and “scared.”  This is a gross violation of every rule of Acceptable Woke Action Writing.  It is (more or less) understood that, in real life, women are often going to be less physically-action-capable and that this matters – hence all the arguments about women being perpetually in fear of their physical safety, etc. – but in Fun Fiction you’re not allowed to portray this, because the desirable fantasy is the Badass Woman. 

Even more importantly, Usagi and Mamoru slowly build up to their actual fantasy/destiny of togetherness, which is: Ye Olde Heteronormative Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale with gender roles out the wazoo.  Endymion/Tuxedo Mask/Mamoru looks and talks and even acts like your classic romance Prince, strong and dashing and protective…and in the context of that relationship, Usagi looks and talks and acts like a Princess, blushing and emotional and happy to be protected.  I’ll be honest, my memory of Sailor Moon is super sketchy and so I can’t point to details, but at the very least the signifiers are there: the prince outfit, the long white dress, the couple pose, the “destined to love each other” motif, the metaphysically gendered nature of it all.  And the woke coalition hates, hates, hates the Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale.

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.

Eh.  Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent.  The metaphor still holds.

Is there any such character they do like?

The one who comes to mind is Fury Road Max Rockatansky.  (Which, yes, ha ha irony given the title of the movie, but even so.) 

brazenautomaton:

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.

Eh.  Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent.  The metaphor still holds.

raggedjackscarlet:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”

But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”

- NYT

Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.

There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.

Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma

The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.

They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.

They wanted Tuxedo Mask.

But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”

And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.

You have seen behind the veil, sir.  Now the only question is: will you let the unearthly wonders that you have witnessed shatter your mind, or will you wield them as magic?

There’s something really important in this post, something with huge ramifications when abstracted into the general case, and there’s no way I’m going to be able even to start trying to unpack it now.  But in the specific case, it’s worth saying:

Once you’ve realized that what you really want in a man is Tuxedo Mask, there are basically two ways it can play out.

You can go through the endless cycle of mara in which you find someone who seems cool and mysterious and supportive and attractively competent, you grow closer and closer to him, eventually you can’t help noticing that he’s a real person with his own perspective and thus no longer Tuxedo Mask, you drop him like a hot potato, lather, rinse, repeat.

Or you figure out how to perceive your life so that it’s it’s like Sailor Moon.  It’s doable, especially if Mamoru understands the project and wants to help.

It turns out that the IRS has an “Identity Assurance Office.”

And, yes, when you think about it for a bit, it’s obvious what that actually has to be, but, y’know…

“If you are a single individual or head of household with taxable income in excess of $261,500, you are valid.”

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

fantasychica37:

another-normal-anomaly:

funereal-disease:

lookashiny:

lipstickchainsaw:

funereal-disease:

funereal-disease:

starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”

to expound on this (it’s okay to reblog the expanded version):

I like living in a female body. I like my sexed characteristics. I like presenting femininely. I like being referred to as “she”. I have always been uncomplicatedly cis by pretty much every measure, and I don’t think that has changed. What’s changed, I think, is what all those things *mean* to the world around me.

“It doesn’t feel good when people say ‘everyone’ and they don’t mean you.” I heard that the other day, and I haven’t been able to let it go. It crystallizes what I’ve been feeling over the past year: that autistic women, or at least high-systemizing-low-empathizing women, are being increasingly defined out of womanhood itself. I’m seeing a return to frankly disturbing essentialism among women of my generation. It’s of a piece with that “feminist astrology” post I wrote a while back, but it’s more than that. It’s a creeping woo-ishness in the gender discourse that’s beginning to make me nauseous.

It seems, to my admittedly untrained eye, that despite constant pretenses at breaking down the gender binary, millennial and Gen Z women are not just enforcing it – they’re widening the gulf. The general mood is that there are things women know that men just can’t understand or even truly empathize with. On the more overly woo-ish end of things, there’s astrology and “feminine energy” and literal goddess worship. But the essentialized dichotomy shows up in more mainstream media, too. It underlies every thinkpiece on “how women feel” about X, Y, or Z. It’s there when women of my cohort make fun of STEMlords and “well actually"s and hyperlogical white dudes and expect me to laugh along with it. It’s not even subtle in posts like “women’s atheism is fundamentally different from men’s” and “women don’t say what they mean and that’s okay”. It’s present in every piece of emotional manipulation disguised as activism that women, being The Nurturing Ones, are supposed to fall for.

Obviously the stereotype itself is nothing new – what’s new is the enthusiasm with which my generation has seemingly decided to lean into it. I fear that by the time we’re fully in control of the media and the public narrative, women like me might be defined out of womanhood altogether. And I fear that responses to this concern will run along the lines of “it’s okay, just admit you’re non-binary”. I’m *not* non-binary! You fucks just moved the goalposts! Narrowing what counts as “woman” isn’t okay just because claiming non-binary genders is becoming more of an option. It’s still defining people out against their will.

tl;dr my gender is “too femme to count as male but too high-systemizing for The Sisterhood”

This may be recency bias on my end, but goddamn, today’s gender essentialism makes everything surrounding the concept of gender so very confusing. The worst part is that it’s gender essentialism dressed up as ‘breaking down the gender binary’. It’s basically just a repackaging of traditional gender norms with the labels on what’s good and what’s bad switched around.

But not quite. A lot of the vitriol directed at what they think is typically male is just slagging on autistic people. When you tell them this, they’ll look at you funny and say that of course they don’t hate autistic people, they’re not ableist!

But that’s because they don’t know what autism is, they don’t know what it actually looks like in the nitty-gritty, beyond the idealised image they have in their heads.

There’s a lot said about how autism is severely underdiagnosed in women because the behaviours that indicate autism are generally expected of women in society, yet I see a lot of these people stereotyping all men as having these autistic traits, while not realising they are autistic traits, and then unilaterally (or at least, without any concern for the scrupulous, which is to say, many autistic people) declaring all these traits to be bad and in need of changing.

And there’s just so much collateral damage in that approach! They’re hurting so many people that they don’t even mean to hurt and I just want to scream at them to stop doing that.

But then I’d just be aggressive, I guess.

A part of the gender thing on here, in particular, seems to be the repackaging of any action or feeling or concept related to gender not stereotypically on one side of the male/female dichotomy as non-binary. I am aware that there are non-binary people, but no every woman who presents as/likes sterotypically masculine things is non-binary and the same with men and femininity. It seems like, out of an effort to broaden the gender spectum, some people have been reinforcing gender essentialism, instead.

THIS. It’s not that non-binary identities aren’t real. It’s that some people are using them as yet another box instead of a reason to complicate the idea of boxes in the first place. 

