October 2018

marcusseldon:

I may have talked about this before, but the term “nerd” has evolved such that it can refer to two distinct groups of people, and the fact that we don’t recognize this causes a lot of misunderstandings.

I like to call the two groups “hipster nerds” and “nerdy nerds”.

Both groups have similar sets of interests: video and board games, data and math, comic books and movies, tabletop RPGs, philosophy, and so on. This is why they’re both nerdy groups. 

The big difference between them has to do with personality. Hipster nerds have nerdy interests, yes, but they are also “normal” in their social lives. They dress normally, like going out to bars and clubs, are generally socially skilled, and generally seem like a non-nerd when not talking about their interests.

Meanwhile, nerdy nerds are the group that “nerd” exclusively referred to 10-20 years ago. They are generally more socially awkward, and more likely to have mental illness or not be neurotypical. Their preferences for socializing may not be as conventional, for example they would rather have a quiet evening obsessively discussing a topic than go out to a bar. They’re more introverted, and more obviously quirky or weird in the way they interact with others, even if they don’t necessarily come off badly or as being awkward.  

The boundaries between these two groups are blurry, and some people switch between them over the course of their lives, or exist somewhere between them. For example, Dr. Nerdlove is someone who was a nerdy nerd in his teens and twenties, but is now clearly a hipster nerd.

Neither group is better than the other, or more deserving of a claim to nerdy interests. However, I feel like a problem in our discourse is sometimes people will talk about how nerds don’t struggle, how nerds don’t face social difficulties or hardships that aren’t their fault, and it becomes clear that these people are thinking about hipster nerds, not nerdy nerds.  

In some ways I do think it is coherent to think of nerdy nerds as a minority group or subculture, whereas hipster nerds are just normal people with a particular set of interests and it doesn’t seem correct to think of them that way.

Yeeeeaaaaaaaah…

I sincerely believe that this dynamic, and its history, are crucial to any coherent understanding of the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.  That’s especially true if you’re any sort of nerd with any personal stake in nerdery, but there’s relevance even if you’re not.

For decades, there was a strong correlation between having “nerdy interests”  and having a “nerdy personality.”  This wasn’t a coincidence.  There were strong cultural forces pushing Nerd Types into Nerd Shit and pulling everyone else out.  On the one hand, well, there was good old stigma.  Nerd Shit was childish nonsense for losers who couldn’t get laid; everyone knew it, even most of the nerds themselves, however much they might yell and scream otherwise; and you didn’t want to be associated with that if you could possibly be cool, whether it was average-Joe cool or smart-set worldly-intellectual cool.  On the other hand, the world of Nerd Shit was really good to its captive inmates, if they were the right sort of people.  It provided a large number of lovely little ghettoized communities where nerds could find friendship and love with those who shared their predilections, sealing themselves away from the cold cruel world beyond.  Its scriptures pandered endlessly to the nerd taste for things like complexity and finicky detail, and an awful lot of them were crafted to be soothing ego-boosters for a reliably nerdy audience (”people like you are the real chosen heroes,” etc.). 

Then, over the course of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, the stigma disappeared and normies came flooding into nerdland.  The reasons for this are complicated, but it’s worth pointing out that a lot of nerds pushed very hard for it to happened.  They wanted respect, they wanted mainstream acceptance, they wanted the kind of budget and audience for their Nerd Shit that only normies could provide.

What you ended up with, almost immediately, was a macro-scale Geeks/MOPs/Sociopaths kind of situation.  The average-Joe normies didn’t like the Nerd Shit being so complicated and finicky, and because they had money and numbers, content creators catered to them.  The smart-set worldly-intellectual normies didn’t like the Nerd Shit being so thematically retrograde and out-of-touch (in the ‘10s they would add “problematic” to their list of complaints), and because they were prestigious culture-definers, the content creators catered to them too.  All the normies were annoyed by the old-style nerds – who were distinctly unfashionable, and (let’s be fair) in many cases deeply unpleasant people who had managed to avoid being housebroken in the way that normal unpleasant people usually are – and, when possible, endeavored to push them out of events and infrastructural venues, or at least to make them less culturally central. 

Unsurprisingly, there was a strong and widespread sense of displacement.  But it was all sufficiently diffuse that in most contexts it was hard for anyone to put a finger on what had happened, let alone to do anything about it.  The “hipster nerds” flooding in didn’t label themselves as invaders, and mostly didn’t act like invaders; they were content enthusiasts calling themselves nerds, and often were nicer to be around than your average old-style nerd.

There have been many flailing, fumbling attempts to recreate the ghettoized-feeling communities-that-were, the ones that really were havens for the “nerdy nerds.”  Mostly they’ve failed, because once the stigma is gone there’s no more barrier-to-entry, and it’s very difficult to create a Cool Thing that can attract followers at all without getting the kind of culturally-foreign followers who will colonize it.   A lot of the weird cultural signaling that I’ve seen from the geekiest sectors of the populace, in recent years, seems (to me) to amount to “please go away unless you are actually going to like me, don’t just latch onto my stuff.” 

One of the few things that can actually reliably drive off normies, at least smart-set worldly-intellectual normies, is crude right-wing politics.  And so here we are.

bambamramfan:

collapsedsquid:

collapsedsquid:

One thing that’s happening this election is #walkaway, this campaign that’s suppposed to be about democrats who are becoming disgusted with the actions of their party and joining the GOP.  However, it looks like the major promoters of this theory are the qanon conspiracy theorists.

reguess1997: Maybe I just have my head buried deep in a Leftist echo chamber, but I’d like to think that if a Dem were dissatisfied enough to leave the party, they’d be going further left.

The premise is that the democrats are being disgusted by the violence of the party. Like I said though this is being promoted mainly by insane conspiracy theorists and obvious grifters like D’Souza and Diamond and Silk.

Will Sommer went to a march and reported on it here .

I find the #walkaway movement a fascinating combination of misunderstanding and wishful thinking.

Like it’s rightist founders DO see a lot of people they know rejecting “the left”, but those people mean the sort of puritanical culture war we associate with tumblr, various famous websites and popstars, and over-reported college administration policies.

But of course anyone left of center knows that “the cultural left” and the Democratic Party are not the same thing. Not just in a “technically different labels thing”, but that the Democratic Party is seen as a boring, corporate, milquetoast tactical necessity and nothing more by the vast majority of progressives. And even when defectors abandon social justice or whatever, it’s either to a) go further left, in which case they still see the Democratic Party the same way, or b) move culturally right but still think the Democrats are a tool for holding back the insanity of the Republicans. 

There are a few people who identify the Democrats with the parts of progressive culture they are leaving, but not a lot. If you’re walking out over “I love white male tears” or “I was told my wife couldn’t be abusing me because I’m a man” then what exactly is so upsetting to you about Heidi Heitcamp?

But the Republican political operatives just can’t see this. Those who love Trump for Trump can’t imagine their party leader NOT being affiliated with the cultural totems of their side. So they think rejecting Lena Dunham *must* mean loving Mitch McConnell.

It’s all very, cute and endearing, in a three legged puppy sort of way.

In fairness, a lot of them are probably remembering the Obama phenomenon, which actually did involve some degree of cult-of-personality shit in certain sectors.

…and also the rising-with-electoral-tides heightened passions that periodically allow people to seem genuinely enthusiastic about candidates like Hillary Clinton.  Which are almost precisely analogous to the rising-with-electoral-tides heightened passions that periodically allow people to seem genuinely enthusiastic about candidates like George W. Bush.  It’s much more helpful to be working from a model of “people have cultural tribes in which they’re reasonably embedded, they’ll generally make their practical politics conform to this as appropriate regardless of the fiddly internal disagreements,” but this can be hard to see because there’s so much hoopla dedicated to disguising it.

dagny-hashtaggart:

mailadreapta:

boatiechat:

frislander:

moghedien:

Apollo: Sister, what are you the goddess of?

Artemis: *lounging by a spring on piles of deerskin surrounded by three dozen naked girls with a dead pan expression* Virginity.

“Heracles, they’re lesbians”.

Note that the concept of “virginity” in Ancient times merely meant “unmarried”, and had nothing to do with sexual activity. Some priestesses were “virgins” because they chose (or were committed to) a life of worship, but it was merely a question of social status, not of personal choice or practice. Of course, one can suppose that this lifestyle would be rather attractive for lesbians.

So when Artemis is said to be the Goddess of Virgins, it is meant to be understood as “Goddess of Unmarried Women”, or, quite possibly literally, of lesbians. 

(It’s only Christianity that reframed the concept of virginity to mean “never had sex”. Many ancient religions has “Virgin goddesses”, which symbolized feminine power, and in this case too it meant “untied to a man”, or “whole for herself”)

So, as is usual with Tumblr, this post is a lie based on a bit of half-remembered scholarship which has been twisted around for maximum wokeness.

First: I cannot find any evidence at all that the Vestal Virgins of the Roman religion were anything but completely celibate virgins. Since the Vestal Virgins are probably the #1 or #2 most famous religious virginal orders of the ancient world, that pretty much puts an end to the idea that Christianity invented the virgin in the modern sense.

I think what the above is referring to is something like this doctoral thesis, which examines the actual meaning of parthenia in ancient Greece. I have not yet had time to read the whole thing, but let’s start from here, which lays out the central thesis:

The consensus so far has been that παρθενία is the status of the marriageable girl, which certainly implies sexual abstinence but without explicitly referring to it. Scholars working on early Greek poetry and maidens’ choruses (Calame 1977) or on the Greek early conflation of the nuptial and funerary rituals (Burkert 1972, Dowden 1989, Rehm 1994) emphasize the social meaning of παρθένος by consistently translating it as “maiden.” In Dowden’s (1989: 2) words, “although [a παρθένος] is expected not yet to have had sexual experience, parthenia does not directly refer to virginity or end with the rupture of the hymen…" Although parthenia was perceived as adversely affected by premature sexual experience (to deflower is to diapartheneuein), the real issue was marriageability and the real contrast was between parthenos and gyne, the married woman. A parthenos is a maiden, not a virgin.”

The idea that a parthenos is “a maiden, not a virgin” is what the above is referring to, but notice that the actual academic citation is quite clear that maidenhood implies virginity. That is, being sexually chaste is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a parthenos.

So in conclusion, the Christians did not invent virginity as we currently understand it, the ancient Greeks and Romans definitely expected their daughters to be virginal before marriage, and don’t believe anything you read on Tumblr until you’ve checked the sources.

Yeah, often terms like “virgo” and “parthenos” meant more like “celibate” or “chaste”: the Vestals, e.g., did not technically have to be virgins in the modern sense of never having had sex, but they were expected to be celibate during their priestly tenure. Saying that the idea had no connection to sex seems dubious, and “it was merely a question of social status, not choice or practice” is definitely wrong. (They were usually virgins in the modern sense, because most of them were committed to the priesthood while they were children, but there were cases of adult women being selected to replace Vestals who died, and they had to be celibate but not necessarily virginal.)

Also the concept of virgin births/conception without sexual intercourse is attested in various religious traditions that emerged around the same time as Christianity (e.g. Mithraism), and some that predated it (e.g. Zoroastrianism).

Moreover, the implication that the classical analogues of the term “virgin” were used euphemistically for lesbians seems odd because by and large the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have a problem with homosexuality per se. There were certainly forms and instances of same-gender romance and sex that were looked down on, but the notion that the simple fact of two people of the same sex being involved with one another would have to be danced around in the “spinster aunt” way common in some historical Christian and Muslim societies has no basis in fact as far as I’m aware. While sources on women in general are pretty rare in classical Greek texts, we do have historical evidence of relationships between Spartan women in a mold similar to the erastes-eromenos pattern found in much of ancient Greece, as well as mentions of women’s involvement with other women in Plato.

I’m seriously not any kind of expert on ancient Greek culture, but – as a general rule, when trying to poke at the boundaries of things like sexual relationships and virginity in other societies, it’s worth remembering that our understanding of what sex is is really not universal. 

In particular, the idea that two women simply cannot have sex, that anything they might do together lacks some fundamental element of sex-ness, is very widespread and evidently very intuitive.  My go-to example is Taoist sex alchemy, by whose doctrines male homosexual activity is a very big deal (and usually a very bad idea), and female homosexuality is not a meaningful thing.  While I’d welcome someone with greater subject matter expertise chiming in, my impression is that even our modern conception of women-having-sex is pretty recent and artificial – it was invented almost out of whole cloth, essentially, as part of the rising gay awareness movement, since the idea that lesbian activity did not count as sex was not popular with lesbian couples – and it would have been pretty easy for us to go the other way, if our change activists had been more interested in (e.g.) normalizing female experimentation before/during straight marriage.

