November 2018

duckbunny:

alias-milamber:

In an attempt to remember the tune to Old Macdonald, I just ended up with this:

Old Macdonald had a farm.

On the feast of Stephen

And on that farm he had some ducks

Loudly plotting treason

oligopsalter:

aesthetic critiques of morality/politics are both inherently reactionary and tbh just kind of eyeroll-inducing. “feminist insistence on verbal consent takes the sexiness out of life” “cheap block housing is ugly” “lab-grown meat would be artificial and inauthentic” grow the fuck up. capitalism has constructed elaborate dreamworlds where you can have whatever dumbass aesthetic experience you want, go enjoy it there

With the possible exception of a few extremely-baseline bottom-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy things like “getting enough calories,” “breathing clean air,” “not freezing to death at night,” etc. –

– human welfare is, essentially, aesthetic.  “This kind of thing makes me thrive psychologically, but that kind of thing is soul-killing and I hate it.”  Jobs, social recognition, the whole nine yards.  The use of the word “aesthetic” here is serving only to dismiss certain kinds of preferences and interests for no especially good reason. 

Some preferences and interests are super awkward, yeah, and conflict with other ones in a serious way.  Sometimes we have to say “I don’t care how much sexiness it adds to the world for you, your model of gender interaction is making life a nightmare for a lot of other people, and so we’re going to crack down on it.”  But “your desires don’t matter because TV is available as a substitute” is a terrible argument that can be applied to…well, anyone’s desires. 

How many eyes does Lord Bloodraven have?

A thousand eyes, and one.

And how many seas must a white dove sail

Before she can sleep in the sun?…

discoursedrome:

I always thought the most fun left-wing angle for the whole Senate thing would be to try to set things up so that America either has to cede or grant statehood to all its territories with more than, say, 100,000 people.

Let’s go with “…grant statehood to all communities with more than 100K people willing to call themselves members [of that community exclusively].”

funereal-disease:

Thesis: the rise of fanwank and anti culture correlates directly with diminished understanding of what “romantic”, in a literary sense, actually means.

It doesn’t mean “this is ideal or healthy or even realistic”. It means “this is beautiful, this is tragic, this is grotesque, this stirs emotion”, even if it’s not, as @starryroom puts it, something you would be comfortable seeing play out in front of you at Taco Bell. It’s about grandiosity and mythology and heroism writ large. It’s about playing with the id, as beautiful and terrible as it can be. 

Thesis: this kind of conceptual failure is likely an outgrowth of an unusually-permissive mainstream culture, or (even more) of a mainstream culture that presents itself as being permissive even when it isn’t.

Both puritanism and traditional shame-based community morality can be all kinds of awful, but they do make it very easy to understand what it means for something to be a “guilty pleasure,” or even just a “private pleasure” that can’t flourish in the public eye.  The puritan code, or the community, may demand things that diverge from the desires of the individual.  But if your code is “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, unless, you know, it’s abusive or something,” then you end up in very confusing situations where people feel obligated to fight over whether a given thing is or isn’t a moral abomination, because obviously no one could have any other possible issues with your liking it.

mitigatedchaos:

mitigatedchaos:

balioc:

In the hypothetical utopia of excellent governance, in which everyone enjoys bountiful prosperity and ample leisure and many opportunities for personal flourishing, one of the most popular hobbies will surely be…complaining about the government.  In ever-more-elaborate, ever-more-arcane ways that show off great depths of sophistication or cleverness or independence or small-group loyalty.

…or were you expecting gratitude?  Really?

There is an important lesson to be learned from this.  He who has ears, let him hear.

How often do you complain about electrical and water services in your area? Or, having become almost entirely reliable and predictable, do you even notice anything about them but their brief absence during a storm or similar event?

In other words, I think this is a very Liberal perspective from you - which, not surprising - however, it’s rational not to care that much about politics for many people much of the time. There’s just so much other stuff to do. I know I went into political hibernation during the Obama administration.

While there are always resource-use conflicts, the development of a government capable of disciplining itself and adapting itself with less requirement for voter oversight would shift it more towards the “forgotten utility” side. I envision a country in which “day traders” read the Public Sector section of the newspaper, like they do the Business section now, but most people ignore it, like the business section. Entire TV channels like those stock market channels, dedicated to arguing over the financing of new arcology projects, placement of new roads, interest rates on sub-municipal bonds, that sort of thing.

So this is part of the lesson, in that it acknowledges one of the partial solutions to the issue, namely “allow individual government domains to be swallowed by invisibly competent technocracies.”  That’s a really good thing to do, in those particular spheres where you can do it.  And even being capable of acknowledging that this is a solution, that “the government does its job and so we never think about it” is one of the best outcomes for which you can hope, requires pulling your head out of the stickiness proclaiming that widespread political engagement is always good and that the interests of the people will be best-served by the active stewardship of the people.

But overall this is far, far too optimistic a take for general-purpose use. 

“While there are always resource-use conflicts” is a rhetorical tarp covering up a bottomless pit.  One of the government’s primary jobs – always, in any culture and any economy, whatever ideological spin you want to put on it – is to suck in a ton of resources and then reroute them in assorted useful ways.  People will always be keenly conscious that they could be happier with more resources, even in a post-scarcity utopia.  If anyone is able to make a plausible claim that the government is preventing [group of people] from having as many resources as they might, and (importantly) that there’s anything to be done about this, those people will find cause for alienation and discontent even if overall things are going very well and they have no discernible “reason to complain.”  And you can’t prevent such situations from arising without taking a hard and credible line on “no, there is nothing you can do about this,” because you can’t stop governments from collecting and redistributing resources without making them useless.

This is to say nothing of pure status- / control-mongering.  “Who gets to be in charge” is always going to be a topic of near-universal interest, so long as we’re basically monkeys.  Occasionally you hear cutesy suggestions for covering the “real” functional government with a pointless shadow-play government of pure symbolism, on which people can vent their simian social ambitions, but this just isn’t going to work at all so long as the real government has to wield power in ways that actually matter.  You can try to blunt this by decoupling power from status and shuffling most of the really palpable status hierarchies out into the subcultures, and in fact I strongly favor doing so, but realistically this is going to get you only so far.  People are not going to become so bored and complacent that “who gets to tell whom to go to jail” is going to cease to matter to them.

In the hypothetical utopia of excellent governance, in which everyone enjoys bountiful prosperity and ample leisure and many opportunities for personal flourishing, one of the most popular hobbies will surely be…complaining about the government.  In ever-more-elaborate, ever-more-arcane ways that show off great depths of sophistication or cleverness or independence or small-group loyalty.

…or were you expecting gratitude?  Really?

There is an important lesson to be learned from this.  He who has ears, let him hear.