Holy shit funereal, are you me? This is exactly my problem. I don’t mind having a female body and a feminine appearance and wearing feminine clothes and pretty jewelry and loving cats and horses, but when society tells me that I also have to be nurturing and spiritual and unstraightforward and only have female friends and live in fear of others’ aggression or else I am A Man, I get real tempted to say “Welp, guess I’m A Man now”.

On a related note, can someone explain to me and the people who do this what is gender if it’s not how you behave and it’s not your personality? Does anyone even know? Is it just a gut feeling people have?

My usual definition of ‘gender’ is ‘the archetypes people most strongly identify with, sorted into neat categories for ease of use’.   

King vs. Queen, knight vs. damsel, lord vs. lady, wizard vs. witch. Or for more modern examples: Batman vs. Batgirl. Lara Croft vs. Indiana Jones.  Xena vs. Hercules. He-Man vs. She-Ra. Butch vs. femme vs. futch. 

Everyone vibes with some kind of archetype, some outside influence they use to define the kind of person they are. It can be an ideology, an aesthetic, a fashion style, a fictional character, a career, whatever. But everyone has a role they’d like to play, and everyone defines themself accordingly. 

And because of the way our society works, because our society is full of roles formed by archaic divisions of labour based on AFAB people bearing children, that hypertrophied into a huge morass of traditions and rules, these archetypes tend to be split into two groups: ‘male’ and ‘female’. Certain qualities- for example, “this person has a penis”, “this person is aggressive”, “this person has long hair and breasts”, or “this person is nurturing” - determine which box which archetype goes in. 

If a person vibes with more archetypes labeled ‘male’ than ‘female’- if they’d like to play the roles traditionally defined as masculine, have the body parts traditionally defined as such, be seen as such by others- they’re likely to define themselves as ‘male’ or ‘masculine’; the reverse is also true. It’s not 100%, of course; there are plenty of people who strongly identify with archetypes of one gender who see themselves as a different gender. But they tend to call themselves things like “gender non-conforming” or “butch/femme” - which are themselves archetypes you could sort into one box or the other; ‘drag queen’ and ‘lesbian lumberjack’ are gendered archetypes, after all. 

I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the most popular Tumblr-nonbinary jokes goes something like this: 

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m a pirate.” 

“But what’s in your pants?”

“Booty!”

(With many many other variants of this joke based on different occupations: ‘scientist’ seems to be a popular one, and I don’t think that’s an accident.)

 NB people don’t (…seem to) vibe with any of the ‘traditionally’ gendered archetypes. They don’t fit into any roles in any of the boxes. So they find archetypes that exist outside those boxes to build themselves around, whether it’s archetypes that are traditionally androgynous (like elves or shapeshifters), archetypes that are too recent to have the full weight of Traditional Gender Roles behind them (like ‘programmer’, especially back in the day), or archetypes that don’t have anything to do with humanity (different sorts of animal, aliens or robots). 

There are NB people who do vibe with roles within the traditional gender boxes, but they tend to call themselves things like “demi[gender]” or “nonbinary [gender]”. Again- not a one-to-one perfect matchy thing; there are plenty of NB people who do vibe with specific roles inside the gender boxes. But in general, it seems to correlate. 

In this day and age, gender is less about what you do in society and is more a form of self-definition, or even a form of self-expression. It’s the way you want people to see and react to you. It’s the way you want to see and react to yourself. And because people need stories, a lot of the time, they build their self-definitions as a story, made out of stories and ideas that already exist. So, your gender is a combination of all those stories and archetypes that feel Like You. 

Really well said, Earl. Jumping off that, I’ll point out that autistic people seem likelier than NTs to be drawn to nonhuman archetypes (animals, aliens, robots, etc). So it’s not just that our archetypes are nongendered – it’s that the entire concept of human gender renders our identities incoherent. You can’t be a woman if you’re not even a person.

OK, now I’m confused.  This narrative/archetype-centric model of gender conflicts strongly with my own native thoughts on the subject, but more importantly, as far as I can tell it conflicts strongly with all the points you were making earlier in your original post.  

It’s possible to have “cross-gendered” stories and archetypes, which are specifically about existing as a member of one particular gender while partaking heavily of tropes associated with the other gender.  “Lady knight,” “spunky adventuresome princess who hates embroidery and loves swordplay” (which maybe just collapses to “tomboy”), “nurturing heart-of-the-team house-dad.”  These are very popular; lots of people identify with them heavily.  Which suggests that there is something in play other than “‘knight’ is a boy archetype, ‘princess’ is a girl archetype, you figure out which you are by looking at your favorite archetypes.” 

…which seems to be exactly the argument you were advancing earlier.  “You don’t get to tell me that I’m not a woman just because I don’t want to play princess; my femaleness inheres elsewhere.” 

It’s a lot more consonant with my own intuitions, and (as far as I can tell) with the personal narratives provided by trans people and others who have had to Face Down Exactly What Gender Really Is, to say something like –

It’s an ineffable sense of who-you-are, which is largely detached from abstract cultural concepts.  It’s probably rooted in this biological physiological actually-mostly-a-binary that defines our species, such that most people can’t escape their inherent sense of male-ness or female-ness regardless of their preferred roles and archetypes, and a few people have dysphoria due to wonky wiring or something.  It is shaped and constructed and refined by countless cultural stories about What a Man Is or What a Woman Is, and people lean into stories those to a greater or a lesser extent depending on their personalities, but it’s actually really hard to make the jump from “I like Gender X stories” to “I belong to Gender X.” 

autistic people seem likelier than NTs to be drawn to nonhuman archetypes (animals, aliens, robots, etc). So it’s not just that our archetypes are nongendered – it’s that the entire concept of human gender renders our identities incoherent. You can’t be a woman if you’re not even a person.

I know some people who wouldn’t agree.  Animals, aliens, robots., etc., all of them quite gendered.

It seems like an attempt at an asinine Internet pwn, I know, but this is actually an important point vis-a-vis identity construction; people can and will gender things. They will say “the robot is definitely a boy, never mind that it doesn’t necessarily make any sense, because I identify with robots and also I’m a boy.”  Which means that “the thing didn’t start off gendered” is not serving as an obstacle to people both identifying with it and maintaining a strong gender-sense.

A friend pointed out, correctly, that I probably shouldn’t use “cartoon ponies” as  metonymy for “weird sexual fixations that you can acquire via internet culture.”  It’s punchy and cute, but…in fact the MLP fandom, even the sexual side of it, is almost entirely non-paraphilic.  And I knew that.  “We like these particular fictional characters and they feature in our fantasies” is not weird internet sex shit, it’s bog-standard sex shit, and as far as I can tell the actual pony-ness is mostly elided or outright eliminated for these purposes. 

Mea culpa.  The pony fans are dumped on quite enough by the world. 

If you want what’s changed it’s probably that people discuss them more

This is true, but it’s more important than it sounds – the “discussion” (which also includes fanfic, fanart, etc.) is part of a feedback cycle. 