The upshot of which is: independent of any question about the extent to which parthenia entails virginity, there is a question of whether parthenia is compatible with lesbian activity specifically.  My understanding is that the evidence for all possibilities here is weak-to-nonexistent, and my default assumption based on humanity generally is “Artemis is probably fine with it.”  It even seems vaguely plausible that cultic Artemis-devotion would be associated with lots of (”non-sex”) lesbianism, although I’d certainly put the odds at well under 50%.

morlock-holmes:

I’m angry and frustrated. I feel like the social justice left was sold to me as the be all end all of ethics and behavior to me and I’m realizing that after years of believing that the whole philosophy has done nothing to solve my own problems, nothing to even give me a vocabulary to describe my problems, and nothing to even help me find sympathetic listeners.

I do have a robust vocabulary for why I don’t actually have any problems, though.

Particularly, I have a lot of trouble with my day to day actions. What does it look like, day to day, to behave in a moral way? How do you embody your morality and make your life better through concrete actions you can take day to day?

And the people I know all take a “Well, that’s that, and this is this” attitude towards politics.

I’ve talked about this with gender stuff a lot, “Yeah, you reblog those articles about how the worst thing about men is unwarranted confidence, but obviously confidence is sexy and people expect men to be assertive, so you don’t actually, like, add a lot of hedges to your speech in real life. Isn’t that obvious? How did you not realize that?”

Now that I’m looking for it I notice that people, men and women, seem to react better when I’m not afraid to take up space, or when I fake confidence. 

And the more left-wing the people I talk to are, the more they go, “Well, duh? Why would you ever think differently? Just because I keep talking about how those things are horrible and we need to completely remake gender relations? How did you not get I wasn’t talking about you when I said that?”

People who are less ensconced in that culture often go, “Oh, yeah, I also had to learn that myself, it was hard.”

And then there’s the people who go, “Oh, well, that’s not my experience at all! Left-wingers are actually really good at answering these kinds of questions, you just aren’t asking the right people the right questions.”

And then when I go, “Okay, who are the right people? What questions should I be asking?”

They just offer a confused shrug and go, “Have you tried going to therapy more often?”

Day to day, how do I put together a life that is fulfilling and leaves the world better off? I feel like I’m surrounded by people who just go,

“That’s got nothing to do with politics, people just, like, know how to do that. It’s not something you talk about or ask for help with, you just shut up and do it because we all know how, and I don’t know why you’re so crabby.”

Maybe other people have other strategies, but speaking only for myself…

…I don’t know how it’s possible to live in the world without accepting it as truth that moral discourse in the public sphere is a battlefield.  People have widely differing visions of the good – sometimes that’s literally what’s going on, sometimes it’s a euphemism for “people have divergent social interests that they’re trying to advance under the cover of moral rhetoric” – and they will try to badger and bully and guilt you into doing what they want, and this has very little to do with any notion of goodness to which you might reasonably aspire.  As has already been pointed out, this is what you get from all sides, or at least from all sides that are large and strong enough to act with confidence.  SJ folks do it, trad folk do it, “normal commonsense regular people in favor of decency” do it, and you will go mad if you don’t internalize the belief that they can all go to hell.

If you actually want help and guidance from others…well, the best you can do is probably to look for people who are willing to talk about morality abstractly rather than concretely.  Someone who will listen to you say “this is what I value in the world,” and who will talk to you about how to achieve/realize that value or how to refine it in the face of worldly contradictions, is probably on your side in some meaningful sense.  Anyone who says “no, fuck that, you have to work towards achieving these values” is a soldier in an enemy army.

discoursedrome:

collapsedsquid:

collapsedsquid:

Slobodian talked about the the original neoliberals as being basically dominated by the ideology “The economic cannot ever be allowed to become political.“  That was shaped by their experience in the Austro-hungarian empire and it’s experiences with violent nationalism, but also obviously opposes socialism and has been pointed out, they believed that facsism “saved civilization“ from socialism.  In either case though, this was bad, the path to endless conflict according to the original neoliberals.

The Austrian empire did this through monarchy, there was no voting on the monarch and so he could theoretically make decisions without popular input.  This is what I mean when I said they wanted to re-create the Austrian empire.

I described the two ideologies that were bent in support of this as “clintonianism”, based on a specific utilitarian interpretation, and “libertarianism,“ based on commitment to property rights.  Clintonianism can get some support among the poor and public-spirited people because it promises to improve their lot.  Libertarianism can get some support among the moderately rich because they avoid taxes and regulations. 

Both have some conflict with neoliberalism though, clintonianism still leaves the economy as somewhat political and libertarianism leaves the door open to total destabilization. But they’re good enough.

That is why though support of the pure-neoliberal position though is only going to found among the elite though, top level state officials and the ultra-wealthy. It’s a list of things you either can’t have or can’t do, it want a strong state to keep peace that does not redistribute wealth. That is why we are less familiar with this idea and more familiar with the other two sets of ideas, and that is why they are still important to the neoliberal project.

discoursedrome: what I find confusing about this line as I’ve encountered it is why they’re so neurotically hateful of bread and circuses/social safety net stuff instead of, like, viewing it as an investment in people not getting mad and killing you

I think this is a key point, neoliberals are not so much opposed to bread and circuses as they are to the idea that the public can get bread and circuses if they ask for them.  If they’re provided by a ruler out of beneficence then it’s tolerable, but if the people can just ask for stuff that’s the path to a death spiral of increasing demands. That’s where they can differ with libertarians.

Interesting; I might need to read this.

It’s perplexing to me because the way I conceptualize it is that all rulerships function by some kind of majority consent, since that’s the only place it could possibly come from, and you can do various stuff to insulate the rulership against dissent but there’s still some kind of underlying economics of “the more you piss people off the more likely your regime is to explode”. Like, it always seems to me that if you’re predisposed to thinking of things economically then it makes more sense to think of it in the sense that people can always make efficacious demands, you can’t stop them, but you can adjust the cost of making efficacious demands in various ways to make it unlikely that they will. And there have to be various points where “give in to some of the demands” is the most cost-effective way to do that, but it feels like oftentimes neoliberal types rocket way past that point and end up reaping the whirlwind.

It is possible to set up a regime where the practical rule is “there is no political action you can take that will have any influence, the only way to resist the government’s demands involves the kind of rebellion that will completely destroy you and everything you care about.”  And, yes, technically it is still possible to make efficacious demands under such a regime – you can sign up to destroy yourself and everything you care about, just to strike a blow, and if you’re mad enough maybe you will – but it is strategically reasonable for the government to say “if we set things up such that this is the tradeoff, not many people will want to make it.” 

Which frankly sounds like a better deal, overall, than “we have to change our policies to thwart the people asking for bread and circuses just to show that we’re not giving in to them.”

brazenautomaton:

zexreborn:

tanadrin:

tanadrin:

Personally, while I find a lot of the criticisms of Citizen’s United insufficient, I think there is a distinction to be teased out between money and speech, as there is between (say) lobbying and writing to your representative to give them an earful. Just because the distinction isn’t absolute doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for, or indeed a need for, more sophisticated rules where very large sums of money are at stake. For the same reasons that, me, a private person, lending a friend five hundred bucks is mostly unregulated, while me, a bank manager, lending him fifty thousand might attract the scrutiny of various regulatory agencies.

cyprinodont

I mean can we at least admit that financial incentives are almost always more compelling to the type of person likely to become a senator vs moral incentives?

I don’t think this is because congresscreatures are uniquely amoral, I think it’s because the natural human ability to rationalize anything to preserve your status/power/personal comfort means most people in that position would behave the same way. Similarly, I think most people who were President would order drone strikes, even people who, before getting elected, talked about how terrible drone strikes are. I think it takes a uniquely iconoclastic person to fully break from the incentives and intellectual climate that shapes how politicians behave, and that such iconoclastic people are likely to be ineffective politicians for various reasons relating to both how their colleagues would react to them and what other effects in one’s personality such inflexibility produces; the key to building institutions that behave humanely is to ensure you’re not sleepwalking into an incentive structure that makes it significantly easier for them to behave inhumanely, and this is the real meaning behind the notion that power corrupts people.

I think this is related to/is an expression of the principles behind effective anticorruption in poorer countries: it’s not enough to prosecute corrupt politicians and civil servants, you also have to make sure (whether through improvement of the local economy or paying them enough etc.) that corrupt behavior isn’t the only way to advance in your career, make ends meet, etc. My special ire is reserved for people like Newt Gingrich, who took a system which was in a slightly better state and used his influence to push it into a worse equilibrium–in his case, by pressuring representatives to spend more time away from Washington, raising money and campaigning, to procure a short-term political advantage at the expense of the long-term positive function of the House, in which representatives and their families spending a lot of time rubbing elbows made bipartisanship easier, as an outgrowth of preexisting social relationships.

It would almost be better if it were just straight bribery that we had to worry about - at least then corruption would be orthogonal to survival and we might have some reason to hope for individually virtuous politicians. As it stands, an honest politician has a disadvantage in winning and staying in office. Citizens United not only legalized bribery, it legalized the type of bribery most likely to corrupt the political process.

(Modulo @brazenautomaton ‘s well-taken point that campaign expenditures may not be as effective as corporations and politicians think, though note a world where campaign expenditures don’t affect campaign results but everyone thinks they do is very similar to a world where the more mundane type of bribery is legal. I’m the sense, at least, that individual politicians are swayed by gifts that don’t affect their re-election chances).

I’m pretty sure that the data doesn’t bear that out either. “The amazing thing about money in politics is how little of it there is”, and so on. 

It might buy access and thus a legislator’s awareness of the thing you want to change, but it doesn’t buy loyalty. Money to a candidate cannot buy their loyalty and money from a candidate cannot buy votes for them. Money is actually not very useful in politics. Money withers in the presence of status, and status is immutable. 

It also does buy “being taken seriously,” especially in the early stages of a politician’s career.  Not even because you’re spending it on anything, but because the media uses “able to raise money” as a metric for “worth paying attention to.”

I am in no position to say how much of an effect this particular dynamic has, but at the very least it probably leaves a lot of politicians with bad habits.

There is something particularly despicable, particularly cowardly, about the kind of public writing that says something like –

We assert that the people in charge of the culture are just tribal priests, peddling mumbo-jumbo in order to benefit one particular slice of the population at the expense of everyone else.  We hereby counsel revolution and put ourselves forward as an alternative cadre of tribal priests, so that we can peddle a different brand of mumbo-jumbo in order to benefit a different slice of the population.

If you believe that the truth will save us, then speak the truth and don’t go hawking lies.  If you believe that we need lies in order to keep the wheels of society spinning – which is a thing you can believe – then you’d best have a very good explanation for why your lies are so much better than the other guy’s lies that it’s worth the cost of revolution.

Talkin’ About Outsiders

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

Riffing on my recent post:

If you wanted to keep something like the traditional D&D Great Wheel cosmology, and you wanted all the planes on the Wheel and all the various alignment-oriented races of outsiders to be cool and thematic and not-shoehorned-in, what would it look like?  Let’s give it a shot.  Maybe this will be useful someday, if I ever run a planar-savvy D&D campaign.  Or if you do.

Keep reading

The Fae have almost no resonance as the thing that LN Outsiders need to be. You can justify “Oh, Fae can be seen as LN”, but you think “avatars of LN”, and what comes to mind has almost nothing in common with the Fae. Fae exist outside of good and evil and law and chaos. Fae cannot be understood in that framework.

I’d want mechanistic, robotic, indefatigable beings whose commitment to principles and laws cannot be dissuaded – no matter what a bad idea their task may be to mortal health. A samurai-bushido aesthetic in places would also help.

also: you don’t have a strong through-line as to what CG Outsiders are but you want them not to have a strong visual theme either? and you optimized for “where do they live” over “what do they do” when the latter is far more relevant to D&D? and you never even considered “avatars of Hot-Blooded Fighting Spirit” as their thing?

I’d want mechanistic, robotic, indefatigable beings whose commitment to principles and laws cannot be dissuaded – no matter what a bad idea their task may be to mortal health. A samurai-bushido aesthetic in places would also help.