If you’re St. Teresa, you can have lots of fun sexually obsessing over Christ.  But this actually requires a lot of imagination and a lot of focus, because the Christ fandom is not giving you a whole lot to work with in terms of inspiring material on that front.  And if you’re not in a rich household or a top-class monastery, with access to art and literature, it’s giving you pretty much nothing.   For your average horny teen, it’s probably a lot more rewarding just to go play grabass with the boy/girl next door. 

Whereas, now, there is a Library of Alexandria’s worth of immediately-accessible material to guide you through your journey towards a sexual fixation on cartoon  ponies.

cast homer out of the republic?    

That is to say: clamp down on storytelling, especially good storytelling, on the grounds that it will corrupt the morals of your society.

Just like Plato recommended.

discoursedrome:

Anyway about the state-funded Socially Responsible Porn Specifically for Teens thing: I’m in favour of it in the abstract but it’s a political non-starter virtually everyone at above the community level so it’s not something that is really worth worrying about.

I’m in favour of it because I’m a nefarious libertine, of course, but more generally because in addition to the fact that it’s hard to keep teens off porn, there’s the less appreciated issue that teen sexuality is sufficiently overwhelming that it tends to just adapt whatever’s on hand to serve the function of porn, which is why “people who want to have sex with cartoon horses” is an established archetype now, why there were all those Onceler askblogs roleplaying with one another in 2012, and so forth. This sort of thing often has multiple layers of indirection to make it seem less overtly sexual, but it’s not, so you have to decide how invested you are in generation after generation’s formative sexual period being based on “whatever media or social environments happen to be on hand”.

I mean, let’s be honest about what’s going on here: the sort of mostly-trad people who are really worked up about Socially Responsible Porn For Teens (or the looming threat of it) are also, already, very much opposed to the sort of cultural dynamic where horny teens become obsessed with cartoon horses or anime waifus or gay vampires or whatever.  I’m pretty sure that’s “degeneracy” in a nutshell.  And they will point out, correctly, that this is a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms – there have been horny teenagers as long as there have been humans, but (as far as I can tell) this kind of weird-from-the-outside-seeming fixation on the unreal is something that’s started cropping up only in the past few generations. 

Some of them, mostly the more idealistic/religious trad types, actually believe that with proper cultural programming you can channel teenage horniness into Pure and Approved dynamics.  Others are more realistic (and probably, e.g., have a better sense of how much impure and unapproved sexual stuff goes on amongst teenagers even in very traditional societies without the cushion of reliable birth control). 

But, really, the only actual relevant factors in this dynamic are:

1) To what extent are the actual lived social norms of your actual community, as exemplified by easily-available role models, capable of leading you to sexual fulfillment?

2) How good is the technology that you use for creating and disseminating stories that teenagers will find compelling? 

I’ve seen very few reasonable-sounding suggestions for how (1) could be achieved, in any significant measure, in a community larger than a Dunbar-sized tribe or a farming village.  I’ve seen no calls to cast Homer out of the Republic, and if anyone actually decided to go down that route, the rest of society would rightly react with horror and scorn. 

So, yup, “degeneracy” will keep marching on.   Reality will have to contend with an ever-stronger, ever-more-rewarding conceptual realm.  Which is all to the good, if you have any vision. 

This chart is…kind of amazing, in a “let’s go ahead and sum up the dichotomous worldview with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer” kind of way.  I actually do really appreciate anyone who just lays his theoretical schema right out there for analysis. 

Time to play a Fun Game!  For each row, is it the case that

a) The conceptualization basically makes sense, and Traditionalism is clearly better?

b) The conceptualization basically makes sense, and Modernism is clearly better?

c) The conceptualization basically makes sense, and both answers are so obviously terrible that the need for a new cultural paradigm is made manifest?

d) The conceptualization is some obvious bullshit?

Because it seems clear to me that you should be bubbling in answers in all of those four columns, multiple times each.

**********

Chart taken from this blog post. 

brazenautomaton:

machine-elf-paladin:

brazenautomaton:

machine-elf-paladin:

brazenautomaton:

brazenautomaton:

reincarnation is core to the elements of Sailor Moon, and vital for “I’m really secretly a princess of a magic kingdom but live in the real world!”

it’s also a huge source of problems as it’s used to spackle over characterization – Usagi is still Usagi Tsukino, normal person, for long after the other Inners become “I am so loyal to my mission to protect this person I’m going to die for her sake”, which is a huge contributor to them being burned up. they get all the characterization and knowledge they need from their past lives, and it makes them what Usagi needs, and they don’t approach things for their own reasons or by their own means.

you can’t do that in a movie because you can’t put that shit on the screen and you need them to be different. they can’t do things because reincarnation. it can’t be an answer but it could be a source of something

so in light of this: what does reincarnation mean? what is its thematic significance and how is the reality within the film built from it?

because like

the only villain who was there for and cares about the events of the silver millennium is Beryl and her henchpeople

everyone got reincarnated (you can say it was sailor saturn’ss doing this time, you know ahead of time)

and she has done a lot of work and effort to get all her memories back and has one hundred percent continuity of identity with Beryl of the past and all her old grudges and resentments

but then what does that mean? should knowledge of their past lives be something they fear?

With that framing, the easy answer is: reincarnation means forgiveness-slash-acceptance, a fresh start that nonetheless retains the lessons of the past. As opposed on one side to Beryl’s permanent grudges and inability to let go of what she has lost and on the other side to rootless isolation and those-who-forget-the-past-are-doomed-to-repeat-it. 

That can actually be part of the Senshi’s problem at the start - they don’t like looking back at their memories of the Silver Millennium because the strongest ones are of the awful final days when the stress of everything being torn down around them brought out everyone’s most unpleasant side, they’re just working to find the Moon Princess because that’s how they deal with the problem of the Dark Kingdom monsters and after that they can drop it and never think about it and maybe each other again. Through the course of the movie/s and with Usagi’s encouragement they get to a position of “it wasn’t perfect but it was good nonetheless, and even though it’s gone and never coming back we can look forward to building something new which incorporates its best aspects.”

that’s the position they arrive at, yes

but, like

“I don’t know how to feel about my past life” is a struggle no person in the audience goes through

if that is their struggle in itself, then nobody’s going to be able to relate

it has to be analogous to something

that they start at “our past lives make us super cool and give us authority and the Silver Millennium is in charge” and end “our past lives are a source of inspiration and happiness but our lives are our own and the future is something we forge ourselves” has to be analogous to something normal people experience

The analogy I was trying for (though looking back I can see I wasn’t clear enough about it) is “living in the aftermath of tragedy and loss, once you have enough distance that it’s no longer immediately overwhelming”. That doesn’t work well with a starting attitude of ‘Silver Millennium means we in charge bitches’ which wants an analogy somewhere closer to “living in the shadow of former empire/squandered inheritance” (probably not hashtag-relatable enough) or “learning that the people/community you love so much did horrible things in the past” (which I think to work right needs more loading on the Silver Millennium’s Rotten Side than you want).

But I don’t think Sailor Moon is or should be about being traumatized. Loss, maybe (it always gets run back), danger and sacrifice, but the only time it’s about trauma is the last arc of the manga, and I am ethically obligated to spit every time I mention it. Crystal Tokyo may break everything about events and continuity and dramatic tension, but it does say something “After all of these things happen, there will be a happy ending where everything is great and everyone is fine.” It’s not a good idea to assure that before things look dark, but you should never contradict it. Nobody gets PTSD. Sailor Senshi are not child soldiers. The Silver Millennium was as good as it appears to be, unlike the predecessors of every other MCU hero. 

And it’s not so much about “we in charge bitches” as “we’re working for something big and important and gain authority from that.” If I didn’t have to worry about how it fit with Beryl and I didn’t have to answer the question “what does the specific fact that you are a person who is reincarnated mean?” and it was just about Silver Millennium ties, I’d say it’s another aspect of growing up: when they thought the Silver Millennium was going to swoop in any day and they were doing things in line with what the Silver Millennium wanted and following their playbook with their ability to get bailed out of danger, then they were doing things because their parents said to and under their parents protection. Finding out no help is coming and they have no special authority to call upon and nobody will tell them what it all means because it must be something they make themselves, is when they do things because they have their own set of values and goals, not just because their parents told them to. 

But that doesn’t work at all with Beryl, only kind of with Saturn, and doesn’t address “what does the specific fact that you are a person who is reincarnated mean?” Who is the person they remember, how much do they remember, that kind of thing.

The other option was reincarnation was ancestry-in-general, which basically makes Queen Beryl into Killmonger because she’s obsessed with wrongs done to her ancestry, and Usagi learns to take pride in one’s ancestors but not be obsessed with them. But American audiences would likely flip their shit at this if they figured it out, because they would expect “ancestry” to be a source of nothing but wickedness or victimization – it would be too dangerous a subject to touch. So I’d put it with the “maybes” if there is nothing more relevant to the idea of growing up.

…I was about to say that it sounds like you’re grasping for the concept of “heritage.”  Which is pretty much what you say in your last paragraph, so, uh, here’s one independent voice claiming that you seem to be learning in that direction.

And I do think that playing with themes of heritage is culturally dangerous, but not in the way you’re describing.  Americans certainly understand the idea of taking pride in your glorious heritage; they’re less sanguine about the prospect that you have to move beyond that identification.

(Which is to say, in very blunt crude terms – “downhome” Red Tribe norms support heritage identification for white people, woke Blue Tribe norms support heritage identification for everyone except white people, and so between them they capture almost everyone except the sector of liberal white folks who are inclined to feel guilty about themselves.) 

But in fact I imagine that you could make this work just fine.  “Modulated, critical acceptance of our past and its glories” is really not so far from a plausible consensus position.  Especially if you keep the metaphor strong and let the reincarnations be actual reincarnations instead of straight-up heritage porting.

The following contains discussion of, and spoilers for, Revolutionary Girl Utena as well as certain general elements of the Batman mythos.

There are, of course, many different takes on the “what is actually wrong with Bruce Wayne’s brain?” question. 

But I am very invested in one particular idea that you see over and over in lots of different places, including Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and a bunch of Neil Gaiman’s stuff: he’ll never acknowledge it, probably he’ll never even be able to see it, but Batman is way more invested in embodying a psychodramatic role than he is in effectively doing anything.  He is eternally sacrificing his humanity to become God’s Accuser, eternally atoning for his impotence in the face of his parents’ murder, eternally armoring himself in spookiness so that he Definitely Can’t Ever Be Vulnerable Again.  He’s the World’s Greatest Detective, because you have to be that thing in order to qualify as Batman, but it’s an end-in-itself and not a means.  He’s honestly happy, in his heart-of-hearts, to be playing an unending game of cops-and-robbers with the denizens of his rogues’ gallery; it allows him to continue inhabiting the myth rather than collapsing into a human, which is a prospect that terrifies him.  In the most cynical extrapolations of this idea, he’s unconsciously sabotaging his own crime-fighting project at every turn – ensuring that the villains will always be able to escape and try again, failing to use his money and power in any way that would actually clean up Gotham – because he wants to maintain the Batman’s habitat and prey supply. 

This is not a new or an original take, but it’s worth reminding everyone of how it works.

Akio Ohtori wants to inhabit the myth of the Prince the way that Bruce Wayne wants to inhabit the myth of the Batman.  On some very abstract level, he’s pulling the same kind of self-sabotaging shit, ensuring that the duel-cycle is never ended and the Rose Bride is never truly saved and the “Happily Ever After” card never goes up, so that he can keep on doing Prince things forever. 

But his situation is a lot worse than Batman’s situation.  Because of his environment or his own damaged character or both, he can’t actually live out the Prince role in the myth that he’s sustaining, despite all the sacrifices he’s making in order to sustain it.  He has to be the villain, not the hero.  He entombs the princess rather than saving her, he oversees the trials-of-spirit rather than conquering them.  He can’t be an innocent because he knows too much, he can’t be a hero of justice because his goals are too selfish, he can’t fight a monstrous overwhelming power because he is the local overwhelming power.  So he drags poor deluded souls like Utena and Nemuro through his mind games, all for the chance to dress up in a white jacket and have a swordfight at the end, which isn’t even a very good simulacrum of the thing he actually wants in the first place. 

You kinda feel sorry for him, notwithstanding the bit where he’s so terrible to everyone about everything. 

These thoughts, in conjunction, are interesting to me.

Because they suggest that Akio’s biggest and most blatant mistake was his decision to look inward.  He was determined to set up a fairy-tale pocket dimension, because he was overly attached to the fairy-tale aesthetics and metaphysics that he knew.  But those weren’t actually the most important things, by his own professed standards, and in order to get them he had to sacrifice what was the most important: his own role as Prince. 

The moment he stops doing that, and looks outward into the outside world –

– he can be Batman.

A poncy white-coated equestrian fencer Batman, sure, the aesthetics are always infinitely fudgeable.  But the world will actually let him play Prince in the way that Ohtori won’t, in the sense that it contains maidens to save and bad guys to defeat. 

I now really want to see a post-series Utena fanfic in which Akio decides to become a superhero.  A superhero who is explicitly engaging in superheroics for the sake of his own story and self-image, whose general attitude towards the world is a vague disdainful annoyance that it fails to live up to his genre expectations.  A superhero who is “doing good” guided by the same basic sensibilities that led him to set up the Ohtori dueling system in the first place.

…a superhero who eventually crosses paths with his estranged sister and her girlfriend, presumably.