I mean, your narrative desires may vary, but this is precisely the thing from which I am trying to get away.  (The “mechanistic, robotic, indefatigable” bit, anyway.  The samurai/bushido thing is cool, thematically appropriate, and probably very adaptable to my purposes.)  There are really only two stories you can tell about the Borg – “oh no, the Borg!” and “holy crap, we’re temporarily allied with the Borg, because our interests happen to align with their Great Purpose!” – and those two combined are not enough to support a major setting element of this kind. 

Something I should have talked about, in my last post, is the idea that internal diversity and complexity is necessary to make a race any good for worldbuilding purposes.  This is a problem that all D&D outsiders run into a lot, especially demons, who (as I said) often get written as “they’re all Killfuck Soulshitter.”  It is important to my conception of things that, if you poke around the Abyss for long enough, you can find a nice demon.  Not a good demon, that’s a contradiction in terms, barring weird shenanigans with redemption-oriented plot-magic – it is inherent to a demon’s nature that it cannot really value anyone’s well-being above its own desires – but that doesn’t preclude it from having desires like “bake cookies for my friends and throw a kickin’ party where everyone has a blast.”  

Anyway.  Take the same mentality to LN.  You have a bunch of creatures who aren’t all the same as each other, who are capable of having personalities and individuation and even conflict with each other, but who are fanatically bound to the principles and commitments that define them – and, to me, this sounds like the fae from the tales I know.  “I swore to my queen that I would kill anyone who crosses this bridge, and sure, that was fifteen hundred years ago and our court hasn’t been located here in centuries and in fact no one including my queen gives a shit, but you don’t expect me to break my word, do you?”  “You have brought me the marriage-gifts as defined by the customs of my people, looks like we’re married now, guess we’re both going to have to deal.”  Etc.

(A lot of this just boils down to “I think that, if you’re going to have a race of outsiders that insanely follows its lawful directives without any flavoring from good or evil, I prefer the ‘sworn to my fairy law’ flavoring over the ‘beep boop I have been programmed’ flavoring.”)

also: you don’t have a strong through-line as to what CG Outsiders are but you want them not to have a strong visual theme either? and you optimized for “where do they live” over “what do they do” when the latter is far more relevant to D&D? and you never even considered “avatars of Hot-Blooded Fighting Spirit” as their thing?

I did consider that thing, actually.  It’s a classic way to characterize CG, and while usually it’s done with something more like a Jovial Viking Brawler vibe (like Kord), you could give it a shonen kind of spin, sure.  And, yeah, I would want guys like that to be represented in the CG race.  I rejected it as an overarching idea for the kinds of reasons discussed above; it seemed too one-note for an entire alignment’s worth of outsider race.  In particular, I want it to be possible for planar travelers (or CG souls in their paradisical afterlife) to be able to engage with heavily CG-flavored things without necessarily being part of constant violence or even constant Strenuously Difficult Undertakings.

I’ll be honest – the “starting with ‘where they live’“ strategy worked out pretty well, as far as I’m concerned.  After like an hour of thinking about the couple of paragraphs I put in my post, I felt as though I had a pretty good handle on these guys, and could write up a smattering of monster descriptions with relatively little trouble.

(Short version: The Shiny People of a big heterogeneous city.  Angels who are dedicated to doing cool nice things and sharing them with others in a sort of idiosyncratic, always-having-to-be-different kind of way.  The big ones are lords of little fiefdoms where they do Variegated Awesome Shit, the little ones sometimes do the same thing on a smaller scale but more often bop between the fiefdoms as, uh, celestial scenesters.  You imagine holy art galleries and holy rambling semi-wild parks and holy spiritualist chapels and holy gaming parlors and holy sex temples and holy kitten cafes, and, yes, holy fighting arenas, all crammed cheek-by-jowl instead of separated out into Abyss-style layers.  And then you imagine the sort of creatures who would be dwelling in those places.)

Talkin’ About Outsiders

Riffing on my recent post:

If you wanted to keep something like the traditional D&D Great Wheel cosmology, and you wanted all the planes on the Wheel and all the various alignment-oriented races of outsiders to be cool and thematic and not-shoehorned-in, what would it look like?  Let’s give it a shot.  Maybe this will be useful someday, if I ever run a planar-savvy D&D campaign.  Or if you do.

Guiding Principles:

* All groups of outsiders should feel narratively resonant.  Players should have an intuitive sense of what they’re about, what role they would play in heroic fantasy stories, etc.  We want to avoid “oh yeah, those guys over in that corner, because of course there have to be some guys over in that corner.”

* Outsiders should feel otherworldly and mystical, like the spirits they are, not like Another Race of Monsters that’s been jammed into a planar role by fiat. 

* Outsiders should strongly reflect their associated alignment, but, like, in a cool way. 

I’m also going to be working with my own personal gut-level sense of how the alignment grid “should” work on a cosmic scale, which suggests that the “corner planes” – LG, CG, LE, and CE – are going to be the strongest, most magical, most populated, etc.  In a metaphysical sense, a strong good/evil commitment and a strong law/chaos commitment reinforce each other rather than diluting each other.  In a demographic sense, while in fact the plurality of mortals are TN due to vacillation or apathy, most noteworthy mortals with plane-defining levels of soul power have corner alignments.  In a pragmatic storycrafting sense, three of those four corners are way cooler and better-developed than anything else on the Wheel, so we should probably run with that.  The upshot is that the NG, NE, LN, and CN outsiders can and should be constructed such that they just have less impact on the universe overall.  The in-betweeny planes…well, they’re afterthoughts, we’ll get to them (briefly) but can ignore them for now.

OK.  Diving in:

Chaotic evil demons from the Abyss and lawful evil devils from Hell are being kept, more or less intact.  They’ve gotten more attention than any other planar races, by like an order of magnitude; they’ve got lots of existing lore and monster-design that people know and love; it would be a crime to throw that stuff away.  Fluff should probably try to present them with a somewhat more-philosophical, less-Flanderizing spin than they usually get.  The conceptual heart of demon-ness isn’t “graaaargh kill smash consume defile” (even if that is a popular instantiation), it’s something like “literally nothing matters except my desire and my vision.”  Similarly, devils would benefit from a little less “we’re all legalistic treacherous assholes” (even if many of them are) and a little more “the order of the universe is legitimate, the infernal hierarchy is legitimate, we follow the rules but we play to win.”  But fundamentally these are the creatures you know and love, don’t fix what ain’t broke. 

Neutral evil yugoloths can stay, too, more or less.  They’ve gotten a fair amount of good monster design too, and they’re popular, although I confess that I have no idea why.  A race of fiendish mercenaries who manipulate and prolong the Blood War?  Sure, why not?  I do want to give them a bit more character, though, and not the inexplicable apocalypse-obsessed death-spirit thing from Pathfinder.  Rather: as I understand it, neutral evil as an alignment is mostly about pure selfishness.  It’s not hard to capture the idea of “selfishness” in spiritual cosmic form – that’s the gaki, the hungry ghost.  Yugoloths should be driven by intense insatiable cravings, presumably with each kind having a different general category of craving.  This will do a lot to define their politics internal and external, the means of treating with them, etc.  (Also, to be clear, “daemon” as an importantly-separate thing from “demon” is very silly and I have no truck with it.)

The collective term for demons, devils, and yugoloths is of course “fiends.”

The lawful neutral outsider race has already been covered in my previous post: that’s the fae.  Inhumanly perfect spirits obsessed with rules, oaths, codes-of-honor, etc.  Dangerous, and certainly not benevolent, but also not inimical to the flourishing of mortals in the way that fiends are.  Hard to understand, as all outsiders must on some level be, but probably easier to deal with than any other spirits if you know the right codes and protocols.  Probably we play down the “capricious nature spirit” thing and play up the bit where they have courts, monarchs, diplomatic ties to Heaven and Hell, etc.

The chaotic neutral race should be…well, something better than the slaadi, that’s for sure.  “They’re infinitely variable and unpredictable, except that they’re all magic frogs who speak in word salad.”  Gee.  Useful for storytelling, that.  I don’t have any super-brilliant ideas here (and am open to suggestions), but I have what I believe to be a good-enough idea: genies.  Proud, wild, tempestuous spirits who treasure their own freedom and dignity above all else.  Binding them can be a road to great power, since they’ll do pretty much anything to escape, but it’s also unbelievably risky.  You can make up some cute lore about their anarchic ad-hoc anything-goes society. 

I’d like to use “angels” as the collective term for good-aligned outsiders, the equivalent of “fiends.”  We could go with “celestials,” I guess, but it’s awkward that the LG plane specifically is (sometimes) called Celestia, and really “angels” has a connotative punch like nothing else. 

Lawful good gets archons.  Yay archons.  Tiered choirs, divine armies, holy holy holy, the whole shebang.  The fluff for these guys could stand to be fleshed out some – as far as I know it hasn’t been touched since the 3.5e Book of Exalted Deeds, and that version was kinda lame – but there’s like infinite amounts of Christian angelology lore on which to draw, so I’m not worried.

Neutral good needs something better than guardinals, since “benevolent animal dudes” really had no spiritual resonance at all.  Fortunately we can do some conceptual repurposing here. I think we can just grab the beings that D&D currently calls “angels,” start calling them all “devas” – even the planetars and solars, which I guess become “planetary devas” and “solar devas” – and stick them all in NG.  No one really uses them as all-purpose divine servants anyway, as far as I can tell.  They are beings of pure benevolence, protectors and guardians and healers, etc. etc.  Possibly we call the NG plane “Celestia,” to fit with the celestial-objects theme of the devas, and just go with “Heaven” for the LG plane.

And then we come to chaotic good, which is definitely the hardest row to hoe.  CG has a very important spot on the Great Wheel, the CG outsiders need to have something akin to the narrative power of the demons and devils and archons, and…I just don’t think there’s any pre-existing thing that fits the bill.  “Chaotic good” is not the kind of idea that has been traditionally associated with mighty spiritual mysteries, which is probably why all the existing CG outsider races suck so much.  (Seriously, as far as I can tell, it’s always either “we’re elf knights who fight for freedom! but, like, planar!” or “uh, we’re spirits of art and beauty, I guess, sorta?”) We’re going to have to develop these guys from scratch. 

Rather than trying to come up with an “archetypically CG outlook” or something, I think it would make sense to start with an image of their world and society.  This is a good, lovely, beneficent version of the Abyss.  This is a place of tremendous diversity, where outsider lords carve out their own domains according to their own idiosyncratic specifications.  Which means you have, like, a million conflicting little paradises each defined by its own vision.  (But not, like, at war, the way demon lords always are, we’re all very Good here.  Just…different from each other.)  It probably adds up to a sort of hipster’s-vision-of-the-big-city vibe.  You imagine a race of cosmic Manic Pixie Dream Girls, essentially, always flowing into and out of each other’s circles, descending to the Prime Material Plane in order to experience delights / inspire greatness / find adoring mortal fans who will validate their coolness. 

I think it would be a mistake to give these guys a single strong visual theme, the way that the guardinals are “animal people” and the eladrin are “pretty elves.”  They’re a menagerie of weird-but-beautiful monsters, the way that demons are a menagerie of weird-but-ugly monsters.  The race needs a name, but right now I don’t have a good one.

For true neutral outsiders, I think we can just go with elementals and call it a day.  They’re mindless!  They do as they’re commanded, unless they don’t, in which case they have incredibly simplistic urges like “burn” or “flow!” 

The in-between planes – y’know, Gehenna, the Beastlands, Acheron, etc. – are cool, in some vague theoretical sense, and I don’t think we should scrap them entirely.  But I also think it’s a mistake to try and give them their own full-fledged native outsider races, to pretend that they’re going to have the same depth of inherent character as the main eight outer planes, etc.  Instead, I suspect it’s best to use them as divine domains.  Because they don’t have powerful native outsider races, they’ve all been taken over by gods.  Exactly which gods live on which ones is a matter of your particular setting’s theology, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense to say “these are the places where you’d expect to find gods by default, a god who lives on one of the main eight planes is doing something kinda weird and probably has a close relationship with the local outsiders.”

marcusseldon:

I am super interested in elections, election forecasting, and post-election analysis. One thing that happens when one really immerses themselves in this topic, though, is a creeping sense that (at least general) elections are driven by these over-arching deterministic fundamentals that have little to do with which party is more competent or reflective of the people’s will. It’s that as sense that, to a first approximation, nothing that we think should matter actually matters in the long run.