Yeah, yeah, I know, “go write the thing if you want it so much.”  Probably I won’t, I have too much else to do.  Free to a good home.

brazenautomaton:

Let’s make this its own thing instead of burying it, and call upon everyone who is like “I’m interested in your Marvel’s Sailor Moon thing, but I don’t know the canon!” Because no knowledge of the canon is required or even helpful! Just ask: do you find this villain interesting, and does it have the potential to be threatening? 

#9 is a tiny piece of an Eldritch God, hacked off in a battle with a mad sorceress in the world’s mythic past, and then hacked into tinier and tinier pieces until it was a little stub that could barely think or act. It insinuated itself into the lives of a mad scientist (Professor Tomoe) and his daughter (Hotaru Tomoe) through sci-fi means that make sense in context, and makes a deal to steal and copy Hotaru’s form to be able to act and think again. Motivated by a tiny sliver of Eldritch God, #9 interprets the world using the hardware of Hotaru Tomoe’s brain. (Hotaru is still there, #9 is a copy).

#9 and Professor Tomoe have a plan to summon the Eldritch God that #9 used to be a component of. This is bad for the world. #9 expresses malice and hatred for the world, but also even more intense self-hatred and disgust. She has forgotten almost everything (but what she recalls makes the Professor a warlock-engineer) and can do almost nothing (but what she still can do makes her a fearsome sorcerer) expresses hateful revulsion over the fact she is so diminished, her power is wasted and gone, she should be able to crush everyone and everything but she can do nothing. She only takes joy in the suffering of others but it’s fleeting and hollow. She regenerates from any gruesome wound and, depending on the MPAA, inflicts gruesome wounds on herself for no reason. She speaks with incredible cruelty to everyone, especially Hotaru, about their worthlessness and the futility of their lives and how they must be idiots to not kill themselves. Nobody in the mad scientist’s team really tries to stop her. Her plan to call the Eldritch God and destroy everything is a very spiteful way of committing suicide, as being reabsorbed will cause ego death and nothing else will cause the cessation of her experience. 

This is not the order it is presented in, of course. You first see her just being spiteful and cruel and looking like Hotaru, being cruel to her with nobody stopping, then without Hotaru she expresses more disgust and self-hatred, etc.

A: Is this a setup for a compelling villain on its own with no symbolism? 

B: Is this a setup for a compelling villain when I make clear to you “#9 is the physical manifestation of Hotaru’s mental illness in a form that can visibly assail and be confronted by her”?

Short version: it’s innately pretty interesting (with or without explicit unpacking of the symbolism), but this strikes me more as a TV-season villain or a novel villain than as a movie villain.  The motivations are complicated and counterintuitive, and making them compelling is going to entail getting the viewer over the initial hump of “this person is just awful and really unpleasant and maybe she’s a fun-to-hate monster but I sure don’t care about her internality.”  That probably takes time and breathing room that you don’t get in a feature-length film.  I can theoretically imagine it being done with immensely skillful execution, but it’s rarely a great plan to bank on that.

thathopeyetlives:

It really does seem like a lot of “they said this wasn’t going to happen” stuff is happening lately. I’m not sure if this is actually a new trend or not. It’s hard to get an objective handle on this.

A lot of it, like the reaction to that child sexuality paper, is kind of exaggerated, but this stuff is still WRONG and coexistence was contingent on this NOT HAPPENING.

…all right, once again I’ll bite, what stuff?

brazenautomaton:

mailadreapta:

brazenautomaton:

what is the name of that genre or theme, found often in anime, where the emotional states of the characters is reflected in the condition of the world around them?

Pathetic fallacy?

not that, way more specific

I tend to call this “Fisher King psychodrama,” although obviously that’s homebrew language.

cloakofshadow:

Taking then that view outside–
And knowing Terra vast and wide–
Other, older fools have thought
Their own true loves comparing not
With any soul time soon forgot
And never said their vision lied.

And knowing this, the wise deduce
That love should be its own excuse
And turn to common earth, and sow
Sweet meadow-seed, that there might blow
White flowers when the winds come low–
And let the mind itself seduce.

And therefore, dear, I cannot cry
Your virtues to the empty sky–
For knowing that my eyes are bent
To find your wonders evident
Who then should trust my testament,
Who knows how love does love belie?

the-grey-tribe:

fierceawakening:

transhumanist-viking:

yknow i’ve been thinking about the Alt-Right. 

A big thing with them seems to be obfuscating language to make something that sounds stupid from an outsider perspective. For example, you have that whole debacle a while back about “pepe being declared a hate symbol.” 

Wasn’t that played up to all hell, eh? A frog comic is racist now! Political correctness gone mad! They call us Nazis just for using a meme!

Of course, anyone with half a brain and googling skills could look into it, and see that the pepe meme was actually insanely popular among the Alt-right, with numerous edits of the frog into a Wehrmacht/SS soldier, a Klansman, suicide bombers, nationalists of just about every stripe, and that the frog had been co-opted as a symbol and “wink wink nudge nudge” towards each other. So, saying Pepe was, as the Anti-Defamation League said, being used by racists, despite not being inherently bigoted, isn’t unreasonable. 

But by continually breaking down the rather nuanced view of “Pepe is not a hate symbol, but it is a symbol often appropriated and used by bigots” into “wow they say a meme’s a hate symbol,” the alt-right was able to make the left seem, at least to some people, like slavering morons always looking to be offended. 

They’ve done this with more than just pepe, too. You have a veritable cornucopia of symbols, emojis, dog-whistles, all of which are fairly innocuous by themselves, ranging from the 👌🏻 to the Deus Vult meme, or even the goddamn phrase “our guy” becoming a dogwhistle of sorts. Each time someone tries to point out that those are symbols used to signal to those ‘in the know’ by the alt-right, no matter how laborious the explanation is, and how much ground they concede to the idea that not everyone who uses it is intentionally trying to signal to the alt-right, it can always be reduced down to and made fun of as just another example of the Left Being Offended All the Time. 

That’s partially why it’s so hard to talk about the Alt-Right’s symbols and identifiers, because you could just as easily have on your hands someone who plain just likes a meme and has no idea what the implications are, or you could have someone who’s constantly going on about the ‘JQ’ when no one’s watching. 

I know a lot of people have said this sort of thing before, but it’s one of those things that I feel really does bear repeating, because it’s vitally important to understanding the main tactic that they use to operate. Confusion. They want to create confusion and make sure people outside their circle don’t know what their symbols and identifiers are. If they can wink to each other with no one noticing, then they can go around spreading their ideas in cloaked language and codewords, and through that, start drawing people in. 

Wait, they stole👌? I thought I knew what most of the coded stuff meant but I never heard about that one.

Dare I ask what they use it to mean?

Literally nothing. Things being declared hate symbols became a meme in itself, so 4chan tried to have fun with it and they created a big twitter OP where they posted infographics with explanations why the OK sign is racist now.

Then they waited until liberals became uncomfortable using it, and started egging on liberals to call out people who still use the sign.

4chan made the OK sign into an alt-right symbol for the fun of it. It literally doesn’t mean anything other than itself. Y’know:

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true

…this really wouldn’t be a problem, or a “viable tactic” (to what strategic end?), if the vocal identitarian left weren’t so obsessed with the idea of purging tainted symbols. 

Yeah, the alt-right crowd likes Pepe and “Deus Vult” and the OK-symbol.  The alt-right crowd also likes pie and puppies.  We’re really edging hard into “you know who was a vegetarian? Hitler!” territory here.

Thinking about this sensibly does have the consequence that you’re not going to be able to identify and shun the Bad People unless, y’know, they actually do or say something bad.  But this is not something about which you should be complaining. 

thathopeyetlives:

I really think that “universal basic capital” would be better than universal basic income.

OK, I’ll bite.  How is this supposed to work?

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

balioc:

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

balioc:

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

In light of your recent post concerning borders, the nation-state, and heritage, I submit this to for your consideration: “The researchers canvassed Native communities through much of western Canada. What struck them almost immediately was the astounding suicide rate among teenagers—500 to 800 times the national average—infecting many of these communities. But not all of them. Some Native communities reported suicide rates of zero. ‘When these communities were collapsed into larger groupings according to their membership in one of the 29 tribal councils within the province, rates varied … from a low of zero (true for 6 tribal councils) to a high of 633 suicides per 100,000.’ What could possibly make the difference between places where teens had nothing to live for and those where teens had nothing to die for? The researchers began talking to the kids. They collected stories. They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives. Chandler’s team soon discovered profound social reasons for the differences among these communities. Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense. In contrast, the high-suicide communities had lost their traditions and rituals. The kids ate at McDonald’s and watched a lot of TV. Their lives were islands clustered in the middle of nowhere. Their lives just didn’t make sense. There was only the present, only the featureless terrain of today.”-Marc Lewis, “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease”, pgs 203-204. The nation-state might not be the best model (hell, it definitely isn’t), and the American nation-State has built in flaws, namely the deleterious effect on culture due to Manifest Destiny and industrialization early on its life. Ironically, many of the white conquerors will end up meeting the same fate as many of the conquered: his traditions lost, he will simply lose the collective will to live, and either blow his own brains, or OD on opiates. God bless America.

So, let’s just be very clear about what this passage is actually saying:

1. People need to be able to understand their own lives in terms of narrative structure in order to be happy.  This is true; at the least, it’s true often enough that I’m glad to see it being used as an underlying driver of social praxis.

2. “Elders” preserving “traditions and rituals” that tell you “who [you] are and where [you] come from” in communitarian/generational terms can provide such narrative structure. True, sort of, with heavy caveats.  Traditionalist community narratives certainly work well for many people (which is, as far as I can tell, one of two main reasons that traditionalist communities are pretty good at sticking around).  They also fail spectacularly badly for many people, which accounts for many of the horror stories being told by people who emerge from them.  It turns out that one-size-fits-all narratives, well, aren’t.  Surprise!  And not everyone places a high priority on being situated in a heritage community with a romantic pedigree. 

This particular point is something of a personal hobby-horse.  I spent my youth being told that I belonged to a religious community that, by dint of being my religious community, shared my values and cared about me.  This was a lie.  It “cared about me” in the sense of wanting my allegiance, but its stories about what mattered were just not compatible with mine, and the continued claim that I would necessarily have something valuable in common with community insiders became increasingly implausible. 

3. Narrative structures cannot be satisfactorily acquired from generally-available popular culture, which will only leave you adrift on the “featureless terrain of today.”  what in the actual fuck

I mean, OK, let’s take that study’s empirical conclusions at face value – I have no reason to dispute the facts being alleged (although admittedly I have no particular reason to believe them either) – there probably is something awful going on with those kids from the, uh, non-trad tribal milieus. 

Even so, this is boggling.  Those kids are watching TV.  Presumably they’re on the internet a lot, the same as every other anomic rootless adolescent in the world.  TV and the internet are filled with narratives for sale.  Those are the narratives around which most of civilization’s regular old normie non-trad people are defining their lives! 

They are, often, shitty and incomplete narratives.  They cause all sorts of terrible problems.  They’re often simplistic to the point of stupidity.  They dishonestly demand particular kinds of life outcomes while scorning the practices and traits that lead to those outcomes.  They fetishize particular kinds of cathartic decontextualized moments – righteous victory, for example, or tension-resolving romantic/sexual coming-together – without providing conceptual structure to support those moments that can be maintained over time.  Providing better narratives is a central pillar of my cultural-engineering projects, and there’s a reason for that.

But all that shittiness gets you rootless anomie, which we see in regular old totally-more-or-less-functional folks, not whatever-it-is that leads tribal teenagers to be driven to suicide in huge numbers and to be literally unable to describe their own lives. And conflating those things is either foolishness or knavery.  Even if you want to sit there and say “ha ha the same thing is going to happen to white folks because they’re not trad enough,” you have to be able to explain why that hasn’t happened already, when apparently it’s happened to these poor tribal kids. 

And it really does seem like the smart money is on “trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of extreme isolated poverty; people who are undergoing extreme isolated poverty may display wide variance in their suffering depending on whether or not they have access to those trad narratives, but people who have enough resources to start moving in another direction are likely to want to do so.”

Trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of getting conquered. The same thing is going to happen to certain sorts of white people, and is already happening, because America was never a nation-state and some of the white nations have been conquered.

This is a problem. It’s even more of a problem than you’d expect, given the traditional religion of the conquering tribe: slave morality taken to the extreme of celebrating ostentatious dysfunction, and a religious view of history that insists that nothing can ever get worse. Unless their traditional enemies continue to exist, of course. Then things can get worse. But there’s no other way.

The problems of trad narratives seem to be far more common in American Christianity than elsewhere. American Christianity might just be like that. But given that it has unusually powerful enemies who’ve gained an unusually strong position in telling people how to process their experiences with it, and who of course make the ‘how’ maximally negative…

I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, of course. But I am saying that I know a lot of people who ritually disown their families as irredeemably awful people because some of them voted for Bush, and before I apostasized I did the same thing myself, because it was what one did if one wasn’t born into an impeccable pedigree.

You are reading a lot into this.  I have never been intimately involved with any form of American Christianity, and I come from a “Blue Tribe” background full of Democrats, and I’ve never done anything remotely akin to “ritually disowning my family as irredeemably awful,” because in fact my family is pretty good overall.

You will notice that I said this was not about you.