The 2016 election was not that radically different than 2012, despite it featuring the two most unpopular candidates of all time, one of whom was the least conventional candidate in at least a generation and who was in (in his campaign rhetoric and persona) very different than the previous nominee of his party. Sure, certain pre-existing trends were accelerated a little bit. The professional class shifted toward the Democrats a little bit faster than they had already been, and working class whites in the north and Appalachia shifted toward the Republicans a little faster than they had been. But in the big picture, the election was well within the margin of error for fundamentals-based models.

Take a look at Trump’s approval rating:

Trump’s disapproval ticks up a little bit when Comey is fired, and ticks down a little bit once healthcare and the tax bill fade from the news cycle. But fundamentally, only 3%-5% of the public is changing their minds at any given point, and most big events don’t seem to have any impact at all (remember the Trump and Putin in Helsinki controversy? can you find it on this chart?). 

What about the generic ballot?

Even less variable than Trump’s approval! Does anything matter? It looks like Democrats’ fortunes were ever so slightly better when the tax bill was in the news a bunch, but other than that there has been stasis. I don’t see any movement related to Kavanaugh, for example, only party bases consolidating in the last month of an election as expected.

People talk a lot about how Obama lost his party a lot of power downballot, leading to an ineffectual left. This is true, but it’s mostly not because of incompetence on Obama’s part. You would expect the President’s party to lose a ton of elections in the valley of the worst recession in two generations (2010), which was the year most of the downballot damage was done.Then you would expect modest changes from that baseline afterwards in a slow-growing economy, and a close Presidential election in 2016. 

Over the past 10 years, the only election that was actually affected strongly by more concrete political and policy decisions was maybe the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial election, where the Democrats may have hung on only because the GOP shut down the government a few weeks prior and tarnished their brand for a short time.

American politics seems to particularly to be in a rut right now despite all the weird stuff going on. There have been interesting and dramatic developments in European polling and elections recently, for instance. Possibly some combination of a polarized two party system and first past the post has lead to this stasis, but it’s hard to say.

Culture war.  Which is the sociocultural extension of polarization.  Plus the two-party system and FTTP, as you say.

…that’s a bit of a pat answer, but I do think it’s largely what’s responsible.  In order to get political shakeups, voters have to feel like they have alternatives to which they can move.  So long as we have a two-faction system, and any attempt to create a third faction will mostly have the effect of damaging the faction from which it draws, and the enemy faction is Satan, there’s really nothing you can do but keep voting the party line no matter how disappointing your party becomes. 

The people I know in real life are a very mixed bag politically and intellectually, running from classical liberals to sophisticated SJW types to something-like-communists to libertarians to gritty business pragmatists to proponents of insane homebrewed blue-and-orange theories.  And yet none of them would ever consider voting Republican, not unless something very substantive changes.  Nor should they!  By any of their standards, the Republicans are so much worse than the alternatives!  And, uh, I gather that sentiments are similar over on the other side.

michaelblume:

shlevy:

balioc:

The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that I haven’t seen more of the obvious right-populist-flavored arguments for full drug legalization.

Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison yourself with cocaine, or heroin, or meth.  But I also don’t think it’s my business.  The nanny-state liberals seem pretty sure that it’s their business, though.  Sure enough that they’ll get all up in your face.  Sure enough that they’ll send their DEA narcs in the black helicopters around to go sniffing.

In fact, they seem so sure of it that they’re willing to single-handedly fund all the murderous criminal cartels in Central America, and South America, and the Middle East.  Because that’s what they’re doing!  All those gangs support themselves through drug sales, on which they have a monopoly, because our government was stupid enough to give them a monopoly!  Strike the damn drug laws, and suddenly all the users aren’t going to be buying from criminal goons – they’ll be buying from Wal-Mart!  If that money’s going to flow, let it flow into the pockets of hard-working American business owners and job creators!

Other than the last sentence this is literally what the libertarians I’ve been hanging out with since forever have always said.

Take a right-populist. Make the minimal changes to their brain such that they are capable of hearing and appreciating this argument. Congratulations, you now have a right-libertarian.

Point being, yes, I appreciate all the obvious ways in which this scans as a libertarian (or even leftist) argument – and have seen them dragged out oncce again in the comments to this post – but “we should take money away from Dangerous Hispanic Gangsters and instead funnel it to American Business” is a right-populist framing, it explicitly invokes both idolized local totems and hated outgroup totems, and it seems like you should be able to do something with that.

The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that I haven’t seen more of the obvious right-populist-flavored arguments for full drug legalization.

Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea to poison yourself with cocaine, or heroin, or meth.  But I also don’t think it’s my business.  The nanny-state liberals seem pretty sure that it’s their business, though.  Sure enough that they’ll get all up in your face.  Sure enough that they’ll send their DEA narcs in the black helicopters around to go sniffing.

In fact, they seem so sure of it that they’re willing to single-handedly fund all the murderous criminal cartels in Central America, and South America, and the Middle East.  Because that’s what they’re doing!  All those gangs support themselves through drug sales, on which they have a monopoly, because our government was stupid enough to give them a monopoly!  Strike the damn drug laws, and suddenly all the users aren’t going to be buying from criminal goons – they’ll be buying from Wal-Mart!  If that money’s going to flow, let it flow into the pockets of hard-working American business owners and job creators!

Proposed:

In D&D, and in fantasy universes defined by the D&D alignment grid or anything similar, where each alignment gets its own race of Archetypical Exemplar Outsider Spirit Dudes – LE devils, CE demons, LG archons / celestials / whatever, you know the drill – the LN race always tends to be unpleasantly lame.  Formians suck, inevitables suck, modrons suck except when their inherent goofiness is being used for humor.  And it’s always for the same reason.  “Beep boop 100101100111, we have no individuality or personality, we march in lockstep in order to turn the universe into endless rows of featureless grey cubes” is a boring setup that is no fun to engage with, and the party line seems to be that cosmic-scale lawful neutrality has to be about that thing.

This is stupid.  Just as not every demon in the Abyss has to be Killfuck Soulshitter, because “chaos” and “evil” both mean a lot of different things, not every planar spirit of pure law has to be about rows of grey cubes, because “law” means a lot of different things too.  (And, yes, in official materials way too many demons are Killfuck Soulshitter, but…one problem at a time.)  In particular, “lawful” shouldn’t translate to “boring” any more than “chaotic” should translate to “wacky.”

For your new archetypical LN planar race, I propose: the fey.  Like, classic Eurofae-type fey, the ones you know.

Seriously!  They are creatures who devote the entirety of their being to living by, to being defined by, their codes and their oaths.  They are sworn to arbitrary rules that may not make any sense to anyone else, and that may not advance their interests in any way, but come what may they will never ever break those rules.  They are, famously, indifferent to good and evil alike. 

…mumble grumble, the D&D thing where fey are always chaotic makes no sense at all, unless you’re just going by the heuristic that says “lithe and emotional = chaotic, blocky and stolid = lawful.” 

discoursedrome:

shieldfoss:

@ms-demeanor

Do people literally think that gender studies classes entail sitting around comparing oppressions and handing out points for whoever finds the most privileged white boy to attack?

… pretty much? Like, not 100% of course but a lot like that.

If so why do they think that?

Have you looked at the syllabus for your school’s gender studies courses? Have you flipped through a gender studies textbook? Have y’all read any gender studies papers outside of “you won’t believe what bullshit they published” articles?

No of course not.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t look at the syllabus for the organic chemistry department either, and yet I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what that’s about, and when I’ve talked to chemists we don’t talk past each other. Construction engineers/same thing. Business Majors with a minor in Arabic/same thing. Teachers/. Doctors/.

So why do I think that’s what gender studies is like? The same way I know what Organic Chemistry is like: I’ve done a slight bit of reading, have a slight bit of natural interest, and have spoken to people who studied this. I know there’s more to it than dunking on privileged people, but the part of it that affects my life is pretty much all like that.

Only when I am critical of the continental philosophical tradition, and its various derivatives like gender studies, does this idea surface; that you’re only allowed to critique things after dedicating your life to them.

And I have another paragraph I want to write but I don’t know how to write it without sounding either exceptionally arrogant or exceptionally insulting. I’m going to try and I ask you to please interpret it kindly because I don’t actually dislike people who dedicate their studies to the liberal arts, but here it comes:

Things gain traction in the analytical tradition because it is close enough to the truth to be useful. Things gain traction in the liberal arts exclusively because it is fashionable.

The problem I have with this way of looking at it is that gender studies and critical theory generally have a huge, motivated cultural apparatus dedicated to negatively misrepresenting them for political reasons, which Organic Chemistry generally does not (notwithstanding the sour-grapes people who washed out of org chem because of all the memorization and assays and are bitter about it forever). The popular conceptions of politically controversial fields actually are less representative than popular conceptions of more neutral ones, simply due to the fact that wider society’s main interest in those fields is as political battlefields.

Here as anywhere contentious, the answer to “why do people think this bad stuff if it’s not true” is “because they’ve received a predetermined worldview in which these people are their enemies, and due to filter bubbles and confirmation bias they only hear or think about what enemy groups are doing in the cases that most complement that worldview.” Same reason people think of tort law as being full of cases where a no-hoper gets awarded millions of dollars in emotional-hardship damages for papercuts – which of course does still happen sometimes, in the same way as the ridiculous shit from crit theory does happen sometimes.

I only really did lower-level humanities stuff, and I imagine it gets narrower and more ideological at a high level if only because you need to butter up your advisor, but my experience doing humanities and social sciences stuff is that in undergrad teachers mostly want you to be conversant in the major thinkers, frameworks and books in the field, but don’t really care what position you take within that space so long as you’re able to demonstrate a grasp of the subject matter and argument format. A lot of the core texts are just, “here’s all the different theories and people you need to know in this field, here’s the context in which they developed and what they say about each other, here’s a reading list specific to each of them.”

I only ever took one “soft” course where the prof was really pushing a specific ideology – it was pol sci, but I think it was just a bad prof and not the subject’s fault. I’ve mainly seen the bad stuff associated with crit theory happen outside the context of actual classes, like in student interest groups and so forth. We read books with specific agendas, but we usually read books with different agendas in the same course, and we were always encouraged to read them critically. Honestly the wacky SJ stuff is much more something I associate with undergrads who have a shallow grasp of the subject than with the professors who actually work in the field. I’ve heard of professors who pull that shit so they clearly exist, but unless things have gotten much worse in the past ten years (which is possible!), they’re far less common than reputed.

I can’t say much about gender studies because I only ever did the 101-level of it, but I remember it being interesting and inoffensive. The one thing I remember disliking was that I felt it was taking the strict social-constructionist position too seriously, but I argued about that in class discussions and the prof was happy and encouraged me to pursue the subject further, because in a 101-level course just seeming interested and able to grapple with the material is positive.

…it’s also worth remembering that the popular conception of most fields is wildly inaccurate.  This is double-plus-true of pure math, but your average Joe’s conception of what it means to study law or psychology or linguistics or [analytic] philosophy is laughably inaccurate.  Even if we’re talking about a relatively savvy, college-educated sort of Joe.  No reason that gender studies et al should be exempt.  Any given individual may or may not have more of a clue than that, but the dynamics of sneering and Dunning-Kruger apply as much as they ever do.

It’s also also worth remembering that your educational experience is likely to vary enormously due to random factors.  Your section of Critical Gender Theory 101 has a cool thoughtful rigorous professor who pushes you hard to master the material but doesn’t make ideological demands, the other section has a rabid zealot professor who’s determined to educate you out of your cispatriarchal mind-slavery, and that’s just sort of how things go.  Plenty of both kinds in the world.  (To some extent they cluster by school and department, unsurprisingly, which makes it harder to notice the variation.  But.)

As a default rule, “do not speak whereof you do not know” is wise.  Of course, leaning on that too hard turns into the Courtier’s Reply; sometimes there really is a systemic problem with a field, sometimes an outsider really is needed to call bullshit what it is.  Ultimately this crashes into the rock of “you cannot solve the important things with simple heuristics, hard problems are actually hard.”  But you can make some headway just by trying to do a little bit of research and going looking for the most impressive / legitimately-articulate representatives of the field, rather than just the obnoxious ones who are right to hand.

napoleonchingon:

It pisses me off tremendously that a significant portion of rightists see the institutional right as weak and feckless and unable to stop the general trend of universal leftward political movement, AND a significant portion of leftists see the institutional left as weak and feckless and unable to stop the general trend of universal rightward political movement. Like I can accept and understand that different people have different opinions of what is good and what would be right for society and so on, and that these people have different needs and ideologies and life experiences and also that some of these people are variously evil or delusional. But how can it be that a significant proportion of opposing factions take it as a clear objective given that the opposing faction is winning, without even the slightest bit of reflection that should be brought about by noticing their enemies saying the same thing.

As much fun as it is to make jabs that amount to “everyone on both sides is stupid,” in fact both sides are basically apprehending the truth.  They’re measuring, and being alarmed by, different things.

(NOTE: The following is meant to apply only to America.  I have much less sense of what the cultural situation on the ground is like in other places.)

The right has noted, correctly, that the country as a whole is becoming more and more…let’s say left-aligned…in its thinking and its allegiances.  The favored memes of the left are accelerating in popularity at a tremendous rate.  Anything in the pro-diversity anti-racism/sexism/whatever memeplex has gone from “controversial” to “mainstream” to “enforced dogma that will get you fired for disagreeing” at lightning speed; once-unthinkable proposals like UBI, open borders, drug legalization, etc. now have both substantial popular support and substantial elite support.  This is partly because of changing demographics, partly because the major cultural institutions are mostly left-aligned themselves, partly because of economic factors like “ever-increasing urbanization” and “it’s really not as easy to make your living from a small business as it used to be.”  Conservatives observe this with panic; they feel that their own home is being made alien to them and that there are ever-fewer contexts where they can feel like they’re not being suppressed by a hostile foreign regime.

People on the left will own up to all of this, most of the time.  Occasionally someone will make noises about how we’re going to become Gilead or something, but…that’s a rhetorical gambit designed to evoke outrage and sympathy, not a serious claim, and I think everyone pretty much knows it.  “Blue Tribe” Americans know what the “right side of history” is (their side), they expect the future to agree with them, they expect the culture to line up with their ideals ever-more-closely, and they’re way more surprised by cultural defeats than by cultural victories.  

The left has noted, correctly, that the right has a stranglehold on the country’s political mechanisms that is vastly disproportionate to its numbers or its cultural traction.  At the very least, despite the substantial and ever-increasing popularity of left-aligned ideas – and they are popular, especially if you can avoid couching them in obnoxious polarizing jargon – the federal government swings back and forth in a very regular way, and for the last long while Republicans seem to have had a major advantage on the state and local levels.  Something something Senate makeup Electoral College rural over-representation.  And the veto-point-heavy structure of American government means that it’s a lot harder to do things than to not do things, which favors conservative ideologies yet further on a practical level.  

The 2016 election was kind of a watershed moment for this.  The Republican candidacies for major national office were farcically bad, the whole thing was a nightmare comedy of incompetence and lack-of-coordination, it looked as though the GOP was actively trying to throw all the races and tear itself apart…and the result was that it took full control of every branch of government.

So all that cultural success hasn’t translated to pretty much anything (or at least anything worth crowing about) in terms of major left-side concerns like climate change, health care, redistribution, criminal justice reform, etc.  Leftists observe this with panic; they think that a tiny coterie of evil capitalist elites, plus some deplorable stooges, are going to keep the country submerged in misery and poverty for the indefinite future. 

oligopsalter:

eightyonekilograms:

eightyonekilograms:

eightyonekilograms:

oligopsoneia:

for others who think materialism* is probably true, what’s your best guess/reasoning re: what the world is like conditional on its being false?

*i mean ontological materialism here, attempting to move the religion discourse somewhere interesting, but if you have an interesting response for the historical kind I won’t stop you

I would love to know this as well. “Conditional on materialism being false” encompasses a lot, and many anti-materialist positions are mutually contradictory. So this question is difficult to answer in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m being set up for a trap where somebody springs their entirely new type of anti-materialism on me.

One possibility that would be a serious blow to materialism might be mental phenomena affecting the external world (if you want to be really obstinate, “humanity’s collective subjective experience of the world”) with no mediating physical interaction. Or, more pithily, “psychic powers”.

But if I bring up psychic powers to most anti-materialists, they get offended and go “C’mon, be serious. You’re strawmanning us, of course we don’t believe in that stuff.” And that’s fine, non-materialism doesn’t have to imply psychic powers, but they can never tell me what their anti-materialism looks like or implies for the physical world.

I have seen anti-materialist claims that there can never actually be “evidence against materialism”, because evidence is always physical and material. Again, that’s fine if that’s what you believe, but it leaves me in an awkward position when I’m supposed to put forward a counterfactual claim for what anti-materialism might look like.

I was looking forward to this discussion and I’m still disappointed that oligopsoneia deactivated. Does anyone want to get back into it?

*nudges* @oligopsalter Eh? Eh?

Psychic powers as strong evidence against materialism: agreed. There still might be ways in which you could rescue most of what we find compelling about materialism, but it would certainly be weaker and less of a sure thing.

(I also don’t think that psychic powers are all that ridiculous a notion to entertain: the strongest evidence against them seems to be materialist priors based on a long track record of explanatory power of materialism. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal and some large-n evidence that I’d take seriously without those priors.)

So, updating things:

Revealed religions: still almost certainly false, since they all contradict each other, without any good reason to prefer one over the other - i would update in the direction of many miraculous accounts being true, but these don’t seem to favor one religion over others - and there seem to be good sociological evidence of why we develop them. I would update in the direction of historical revelation being based in real supernatural events, however. I would probably want to investigate if one religion’s miracles hold up better to examination than others - it would surprise me but the stakes would be high. (I guess the chances are still low but the stakes are still high so it would be good to look into this anyway, I guess.)

Existence of God: God seems to solve a lot of (real, not just God-of-the-gaps) philosophical problems if you can get around the mind-as-fundamental thing, and I still suspect on those philosophical grounds that there’s something like God - an ultimate unmoved mover that’s maximally simple and not affected by anything else but everything depends on etc - except not conscious. I’m not sure how much materialism being false would give me reasons to think this thing is now conscious, but it would make it a bit less ridiculous, so p(meaningful theism) definitely goes up.

Metaethics: I think the best accounts of ethics are just a combination of decision theory and peer pressure, which can be complicated in the particulars (obviously) but don’t depend on any sort of complicated ontological machinery. So not updating this. Obviously if like there’s a God sending people to Hell or w/e that becomes a cause priority but in a relatively boring way.

While we’re at it, heaven and hell: I feel like there’s at-least-within-model infinite anthropic evidence against these as classically conceived, since if they’re true you should almost certainly find yoursef in heaven or hell rather than on earth. Reincarnation seems a lot more likely, esp since there seem to be a lot more accounts of ghosts and reincarnation than the saved/damned coming around to say hi (although maybe they just can’t interact, or it’s after a final judgment, or w/e.)

Angels, demons, small-g gods: totally plausible, seem to have a lot of anecdotal evidence behind them. That book by the druid guy that @anaisnein reccomended sounds about right on the philosophical implications/greater plausibility of this than many more elaborate religions, except that my instinct would be not to trust these entities at all. Will Newsome once suggested that omnitheology is basically a method of rigorously defining what demons it’s safe to interact with, which suggests that you should maybe be a henotheist but only for extremely good gods like jesus or amida or idk some god you openly made up like elua or whatever

as usual with any complicated topic i’m probably deeply wrong about a bunch if not all of this, completely missing important parts of it, &c

The most important pieces of evidence regarding materialism, in a practical human sense, are all mechanisms-of-cognition stuff.  Phineas Gage, neurological experiments, hormonal changes, etc.

Psychic powers and disembodied spirits are all very well, but you can probably take or leave them unless you’re a hardcore believer in something specific.  Almost everyone who’s committed to non-materialism cares about some form of “my personality exists independently of my body-meats,” such that it can survive physical death / travel the spirit-realms / whatever.  Seeing how physical processes can alter all the things that make you you renders this kind of thinking extremely difficult to maintain.

(…yes, this means that the best piece of concrete evidence for non-materialism is probably the continued hardness of the hard problem of consciousness.  But if all that ends up getting you even in the best case is “the soul is a traitless point-of-view that needs functioning brainmeats in order to be a person,” you don’t have a very satisfying religion or magic system or anything.)

thathopeyetlives:

lenyberry:

baroquespiral:

funereal-disease:

What drives me nuts about the whole “boomers vs. millennials” narrative is like – its construction depends entirely on the erasure of already marginalized people. 

“Boomer”, in these arguments, always means “white, affluent, and able-bodied”. The existence of poor, nonwhite, or disabled baby boomers contradicts the oppressor/oppressed paradigm, so they are simply ignored. “40 years ago everyone had a house and a job and lived in harmony” is a fiction. It has always been a fiction. It’s post-WWII propaganda constructed to dismiss systemic poverty and racism. Hold up the smiling suburban ideal and no one will notice the slums. It has never been true for more than a fraction of people, and it drives me batty how many millennials wholeheartedly buy into it. I’m sincerely sorry you can’t afford a house, but for the love of god stop acting like systemic inequality was just invented because you hadn’t noticed it before. 

It’s fiction that directly implies the demand “Make America Great Again”.

Also friendly reminder that the reason old people skew conservative is not that people get more conservative as they get older, but that poor and disabled and otherwise marginalized people tend to die younger. 

So yeah, there’s probably more conservative boomers than millenials NOW. That doesn’t mean that was the case when the boomers were in their late 20′s and early 30′s.

Is that actually true at least to the degree of “the only significant reason why it happens”?

The “people become conservative as they age” often seems to be targeted at “your thirties” or “as soon as you have a stake in maintaining society” and it’s often discussed as a trend that happens to individual people who were never marginalized.

Honestly, to the extent that it’s a thing, I think it’s mostly cohort effect.  The thought-drivers of a generation marinate in certain memes while they’re in high school and college, and because they’re the rising youth, those memes are “radical.”  Twenty years later those same memes are “conservative” and the new cohort is interested in different things.

@oligopsalter​:

I unironically do hope that if further reflection reveals me unworthy of reverence that people piss on my grave, etc. It certainly doesn’t affect me, I’ll be gone by then; the only value of my bones will be in what the living find in it 

“Worthy of reverence,” taken at face value, seems like an absurdly high bar.  Most people aren’t that thing, and I don’t imagine that either of us endorses “pissing on graves” as the default.  But I assume that’s just semantics.

“The only value of my bones will be in what the living find in them.”

Sure.  What kind of value is that likely to be?

It’s really not “we think this guy was awesome, and we want to memorialize that awesomeness as a reflection of our present values.”  There are people, right now, who think that memorial is that thing – way too many of them – but this doesn’t hold up if you look at it even for a moment.  We “commemorate” events we barely remember and people about whom we know practically nothing.  We preserve, and lovingly maintain, the art and artifacts of cultures who were frighteningly alien to us.  We give everyone a grave marker (ahem), if we possibly can, without asking whether that person deserved it.    None of our memorial praxis looks remotely like something rooted in straightforward moral approval. 

So why?

Partly it’s the historian’s impulse, or the antiquarian’s impulse.   We don’t want old things to disappear unnecessarily, not when our understanding of the past is already so fragile.  The memory of civilization is a long slow war against entropy, and we actually have to fight it unless we want to forfeit.

But that’s only a small part of it, applying only to certain kinds of things.  Beyond that…

It’s about having enough bits of the past around – actual bits of the past, not heavily filtered through the commentary of the present – to be able to maintain any kind of temporal perspective.  It’s about remembering that, yes, there actually were ages gone by, and they had their own wars and glories and sorrows, and no one living then gave a shit about most of the things that matter to you.  It’s about memento mori, and being able to think about the dead as people rather than as flat symbols, not for their sake but for yours.  It’s about reading the story-of-existence that others have written rather than scribbling all over their text, in recognition of the fact that in the end there’s not going to be anything left of you save whatever story you were able to write. 

discoursedrome:

balioc:

marcusseldon:

One interesting argument in the comments of the SSC NIMBY post is a lot of people are posting who don’t like cities, and are asking why metro areas have to keep expanding.

Which, well, as long as the population keeps growing, cities will grow. I guess you could have ever-sprawling suburbs, but at some point the commutes become impractical.