Your narrative, as given, is in many ways isomorphic to the ideological justification for trad culture being bad – namely, American Christianity hating the gays and so on – but for all I know you were raised Tibetan Buddhist. But what about those horror stories? How many of them are about Tibetan Buddhism?

The thing is, this is an ideological justification. It’s going to be persuasive to many people who have never experienced anything like that, because they’ve been told that it happens all the time – and, since it happens all the time, we should do the exact opposite. It’s a vague association with a thing that everyone just knows.

It’s like how, whenever the “ritual: good or bad?” argument comes back up, someone invariably mentions pep rallies. Maybe they quote Paul Graham; maybe they quote Mencius Moldbug; maybe they talk about their own high school; and maybe they’ve never even heard of pep rallies aside from Americans talking about them. Ritual, pep rallies, Baldur von Schirach – what more needs to be said? Well, a lot, because I didn’t like pep rallies either. It turns out that there are a lot of things that determine whether or not a ritual “is good”. If you don’t like high school, you probably won’t like pep rallies. If you do, you probably will.

Pep rallies are shaped for the standard average high schooler who likes high school, insofar as they’re shaped for anyone – which probably isn’t very far. I wouldn’t trust high school administrators to have any idea how to put together a pep rally that works. If you’re not the sort of person who can fit into a pep rally, there are plenty of alternative cultures you can join which might fit better… or you can just watch Netflix with your cats. Hey, man, it’s a free country, we’re not trying to lower the depression rate or anything.

I don’t see why it should be assumed that all ‘thick cultures’ are equally bad in this sense. Even if all the ones that have been around for a while are – which doesn’t seem accurate to me; Jews seem to have a lot of Jewish institutions, and I just don’t see the sort of burnout there that I see from Protestants – any new culture of this sort that forms is going to have a lot of preselection.

…I think I’m missing the point that you’re trying to make here. 

I’m not generalizing from American Christianity, or even particularly drawing from examples supplied by American Christianity at all.  I’m not particularly talking about any cultural badness of a form that’s directly parallel to “American Christianity hates the gays,” although of course that sort of thing can be a big problem for lots of people.  The general issue at which I’m gesturing is the thing that is inherent in having a tightly-knit, “thick,” obligate culture: whatever the local norms and available roles are, there’s a good chance they won’t actually be super great for you-as-an-individual, and that’s going to cause real trouble if your culture is invested in the idea that you’re not supposed to leave or to seek out a more-selected, more-congenial community for yourself. 

(Except that all this is kind of a sidebar, and I’m actually mostly talking about the fact that even anomic contemporary pop culture has some degree of life narrative to offer for most people, the alleged two-pronged choice between “trad culture” and “total confusion and loss of self” isn’t very meaningful outside certain extreme circumstances.) 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

balioc:

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

In light of your recent post concerning borders, the nation-state, and heritage, I submit this to for your consideration: “The researchers canvassed Native communities through much of western Canada. What struck them almost immediately was the astounding suicide rate among teenagers—500 to 800 times the national average—infecting many of these communities. But not all of them. Some Native communities reported suicide rates of zero. ‘When these communities were collapsed into larger groupings according to their membership in one of the 29 tribal councils within the province, rates varied … from a low of zero (true for 6 tribal councils) to a high of 633 suicides per 100,000.’ What could possibly make the difference between places where teens had nothing to live for and those where teens had nothing to die for? The researchers began talking to the kids. They collected stories. They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives. Chandler’s team soon discovered profound social reasons for the differences among these communities. Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense. In contrast, the high-suicide communities had lost their traditions and rituals. The kids ate at McDonald’s and watched a lot of TV. Their lives were islands clustered in the middle of nowhere. Their lives just didn’t make sense. There was only the present, only the featureless terrain of today.”-Marc Lewis, “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease”, pgs 203-204. The nation-state might not be the best model (hell, it definitely isn’t), and the American nation-State has built in flaws, namely the deleterious effect on culture due to Manifest Destiny and industrialization early on its life. Ironically, many of the white conquerors will end up meeting the same fate as many of the conquered: his traditions lost, he will simply lose the collective will to live, and either blow his own brains, or OD on opiates. God bless America.

So, let’s just be very clear about what this passage is actually saying:

1. People need to be able to understand their own lives in terms of narrative structure in order to be happy.  This is true; at the least, it’s true often enough that I’m glad to see it being used as an underlying driver of social praxis.

2. “Elders” preserving “traditions and rituals” that tell you “who [you] are and where [you] come from” in communitarian/generational terms can provide such narrative structure. True, sort of, with heavy caveats.  Traditionalist community narratives certainly work well for many people (which is, as far as I can tell, one of two main reasons that traditionalist communities are pretty good at sticking around).  They also fail spectacularly badly for many people, which accounts for many of the horror stories being told by people who emerge from them.  It turns out that one-size-fits-all narratives, well, aren’t.  Surprise!  And not everyone places a high priority on being situated in a heritage community with a romantic pedigree. 

This particular point is something of a personal hobby-horse.  I spent my youth being told that I belonged to a religious community that, by dint of being my religious community, shared my values and cared about me.  This was a lie.  It “cared about me” in the sense of wanting my allegiance, but its stories about what mattered were just not compatible with mine, and the continued claim that I would necessarily have something valuable in common with community insiders became increasingly implausible. 

3. Narrative structures cannot be satisfactorily acquired from generally-available popular culture, which will only leave you adrift on the “featureless terrain of today.”  what in the actual fuck

I mean, OK, let’s take that study’s empirical conclusions at face value – I have no reason to dispute the facts being alleged (although admittedly I have no particular reason to believe them either) – there probably is something awful going on with those kids from the, uh, non-trad tribal milieus. 

Even so, this is boggling.  Those kids are watching TV.  Presumably they’re on the internet a lot, the same as every other anomic rootless adolescent in the world.  TV and the internet are filled with narratives for sale.  Those are the narratives around which most of civilization’s regular old normie non-trad people are defining their lives! 

They are, often, shitty and incomplete narratives.  They cause all sorts of terrible problems.  They’re often simplistic to the point of stupidity.  They dishonestly demand particular kinds of life outcomes while scorning the practices and traits that lead to those outcomes.  They fetishize particular kinds of cathartic decontextualized moments – righteous victory, for example, or tension-resolving romantic/sexual coming-together – without providing conceptual structure to support those moments that can be maintained over time.  Providing better narratives is a central pillar of my cultural-engineering projects, and there’s a reason for that.

But all that shittiness gets you rootless anomie, which we see in regular old totally-more-or-less-functional folks, not whatever-it-is that leads tribal teenagers to be driven to suicide in huge numbers and to be literally unable to describe their own lives. And conflating those things is either foolishness or knavery.  Even if you want to sit there and say “ha ha the same thing is going to happen to white folks because they’re not trad enough,” you have to be able to explain why that hasn’t happened already, when apparently it’s happened to these poor tribal kids. 