More telecommuting.

Seriously – given the size of the social gains that could result from decoupling productivity and geography on a large scale – the fact that most creative-class / knowledge-worker / whatever-you-want-to-call-it types are going in to work every day should be seen as a national disgrace.

Oh dude what if we invented VR cyberspace but we used it primarily to allow telecommuting knowledge workers to maintain facetime? that’d be the best conceivable way to simultaneously realize and frustrate the cyberpunk future

the matrix is just a 1980s office park except everyone is a vampire catgirl

poipoipoi-2016:

balioc:

marcusseldon:

One interesting argument in the comments of the SSC NIMBY post is a lot of people are posting who don’t like cities, and are asking why metro areas have to keep expanding.

Which, well, as long as the population keeps growing, cities will grow. I guess you could have ever-sprawling suburbs, but at some point the commutes become impractical.

More telecommuting.

Seriously – given the size of the social gains that could result from decoupling productivity and geography on a large scale – the fact that most creative-class / knowledge-worker / whatever-you-want-to-call-it types are going in to work every day should be seen as a national disgrace.

The basic problem is that I get a depressing number of these on a daily basis and the correct answer generally ends up being “Come over to my desk and let’s talk”.  

I think you could get some of the way there with screensharing, but… not all of the way.  

/And it still doesn’t really solve the population growth problem.  Trump might solve the population growth problem because the only people having kids in this country are First-generation Hispanic immigrants, but.  

I understand that there are serious productivity issues with telecommuting (at this point on the tech tree, anyway).  I just think about that, and then think about a world in which we didn’t have to cram all the educated ambitious people into six or seven metro areas, and always wind up saying your productivity issues so not matter enough to be dispositive here.  You should be strongly encouraged to suck them up or find clever solutions.

There are enough wildly-divergent opinions regarding the “correct” state of population growth that I am, at the least, unconvinced that dealing with it (one way or another) needs to be an integral part of solutions to other major problems.

marcusseldon:

One interesting argument in the comments of the SSC NIMBY post is a lot of people are posting who don’t like cities, and are asking why metro areas have to keep expanding.

Which, well, as long as the population keeps growing, cities will grow. I guess you could have ever-sprawling suburbs, but at some point the commutes become impractical.

More telecommuting.

Seriously – given the size of the social gains that could result from decoupling productivity and geography on a large scale – the fact that most creative-class / knowledge-worker / whatever-you-want-to-call-it types are going in to work every day should be seen as a national disgrace.

bibliolithid:

balioc:

I am halfway convinced that the MBTI works better if you replace “Thinking/Feeling” and “Judging/Perceiving” with “Lawful/Chaotic” and “Good/Evil.” 

It almost certainly makes the old D&D alignment system work better to add “Introverted/Extroverted” and “Sensing/Intuiting.”

Look who’s reinventing the big five.

“The plane of pure conceptual Open-Minded Disagreeableness, known as the Abyss…”

I am halfway convinced that the MBTI works better if you replace “Thinking/Feeling” and “Judging/Perceiving” with “Lawful/Chaotic” and “Good/Evil.” 

It almost certainly makes the old D&D alignment system work better to add “Introverted/Extroverted” and “Sensing/Intuiting.”

marcusseldon:

Two extremely common folk critiques of American politics that are contradictory:

1. Politicians focus too much on getting reelected and have no principles. The country would be way better off if politicians focused on doing what is right rather than what is popular.

2. Politicians are so out of touch with the common people, they care more about ideology and party instead of reflecting the common sense views of their constituents. Politicians should vote the way the common man in their district would vote.

Not as contradictory as they sound, sadly.

“Politicians spend their lives in an elite political bubble, cut off from the morals and folkways of the non-elite.  They invariably go native in rich urban America, making them comfortable with things that their (poor?)(non-urban?) constituents find abhorrent.  Insofar as they actually care about anything on a principled level, they care about the artificial total war between parties, in a way that makes common-sense decent-person negotiation impossible.  But in fact they are mostly driven by a lack of principle, by the need to get reelected whatever it takes, and therefore they stir up their bases with simplistic red-meat attacks that exacerbate that very same artificial total war.” 

This is not a good take; it fails to understand the sources of culture war, or the depth of its entrenchment, in a major way.  But it is a coherent take.

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

dagny-hashtaggart:

theaudientvoid:

deusvulture:

memecucker:

mathurbator:

crabdeity:

dingdongyouarewrong:

cringe culture sux, everyone reblog and add a stereotypically ‘cringey’ thing that they’re not ashamed of enjoying. mine’s undertale

its 2017 and i love my chemical romance unashamedly

i miss nyancat

I like watching reaction videos

(pre-Act 6) Homestuck is actually really good.

Wait, (pre-Act 6) Homestuck being good is an unpopular opinion?

I think Homestuck is both widely liked and widely cringed at.

Aside from Homestuck and Undertale…hmm. It was definitely in vogue to cringe at everything to do with Penny Arcade for a while, and I’m fond of PA.

I genuinely like early 00s Sunglasses And Trenchcoat Matrix-ripoff aesthetic and think writing poetry with form and meter is still worthwhile. 

I have a great fondness for Mall Ninja Shit. Boys with Tripp pants and stupid knives make me go all dopey.

I like antiquated affectations like “‘twas” and “m'lady” and “indeed”; they’re silly, but in a very sweet and wholesome way.

I love cheesy Renn Faire power music. Blackmore’s Night has some real bangers.

I’m an adult woman with a stuffed animal collection that takes up more than half my bedroom. Yes, they all have names and personalities; don’t yours?

Blink-182 fucking ruled then and it fucking rules now

It’s a tragedy that anime music videos aren’t a thing any more

The Mortal Kombat aesthetic is amazing.  I’m honestly not sure how to describe it other than as “the Mortal Kombat aesthetic,” because I don’t know of anything else quite like it – it has elements of chop-socky late-20th-century kung fu flicks, and cosmic fantasy, and heavy metal album covers – but it is incredibly resonant somehow and there should be more of it.

[Preferably in contexts that focus a little less on straight-up over-the-top gore porn.]

are you already, like, into into Mortal Kombat? because if you are just fondly remembering something from yesteryear, you should know they’ve totally shaken off the awful shit of the PS2 era, and now MK9 and MKX are really good games with really fun story modes entirely about Mortal Kombat Stuff that’s played completely straight

I think Death Cargo was trying for a sci-fi version of the MK Aesthetic but it did NOT SUCCEED

I have in fact played MKX.  It’s a good game qua game.  I continue to find the gore porn kind of offputting and beside-the-point.  (And, yes, I realize what it sounds like to say “gore porn is beside the point of Mortal Kombat,” but…I mean it.)

Anyway, I don’t think it was ever the gameplay that was deemed noteworthily cringey and low-status by the Arbiters of Taste.  It was the aesthetic.  You know, the hell-ninja-versus-four-armed-monster-man thing, the “our ancient culture trains its noblewomen to be stripper-assassins” thing.

well the aesthetic can be done right and it can be done wrong, and after Deadly Alliance and Armageddon it was a big change to do it right again.

You probably can’t get too far from gore porn for the MK Aesthetic because a huge part of MK’s inspiration is a grindhouse splatter aesthetic

Eh.  This is true, but only contingently, I think.  You can easily imagine a parallel-universe MK where the grindhouse-y scythed-wheels-cutting-off-limbs combat aesthetic is replaced by, I dunno, a wire-fu wuxia thing – fighting is balletic and floaty and looks like modern dance – but everything else is the same.  You still have the hell ninja, the assassin stripper princesses, the Chinese monks who keep the secrets of mystical dimensions, the ancient secret race of lizard people, Johnny fucking Cage.  For me, at least, that game loses basically none of the things that are good. 

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

dagny-hashtaggart:

theaudientvoid:

deusvulture:

memecucker:

mathurbator:

crabdeity:

dingdongyouarewrong:

cringe culture sux, everyone reblog and add a stereotypically ‘cringey’ thing that they’re not ashamed of enjoying. mine’s undertale

its 2017 and i love my chemical romance unashamedly

i miss nyancat

I like watching reaction videos

(pre-Act 6) Homestuck is actually really good.

Wait, (pre-Act 6) Homestuck being good is an unpopular opinion?

I think Homestuck is both widely liked and widely cringed at.

Aside from Homestuck and Undertale…hmm. It was definitely in vogue to cringe at everything to do with Penny Arcade for a while, and I’m fond of PA.

I genuinely like early 00s Sunglasses And Trenchcoat Matrix-ripoff aesthetic and think writing poetry with form and meter is still worthwhile. 

I have a great fondness for Mall Ninja Shit. Boys with Tripp pants and stupid knives make me go all dopey.

I like antiquated affectations like “‘twas” and “m'lady” and “indeed”; they’re silly, but in a very sweet and wholesome way.

I love cheesy Renn Faire power music. Blackmore’s Night has some real bangers.

I’m an adult woman with a stuffed animal collection that takes up more than half my bedroom. Yes, they all have names and personalities; don’t yours?

Blink-182 fucking ruled then and it fucking rules now

It’s a tragedy that anime music videos aren’t a thing any more

The Mortal Kombat aesthetic is amazing.  I’m honestly not sure how to describe it other than as “the Mortal Kombat aesthetic,” because I don’t know of anything else quite like it – it has elements of chop-socky late-20th-century kung fu flicks, and cosmic fantasy, and heavy metal album covers – but it is incredibly resonant somehow and there should be more of it.

[Preferably in contexts that focus a little less on straight-up over-the-top gore porn.]

are you already, like, into into Mortal Kombat? because if you are just fondly remembering something from yesteryear, you should know they’ve totally shaken off the awful shit of the PS2 era, and now MK9 and MKX are really good games with really fun story modes entirely about Mortal Kombat Stuff that’s played completely straight

I think Death Cargo was trying for a sci-fi version of the MK Aesthetic but it did NOT SUCCEED

I have in fact played MKX.  It’s a good game qua game.  I continue to find the gore porn kind of offputting and beside-the-point.  (And, yes, I realize what it sounds like to say “gore porn is beside the point of Mortal Kombat,” but…I mean it.)

Anyway, I don’t think it was ever the gameplay that was deemed noteworthily cringey and low-status by the Arbiters of Taste.  It was the aesthetic.  You know, the hell-ninja-versus-four-armed-monster-man thing, the “our ancient culture trains its noblewomen to be stripper-assassins” thing.

brazenautomaton:

funereal-disease:

earlgraytay:

dagny-hashtaggart:

theaudientvoid:

deusvulture:

memecucker:

mathurbator:

crabdeity:

dingdongyouarewrong:

cringe culture sux, everyone reblog and add a stereotypically ‘cringey’ thing that they’re not ashamed of enjoying. mine’s undertale

its 2017 and i love my chemical romance unashamedly

i miss nyancat

I like watching reaction videos

(pre-Act 6) Homestuck is actually really good.

Wait, (pre-Act 6) Homestuck being good is an unpopular opinion?

I think Homestuck is both widely liked and widely cringed at.

Aside from Homestuck and Undertale…hmm. It was definitely in vogue to cringe at everything to do with Penny Arcade for a while, and I’m fond of PA.

I genuinely like early 00s Sunglasses And Trenchcoat Matrix-ripoff aesthetic and think writing poetry with form and meter is still worthwhile. 

I have a great fondness for Mall Ninja Shit. Boys with Tripp pants and stupid knives make me go all dopey.

I like antiquated affectations like “‘twas” and “m'lady” and “indeed”; they’re silly, but in a very sweet and wholesome way.

I love cheesy Renn Faire power music. Blackmore’s Night has some real bangers.

I’m an adult woman with a stuffed animal collection that takes up more than half my bedroom. Yes, they all have names and personalities; don’t yours?

Blink-182 fucking ruled then and it fucking rules now

It’s a tragedy that anime music videos aren’t a thing any more

The Mortal Kombat aesthetic is amazing.  I’m honestly not sure how to describe it other than as “the Mortal Kombat aesthetic,” because I don’t know of anything else quite like it – it has elements of chop-socky late-20th-century kung fu flicks, and cosmic fantasy, and heavy metal album covers – but it is incredibly resonant somehow and there should be more of it.