And it really does seem like the smart money is on “trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of extreme isolated poverty; people who are undergoing extreme isolated poverty may display wide variance in their suffering depending on whether or not they have access to those trad narratives, but people who have enough resources to start moving in another direction are likely to want to do so.”

Trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of getting conquered. The same thing is going to happen to certain sorts of white people, and is already happening, because America was never a nation-state and some of the white nations have been conquered.

This is a problem. It’s even more of a problem than you’d expect, given the traditional religion of the conquering tribe: slave morality taken to the extreme of celebrating ostentatious dysfunction, and a religious view of history that insists that nothing can ever get worse. Unless their traditional enemies continue to exist, of course. Then things can get worse. But there’s no other way.

The problems of trad narratives seem to be far more common in American Christianity than elsewhere. American Christianity might just be like that. But given that it has unusually powerful enemies who’ve gained an unusually strong position in telling people how to process their experiences with it, and who of course make the ‘how’ maximally negative…

I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, of course. But I am saying that I know a lot of people who ritually disown their families as irredeemably awful people because some of them voted for Bush, and before I apostasized I did the same thing myself, because it was what one did if one wasn’t born into an impeccable pedigree.

You are reading a lot into this.  I have never been intimately involved with any form of American Christianity, and I come from a “Blue Tribe” background full of Democrats, and I’ve never done anything remotely akin to “ritually disowning my family as irredeemably awful,” because in fact my family is pretty good overall.

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

In light of your recent post concerning borders, the nation-state, and heritage, I submit this to for your consideration: “The researchers canvassed Native communities through much of western Canada. What struck them almost immediately was the astounding suicide rate among teenagers—500 to 800 times the national average—infecting many of these communities. But not all of them. Some Native communities reported suicide rates of zero. ‘When these communities were collapsed into larger groupings according to their membership in one of the 29 tribal councils within the province, rates varied … from a low of zero (true for 6 tribal councils) to a high of 633 suicides per 100,000.’ What could possibly make the difference between places where teens had nothing to live for and those where teens had nothing to die for? The researchers began talking to the kids. They collected stories. They asked teens to talk about their lives, about their goals, and about their futures. What they found was that young people from the high-suicide communities didn’t have stories to tell. They were incapable of talking about their lives in any coherent, organized way. They had no clear sense of their past, their childhood, and the generations preceding them. And their attempts to outline possible futures were empty of form and meaning. Unlike the other children, they could not see their lives as narratives, as stories. Their attempts to answer questions about their life stories were punctuated by long pauses and unfinished sentences. They had nothing but the present, nothing to look forward to, so many of them took their own lives. Chandler’s team soon discovered profound social reasons for the differences among these communities. Where the youths had stories to tell, continuity was already built into their sense of self by the structure of their society. Tribal councils remained active and effective organs of government. Elders were respected, and they took on the responsibility of teaching children who they were and where they had come from. The language and customs of the tribe had been preserved conscientiously over the decades. And so the youths saw themselves as part of a larger narrative, in which the stories of their lives fit and made sense. In contrast, the high-suicide communities had lost their traditions and rituals. The kids ate at McDonald’s and watched a lot of TV. Their lives were islands clustered in the middle of nowhere. Their lives just didn’t make sense. There was only the present, only the featureless terrain of today.”-Marc Lewis, “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease”, pgs 203-204. The nation-state might not be the best model (hell, it definitely isn’t), and the American nation-State has built in flaws, namely the deleterious effect on culture due to Manifest Destiny and industrialization early on its life. Ironically, many of the white conquerors will end up meeting the same fate as many of the conquered: his traditions lost, he will simply lose the collective will to live, and either blow his own brains, or OD on opiates. God bless America.

So, let’s just be very clear about what this passage is actually saying:

1. People need to be able to understand their own lives in terms of narrative structure in order to be happy.  This is true; at the least, it’s true often enough that I’m glad to see it being used as an underlying driver of social praxis.

2. “Elders” preserving “traditions and rituals” that tell you “who [you] are and where [you] come from” in communitarian/generational terms can provide such narrative structure. True, sort of, with heavy caveats.  Traditionalist community narratives certainly work well for many people (which is, as far as I can tell, one of two main reasons that traditionalist communities are pretty good at sticking around).  They also fail spectacularly badly for many people, which accounts for many of the horror stories being told by people who emerge from them.  It turns out that one-size-fits-all narratives, well, aren’t.  Surprise!  And not everyone places a high priority on being situated in a heritage community with a romantic pedigree. 

This particular point is something of a personal hobby-horse.  I spent my youth being told that I belonged to a religious community that, by dint of being my religious community, shared my values and cared about me.  This was a lie.  It “cared about me” in the sense of wanting my allegiance, but its stories about what mattered were just not compatible with mine, and the continued claim that I would necessarily have something valuable in common with community insiders became increasingly implausible. 

3. Narrative structures cannot be satisfactorily acquired from generally-available popular culture, which will only leave you adrift on the “featureless terrain of today.”  what in the actual fuck

I mean, OK, let’s take that study’s empirical conclusions at face value – I have no reason to dispute the facts being alleged (although admittedly I have no particular reason to believe them either) – there probably is something awful going on with those kids from the, uh, non-trad tribal milieus. 

Even so, this is boggling.  Those kids are watching TV.  Presumably they’re on the internet a lot, the same as every other anomic rootless adolescent in the world.  TV and the internet are filled with narratives for sale.  Those are the narratives around which most of civilization’s regular old normie non-trad people are defining their lives! 

They are, often, shitty and incomplete narratives.  They cause all sorts of terrible problems.  They’re often simplistic to the point of stupidity.  They dishonestly demand particular kinds of life outcomes while scorning the practices and traits that lead to those outcomes.  They fetishize particular kinds of cathartic decontextualized moments – righteous victory, for example, or tension-resolving romantic/sexual coming-together – without providing conceptual structure to support those moments that can be maintained over time.  Providing better narratives is a central pillar of my cultural-engineering projects, and there’s a reason for that.

But all that shittiness gets you rootless anomie, which we see in regular old totally-more-or-less-functional folks, not whatever-it-is that leads tribal teenagers to be driven to suicide in huge numbers and to be literally unable to describe their own lives. And conflating those things is either foolishness or knavery.  Even if you want to sit there and say “ha ha the same thing is going to happen to white folks because they’re not trad enough,” you have to be able to explain why that hasn’t happened already, when apparently it’s happened to these poor tribal kids. 

And it really does seem like the smart money is on “trad narratives, for all their many problems, do OK as a palliative for the grinding awfulness of extreme isolated poverty; people who are undergoing extreme isolated poverty may display wide variance in their suffering depending on whether or not they have access to those trad narratives, but people who have enough resources to start moving in another direction are likely to want to do so.”