[Preferably in contexts that focus a little less on straight-up over-the-top gore porn.]

argumate:

balioc:

argumate:

balioc:

argumate:

balioc:

kontextmaschine:

been thinking about aristo/bohemian/lumpenprole as a coherent axis defined around common cultural traits (decadence, cults of action?) against a rivalling stability-oriented gentry/bourgeois/prole line

I think the concept you need to tie this together is “belief that the formal rules make sense and that you will be rewarded for following them.” 

I once wrote much of a very long essay about (approximately) this, but lost momentum before it finished.  Short-short version: aristos and proles are both keenly aware that in fact life is a political jungle where success is defined by allies and resources and risks-that-pay-off, the spiritual essence of the bourgeoisie is “thinking that the world is basically an extension of school.”

how about working class in the military

Yeah, how about it.  “I would specifically like to join an institution that, unlike the rest of the benighted world, runs on reliable and formalistic rules enforced by a clear chain of command.” 

it’s a compelling framework, but one can just as easily imagine counter examples: people born into a life of privilege who simply assume that this will be maintained without any particular attention or effort on their part, people engaging in scheming Machiavellian political machinations to build their power base at some mid-level corporate accounting job, 

The first thing isn’t really a counterexample at all.  Yes, there are quite a lot of privileged aristos who are very happy to sit around and enjoy their privilege without any kind of scheming or intrigue at all.  Theory and experience both suggest that they’re mostly just willing to believe that they can do this, because they already have the necessary resources and the necessary support and no one is going to stop them, and they’re not afraid of losing everything because they’ve broken some rule about what they’re supposed to do. 

The second thing is…actually pretty rare, as far as I can tell.  Like, not “you’ll never see it” rare by any means, but rare enough to raise eyebrows when it happens.  Accountants don’t want to build power bases or play office politics, they want to do their jobs with a minimum of complication and then go home.  (I can say with a lot of confidence that this is generally true of federal bureaucrats, despite the stereotypes.)  If office politics actually happen to an extent that there is some kind of noticeable outcome, most of the people in the office will be kind of shocked and upset. 

And even then, the office politics are likely to be Lawful Evil “tattling to the boss that Phil isn’t following regulations” sorts of schemes rather than Chaotic Evil “I will go outside the system to ruin you” schemes.

introducing the nature of a System makes it clearer: if you’re sufficiently rich you’re largely beyond the awareness of police, if you’re sufficiently poor you’re crushed beneath the boot of police, if you’re in the middle you might occasionally have normal interactions with police and wonder what all the fuss is about, etc.

All true, but misleadingly specific.  It’s not just police (not that I think you’re saying that it is, but…clarity). 

If you’re sufficiently rich, you don’t think that your success in life will ever really hinge on whether the particular authority figure standing over you is impressed; if you’re sufficiently poor, you don’t think that the authority figure is ever going to be impressed enough to matter; if you’re in the middle, the authority figure’s opinion could be the difference between “you are a Top Performer with stellar prospects” and “your career will go nowhere.” 

If you’re sufficiently rich, your friends and family can pull you out of basically any scrape, so long as they like you enough; if you’re sufficiently poor, your friends and family can be the difference between survival and not, so long as they like you enough; if you’re in the middle, you get all your resources from your job and all your opportunities from your education, and your friends and family likely don’t have much to offer in a practical sense.  [That last is a gross exaggeration, but…you get the point.]

Etc.

argumate:

balioc:

argumate:

balioc:

kontextmaschine:

been thinking about aristo/bohemian/lumpenprole as a coherent axis defined around common cultural traits (decadence, cults of action?) against a rivalling stability-oriented gentry/bourgeois/prole line

I think the concept you need to tie this together is “belief that the formal rules make sense and that you will be rewarded for following them.” 

I once wrote much of a very long essay about (approximately) this, but lost momentum before it finished.  Short-short version: aristos and proles are both keenly aware that in fact life is a political jungle where success is defined by allies and resources and risks-that-pay-off, the spiritual essence of the bourgeoisie is “thinking that the world is basically an extension of school.”

how about working class in the military

Yeah, how about it.  “I would specifically like to join an institution that, unlike the rest of the benighted world, runs on reliable and formalistic rules enforced by a clear chain of command.” 

it’s a compelling framework, but one can just as easily imagine counter examples: people born into a life of privilege who simply assume that this will be maintained without any particular attention or effort on their part, people engaging in scheming Machiavellian political machinations to build their power base at some mid-level corporate accounting job, 

The first thing isn’t really a counterexample at all.  Yes, there are quite a lot of privileged aristos who are very happy to sit around and enjoy their privilege without any kind of scheming or intrigue at all.  Theory and experience both suggest that they’re mostly just willing to believe that they can do this, because they already have the necessary resources and the necessary support and no one is going to stop them, and they’re not afraid of losing everything because they’ve broken some rule about what they’re supposed to do. 

The second thing is…actually pretty rare, as far as I can tell.  Like, not “you’ll never see it” rare by any means, but rare enough to raise eyebrows when it happens.  Accountants don’t want to build power bases or play office politics, they want to do their jobs with a minimum of complication and then go home.  (I can say with a lot of confidence that this is generally true of federal bureaucrats, despite the stereotypes.)  If office politics actually happen to an extent that there is some kind of noticeable outcome, most of the people in the office will be kind of shocked and upset. 

And even then, the office politics are likely to be Lawful Evil “tattling to the boss that Phil isn’t following regulations” sorts of schemes rather than Chaotic Evil “I will go outside the system to ruin you” schemes.

argumate:

balioc:

kontextmaschine:

been thinking about aristo/bohemian/lumpenprole as a coherent axis defined around common cultural traits (decadence, cults of action?) against a rivalling stability-oriented gentry/bourgeois/prole line

I think the concept you need to tie this together is “belief that the formal rules make sense and that you will be rewarded for following them.” 

I once wrote much of a very long essay about (approximately) this, but lost momentum before it finished.  Short-short version: aristos and proles are both keenly aware that in fact life is a political jungle where success is defined by allies and resources and risks-that-pay-off, the spiritual essence of the bourgeoisie is “thinking that the world is basically an extension of school.”

how about working class in the military

Yeah, how about it.  “I would specifically like to join an institution that, unlike the rest of the benighted world, runs on reliable and formalistic rules enforced by a clear chain of command.” 

kontextmaschine:

been thinking about aristo/bohemian/lumpenprole as a coherent axis defined around common cultural traits (decadence, cults of action?) against a rivalling stability-oriented gentry/bourgeois/prole line

I think the concept you need to tie this together is “belief that the formal rules make sense and that you will be rewarded for following them.” 

I once wrote much of a very long essay about (approximately) this, but lost momentum before it finished.  Short-short version: aristos and proles are both keenly aware that in fact life is a political jungle where success is defined by allies and resources and risks-that-pay-off, the spiritual essence of the bourgeoisie is “thinking that the world is basically an extension of school.”

Silicon Valley Monarchism Discourse

jadagul:

balioc:

eightyonekilograms:

bambamramfan:

[In response to various threads between @discoursedrome and @balioc . I don’t agree, like, at all with Balioc, but his opponents are misreading these claims in ways I find pretty willfully dense. So I’m going to go into the subject.]

I saw on my dash something about the pervasive spyware tools the CIA has, even more ubiquitous than you had previously thought, as revealed by wikileaks. I yawned because even though I am a terrible piece of trash who is guilty of many sins, both real and thoughtcrimes, I expect it to have zero effect on me. It’s bad yes, but bad in an abstract way.

If you told me my employer’s IT guy, or the local policeman I see at Dunkin, had these tools, I would lose my shit. And I suspect this is the natural reaction many people would have.

“The sky is high and the Emperor is far away” as the old Chinese proverb goes. What goes on in our personal sphere – that of neighbors and their close relations – matters to all of us in a way we find difficult to express on tumblr and viral media. If we have power over people close to us, it is basically impossible to not let that warp our interactions. And if they have power over us, even more so, as we toe the line of politeness and humility to get them to not use that power to hurt us. Even saints have to work hard to resist this all-consuming bias, and they rarely succeed.

The blessing of a distant, lecorbussian ruler, is that they do not actually care about us and our servility to them. They don’t even know us. So they make sweeping judgments based on abstract rules that barely apply to our situation, which may be good or bad, but at least they aren’t doing it on the basis of whether we invited them to our party, or if we’re dating their ex-girlfriend.

Now, one would prefer a ruler who is local enough to know the details necessary to come up with contextually appropriate solutions, but who also does not demand you treat them well on a personal level, or favor the various local bullies who already inflict tyranny on you. But that is rather difficult to achieve.

What Balioc is advocating for here is a ruler intelligent enough to know our context, and distant enough to not care except in the sense of maximizing some public utility function. This has never been achieved in human history, but it is at least one and only one problem to solve. There’s an appeal to that, particularly if you look at the fiasco of American federalism.

And spiritually, I do not think he is far off in his desires from the sort of Just Political Deity many people search for in their vague language. Conservatives desire One True Constitution that can resolve all our disputes while holding no partiality because it died over two hundred years ago. And the rationalists are known for talking about an AI god who will basically perform the same function. It’s not the dream of an infinitely benevolent god who knows the smallest details of your life and loves you for them…  it’s someone with enough power and enough disinterest to practice benign neglect. Might as well call it the Invisible Hand.

In the simplest terms, remember how “freedom” is always expressed on a limitation on someone else, to stop you from doing something. The populist-monarchism alliance has always been based on “I want the central actor to have the power to control the closer tyrants from exercising their power over me.” That’s the case for every labor regulation, the aforementioned Constitution, CPS, and on and on. You can frame almost every demand for freedom as demand for a stronger, more central tyrant somewhere along the line.

I personally try to bow out of political arguments that are basically over “which level of the power hierarchy gets the freedom”, but most people still get caught up in them, and for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.

for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.

“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

The problem (well, one of many problems, but for me the central one) with Silicon Valley Monarchism is that it’s attempting to solve a complex problem (how to govern in a world where people have differing incentives and will fight to increase their or their tribes’ wealth or status in ways that are globally suboptimal) by defining it away. People love to define away problems, because that’s so much easier than arguing: “by definition, you’re wrong” takes one second and no effort, compared to the heavy lifting of a real argument. And that’s what SV monarchism is: there’s no need to work out the messy details of who gets to have power over what, because by definition it’s this dude with the crown. It’s innately appealing to the engineer mind, which hisses and recoils in disgust at those messy “people problems”. Which is why it tends to be one possible pathway for SV-types, along with libertarianism (where the messy people problems are defined away as “the market will fix it”) or Singularitarianism (defined away as “the AI will fix it”).

But have you ever conceded an argument because your opponent pulled the “you’re wrong by definition” card? No, you haven’t. Nobody has. This is why the Sequences have an entire chapter warning against these “by definition” arguments: they never work. And this is why I’m skeptical of your point that “at least there’s only one problem to solve” under monarchism. Nobody post-Enlightenment believes in the legitimacy of monarchies (with actual power, not powerless constitutional figureheads) except these NRx weirdos. People might agree with a monarch as long as this person is making decisions in their favor, but as soon as there’s a decision they don’t like, and there’s a crisis.

Hence, liberal democracy. Things won’t always go in your favor, but at least (the theory goes), when they go against you, you should understand that it was because your fellow man also has interests, and in this case they just didn’t align with yours. When a monarch rules against you, why not guillotine him? What makes his decision worth anything?

It’s like saying that Communism has “only one problem”: how to allocate resources efficiently in the absence of capital markets. Yeah, it’s only one problem, but it’s a huge fucking problem that nobody has successfully demonstrated how to solve. If you think you’ve got the answer, fine, but I’m going to default to a position of “extreme skepticism bordering on summary dismissal”.

I swear, in the sight of all who are reading this, that this is the last I am going to say about this topic.  For a long time, at least.  But it’s worth responding to this.

---

No, it’s not “defining the problem away.”  I mean, it could be that thing, if you’re very stupid and you assume that giving someone monarchical power is going to be enough to prevent any problems all by itself.  But in fact it is deliberately choosing to engage with a certain set of difficult political problems over dealing with a different set of difficult political problems, on the grounds that the first set seems easier and more tractable. 

If you want a successful system where political power is very centralized and where its users are mostly unaccountable to anyone – which is to say, a monarchy, or anything remotely resembling one – there are two giant hurdles that you have to clear in order to get anywhere real.

1. How do you ensure that the “monarch” (or equivalent) is well-meaning and capable, that it will promote beneficial policies and enact/enforce them sensibly?  The most common objection to monarchical-type systems is “sometimes you get a bad king and then everything is terrible,” and it’s true. 

As far as I can tell, this is much the lesser concern, and I have lots of bright-if-presently-half-baked ideas for dealing with it.  Selecting and training capable, virtuous people is a thing to which we have devoted lots and lots and lots of intelligence and effort.  If the fate of the world depends on being able to hire one or ten or a hundred really top-notch employees…well, given what alternative challenges are likely to look like, I’d take that one in a heartbeat.

2. How do we provide the “monarchy” with the widespread acceptance and popular legitimacy that it would require to be tolerably stable?  This one is a genuinely hard question, and a tremendously important one, and the fact that I don’t have a really satisfying answer is why I’m occasionally making casual reference to these ideas on Tumblr instead of trying to make my career as a political thinker. 

But.

A lot of people seem convinced that democracy is just naturally, inherently better-able to accrue legitimacy than are other forms of government.  This attitude strikes me as both implausible-on-its-face and not-remotely-backed-up-by-history.

There is possibly something resonant to the notion that “you have to agree to the rules that bind you, and if the government doesn’t take your viewpoint into account, it can’t legitimately tell you what to do.”  No democracy larger than ancient Athens has ever actually offered that thing.  As an American (for example), you do not get to “be heard” in any meaningful sense, and everyone fucking knows it.  You get to choose between the lesser of two fairly disgusting options, which are put in place by the machinations of fathomlessly huge systems that take no more notice of your thoughts and desires than you do of an ant’s.  And even that choice means relatively little compared to the workings of the various bureaucracies, agencies, armies, courts, etc., which march on and do their thing and punish people without any kind of democratic control that anyone could call meaningful with a straight face.  A modern democracy is rule-by-unaccountable-tyrants as much as any monarchy, they’re just selected differently.  And this is no secret.  People in democracies do not feel very enfranchised.  No one thinks that the cops, let alone the men in suits in Washington, answer to his demands.  Sometimes this infuriates them, sometimes they accept it, but they sure as hell know it.

Now, I want to be very clear – despite everything I just said, democracy is presently blessed with amazing powers of social legitimacy, at least in the “West.”  The results of elections are not seriously disputed.  Military coups don’t really happen.  It’s like a miracle.  This is the single best argument for maintaining democracy, possibly the only convincing argument for maintaining democracy.

Why is it the case?

It’s a meme.  Influential philosophers spent a couple of centuries saying “democracy is the people’s power and so democratic governments are inherently legitimate,” various large popular movements picked it up, it was embedded in the cultural DNA of some very successful countries, and now it’s part of our civilization.  It doesn’t have any especial connection to the actual traits of democracy, any more than “Harvard is the best college” has anything to do with people knowing anything about the faculty or curriculum at Harvard.

That meme could have been something else.  At various times and places it was something else – there have been long periods of stability under non-democratic regimes.  And it could be something else again, if the circumstances were right, if the right philosophies caught on.  I don’t know how to do that.  If I did, I’d be talking about this a lot more and a lot more loudly.

Blood monarchy is such a terrible idea precisely because heredity doesn’t have the power to engender that kind of legitimacy, and so “why don’t we depose the dynasty and go with a different noble line?” is always an open question.  There are alternatives. 

I often complain that we’ve lost our consensus that governments don’t get to regulate Google. This is pretty much what I’m talking about.

…I am honestly not sure how to parse this in context, even to the extent of “is he agreeing with me or the opposite?”

Silicon Valley Monarchism Discourse

eightyonekilograms:

bambamramfan:

[In response to various threads between @discoursedrome and @balioc . I don’t agree, like, at all with Balioc, but his opponents are misreading these claims in ways I find pretty willfully dense. So I’m going to go into the subject.]

I saw on my dash something about the pervasive spyware tools the CIA has, even more ubiquitous than you had previously thought, as revealed by wikileaks. I yawned because even though I am a terrible piece of trash who is guilty of many sins, both real and thoughtcrimes, I expect it to have zero effect on me. It’s bad yes, but bad in an abstract way.

If you told me my employer’s IT guy, or the local policeman I see at Dunkin, had these tools, I would lose my shit. And I suspect this is the natural reaction many people would have.

“The sky is high and the Emperor is far away” as the old Chinese proverb goes. What goes on in our personal sphere – that of neighbors and their close relations – matters to all of us in a way we find difficult to express on tumblr and viral media. If we have power over people close to us, it is basically impossible to not let that warp our interactions. And if they have power over us, even more so, as we toe the line of politeness and humility to get them to not use that power to hurt us. Even saints have to work hard to resist this all-consuming bias, and they rarely succeed.

The blessing of a distant, lecorbussian ruler, is that they do not actually care about us and our servility to them. They don’t even know us. So they make sweeping judgments based on abstract rules that barely apply to our situation, which may be good or bad, but at least they aren’t doing it on the basis of whether we invited them to our party, or if we’re dating their ex-girlfriend.

Now, one would prefer a ruler who is local enough to know the details necessary to come up with contextually appropriate solutions, but who also does not demand you treat them well on a personal level, or favor the various local bullies who already inflict tyranny on you. But that is rather difficult to achieve.

What Balioc is advocating for here is a ruler intelligent enough to know our context, and distant enough to not care except in the sense of maximizing some public utility function. This has never been achieved in human history, but it is at least one and only one problem to solve. There’s an appeal to that, particularly if you look at the fiasco of American federalism.

And spiritually, I do not think he is far off in his desires from the sort of Just Political Deity many people search for in their vague language. Conservatives desire One True Constitution that can resolve all our disputes while holding no partiality because it died over two hundred years ago. And the rationalists are known for talking about an AI god who will basically perform the same function. It’s not the dream of an infinitely benevolent god who knows the smallest details of your life and loves you for them…  it’s someone with enough power and enough disinterest to practice benign neglect. Might as well call it the Invisible Hand.

In the simplest terms, remember how “freedom” is always expressed on a limitation on someone else, to stop you from doing something. The populist-monarchism alliance has always been based on “I want the central actor to have the power to control the closer tyrants from exercising their power over me.” That’s the case for every labor regulation, the aforementioned Constitution, CPS, and on and on. You can frame almost every demand for freedom as demand for a stronger, more central tyrant somewhere along the line.

I personally try to bow out of political arguments that are basically over “which level of the power hierarchy gets the freedom”, but most people still get caught up in them, and for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.

for those “Silicon Valley Monarchism” is a pretty intuitive and simple solution to that particular knot.

“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

The problem (well, one of many problems, but for me the central one) with Silicon Valley Monarchism is that it’s attempting to solve a complex problem (how to govern in a world where people have differing incentives and will fight to increase their or their tribes’ wealth or status in ways that are globally suboptimal) by defining it away. People love to define away problems, because that’s so much easier than arguing: “by definition, you’re wrong” takes one second and no effort, compared to the heavy lifting of a real argument. And that’s what SV monarchism is: there’s no need to work out the messy details of who gets to have power over what, because by definition it’s this dude with the crown. It’s innately appealing to the engineer mind, which hisses and recoils in disgust at those messy “people problems”. Which is why it tends to be one possible pathway for SV-types, along with libertarianism (where the messy people problems are defined away as “the market will fix it”) or Singularitarianism (defined away as “the AI will fix it”).

But have you ever conceded an argument because your opponent pulled the “you’re wrong by definition” card? No, you haven’t. Nobody has. This is why the Sequences have an entire chapter warning against these “by definition” arguments: they never work. And this is why I’m skeptical of your point that “at least there’s only one problem to solve” under monarchism. Nobody post-Enlightenment believes in the legitimacy of monarchies (with actual power, not powerless constitutional figureheads) except these NRx weirdos. People might agree with a monarch as long as this person is making decisions in their favor, but as soon as there’s a decision they don’t like, and there’s a crisis.

Hence, liberal democracy. Things won’t always go in your favor, but at least (the theory goes), when they go against you, you should understand that it was because your fellow man also has interests, and in this case they just didn’t align with yours. When a monarch rules against you, why not guillotine him? What makes his decision worth anything?

It’s like saying that Communism has “only one problem”: how to allocate resources efficiently in the absence of capital markets. Yeah, it’s only one problem, but it’s a huge fucking problem that nobody has successfully demonstrated how to solve. If you think you’ve got the answer, fine, but I’m going to default to a position of “extreme skepticism bordering on summary dismissal”.

I swear, in the sight of all who are reading this, that this is the last I am going to say about this topic.  For a long time, at least.  But it’s worth responding to this.

No, it’s not “defining the problem away.”  I mean, it could be that thing, if you’re very stupid and you assume that giving someone monarchical power is going to be enough to prevent any problems all by itself.  But in fact it is deliberately choosing to engage with a certain set of difficult political problems over dealing with a different set of difficult political problems, on the grounds that the first set seems easier and more tractable. 

If you want a successful system where political power is very centralized and where its users are mostly unaccountable to anyone – which is to say, a monarchy, or anything remotely resembling one – there are two giant hurdles that you have to clear in order to get anywhere real.

1. How do you ensure that the “monarch” (or equivalent) is well-meaning and capable, that it will promote beneficial policies and enact/enforce them sensibly?  The most common objection to monarchical-type systems is “sometimes you get a bad king and then everything is terrible,” and it’s true. 

As far as I can tell, this is much the lesser concern, and I have lots of bright-if-presently-half-baked ideas for dealing with it.  Selecting and training capable, virtuous people is a thing to which we have devoted lots and lots and lots of intelligence and effort.  If the fate of the world depends on being able to hire one or ten or a hundred really top-notch employees…well, given what alternative challenges are likely to look like, I’d take that one in a heartbeat.

2. How do we provide the “monarchy” with the widespread acceptance and popular legitimacy that it would require to be tolerably stable?  This one is a genuinely hard question, and a tremendously important one, and the fact that I don’t have a really satisfying answer is why I’m occasionally making casual reference to these ideas on Tumblr instead of trying to make my career as a political thinker. 

But.

A lot of people seem convinced that democracy is just naturally, inherently better-able to accrue legitimacy than are other forms of government.  This attitude strikes me as both implausible-on-its-face and not-remotely-backed-up-by-history.

There is possibly something resonant to the notion that “you have to agree to the rules that bind you, and if the government doesn’t take your viewpoint into account, it can’t legitimately tell you what to do.”  No democracy larger than ancient Athens has ever actually offered that thing.  As an American (for example), you do not get to “be heard” in any meaningful sense, and everyone fucking knows it.  You get to choose between the lesser of two fairly disgusting options, which are put in place by the machinations of fathomlessly huge systems that take no more notice of your thoughts and desires than you do of an ant’s.  And even that choice means relatively little compared to the workings of the various bureaucracies, agencies, armies, courts, etc., which march on and do their thing and punish people without any kind of democratic control that anyone could call meaningful with a straight face.  A modern democracy is rule-by-unaccountable-tyrants as much as any monarchy, they’re just selected differently.  And this is no secret.  People in democracies do not feel very enfranchised.  No one thinks that the cops, let alone the men in suits in Washington, answer to his demands.  Sometimes this infuriates them, sometimes they accept it, but they sure as hell know it.

Now, I want to be very clear – despite everything I just said, democracy is presently blessed with amazing powers of social legitimacy, at least in the “West.”  The results of elections are not seriously disputed.  Military coups don’t really happen.  It’s like a miracle.  This is the single best argument for maintaining democracy, possibly the only convincing argument for maintaining democracy.

Why is it the case?

It’s a meme.  Influential philosophers spent a couple of centuries saying “democracy is the people’s power and so democratic governments are inherently legitimate,” various large popular movements picked it up, it was embedded in the cultural DNA of some very successful countries, and now it’s part of our civilization.  It doesn’t have any especial connection to the actual traits of democracy, any more than “Harvard is the best college” has anything to do with people knowing anything about the faculty or curriculum at Harvard.

That meme could have been something else.  At various times and places it was something else – there have been long periods of stability under non-democratic regimes.  And it could be something else again, if the circumstances were right, if the right philosophies caught on.  I don’t know how to do that.  If I did, I’d be talking about this a lot more and a lot more loudly.

Blood monarchy is such a terrible idea precisely because heredity doesn’t have the power to engender that kind of legitimacy, and so “why don’t we depose the dynasty and go with a different noble line?” is always an open question.  There are alternatives.