If I said, “The ‘The Game’ Theory of Cultural Authenticity”, would you know what I was talking about?
Is that, like, if you think about cultural authenticity, you’re inauthentic?
as soon as you start designing a tradition you’re no longer traditional but traditionalist, however your made up bullshit can become a tradition if you just wait a couple of decades.
you won’t like it when it does, though.
I would not.
I’m going to be pompous anyway, though.
I think the difference between “authentic tradition” and “inauthentic playacting” is actually pretty overblown.
No matter how ancient and unassailable a tradition is, it has to be introduced again and again to people who have never heard of it or done it before, because this is how human education works. Children have some very universal emotions when it comes to the practices of their families, which include things like “Well, my whole family and everybody I know does this, so I guess it must be normal” and, this is key, “I have no idea what this is but I guess everybody is going along with it so I will too.”
If you’re American, did you have strong feelings about, e.g. the pledge of allegiance as a very small child? Did you even know what it meant? How about the Fourth of July, or Halloween, or Sunday morning church service?
I see children in church who are too young to keep quiet or really understand the service. They are not universally seized by the Holy Spirit and given spiritual knowledge, they must be taught what church is and learn how one behaves in it.
The idea of authenticity here says that this can only happen when this learning process happens as a young enough child (And perhaps only to children of a particular race or nationality), and that once one has become old enough, this process can’t actually take place anymore and becomes a useless affectation, and that the experience of someone who tries to learn these things is fundamentally and unalterably different than that of the people who know them, some mysterious outsiders who are having an authentic, unmediated experience of this thing that, for you, is mediated by its unfamiliarity.
The secret that we’re losing is that everything begins as an affectation, and after a while you learn how to do it and it no longer is an affectation, but a habit.
If you are constantly focused on whether you are having an affected or authentic experience, you’ll never be able to begin the work that it takes to become authentic.
Wait, did I understand what you meant after all?
Yeah I think it’s not about whether you learn it late etc., But whether the reason you do it is ‘because I want to do something traditional’ or not. Even if the reason is ‘because everyone else is and I don’t want to make a scene’ that still isn’t the same as 'i want to do something traditional’.
Sort of. But you need to go up a couple of levels of abstraction to understand the relevant distinction here.
It’s not only the self-conscious traditionalist, LARPing at customs that are alien to him for the sake of “being traditional,” whose authenticity (in this sense) is lacking. It’s also the mother who makes her son have a Bar Mitzvah, despite not ever going to synagogue herself, out of some vague guilty sense that he ought to have a “Jewish identity.” It’s the parents who take their kids to church because they hear that kids who go to church are better-behaved. It’s the would-be whiz kid Silicon Valley entrepreneur who participates in an ayahuasca ceremony because he’s heard that it can give you really visionary ideas.
Which is to say – it’s anyone who performs the rite, not for its own sake or its own explicit purposes, but because it’s supposed to come with beneficial knock-on effects. This will never, ever, ever work. Doing something as an affectation is fine, but doing it with cynicism in your heart won’t cause the magic to blossom, and you’re not going to be able to avoid cynicism if you’re mouthing words you don’t believe.
(I have a lot more respect, actually, for people who perform the rite because of some inchoate woo-filled sense that it’s “cool” or that it “seems meaningful.” That kind of motivation is basically empty except for aesthetics, but…we all have aesthetic motivations, and it’s at least the kind of impulse that can lead to genuine engagement if there turns out to be chemistry.)
(That said, there’s a clear sense in which ritual isn’t real for you until it matters in and of itself. As the man said, an boy’s initiation ceremony isn’t done in order for the traditions of the people to be upheld, it’s done in order to make him a man, and either you think that’s meaningful or you don’t.)
I’d like to do an informal poll of my Tumblr followers: would a (democratically elected) world government be an obviously good thing, or an obviously bad thing?
Not that this would be achievable in the foreseeable future. I can’t imagine China, Saudi Arabia, etc. allowing genuinely free and fair elections for World Parliament on their soil any time soon. But if?
I’m posting this because world government strikes me as an obviously good thing, but I mentioned this to @cptsdcarlosdevil and they were like “Whaaat?” So I want to check attitudes to world government more broadly in the kind of people who would follow me on Tumblr.
Also, if you’re in the “obviously bad” camp, I’m curious to know why (unless your reasons boil down to “because government is bad”, I’m pretty sure I have some anarchist followers, but “because anarchism” isn’t interesting).
Probably very good.
Clearly, civilization-savingly good if you strike “democratically elected” and replace it with some better leadership-selection mechanism.
Strictly speaking I am not your Tumblr follower, but I probably fall into that “kind of people.”
It is important to be able to say “this thing is bad for me, and for people like me, and so we should structure society such that it can be avoided” without concomitantly having to say “this thing is objectively bad and we need to ensure that it is never a part of anyone’s life.” The alternative is an abyss of social problems (endless conflicting-needs-driven culture war) and cognitive problems (twisting yourself in pretzels to explain why the thing that’s bad for you is actually just objectively bad).
I am guilty of screwing this up, way too often. When I rant about, e.g., the virtues of atomization and the awfulness of thickly obligatory social roles…well, there are an awful lot of people who benefit hugely from that kind of tight-knit community embeddedness, it’s just that people like me die in obligatory social roles, and therefore I will fight hard to ensure that there’s always an available out. And I should be clearer about that, and about the tradeoffs involved, and I should get less lost in my own point of view.
But there are so many people who screw this up so much more than I do.
It’s a pretty common complaint in certain corners of the internet that one endured pretty horrible persecution from other children for being a nerd. And, since the people making these complaints are, in fact, nerds, this is often accompanied with fairly detailed intellectual theorising about why nerds would be singled out for persecution. (See here for a prime example.)
A recurring theme in these analyses is that the greater-than-average intelligence of nerds plays a central role in their relentless torment by the Popular Ones. How this explanation goes will vary from theory to theory, but there seems to be something of a consensus that nerd intelligence is not explanatorily idle here. This has always bugged me, partially for personal reasons I’ve only started to recognise.
The thing is, I have seen the situation from both sides of the intellectual performance bell curve. As a young child (until around third or fourth grade), I progressed intellectually much more slowly than most of my peers. It took me significantly longer to read or perform basic arithmetic than was the norm for them, and even then only with the help of much outside tutoring. I can remember my first year at my elementary school thinking that I was distinguished largely by having made at best trivial academic progress since I first arrived.
It eventually improved, though. By eighth grade, I was at least above average in mathematics, and exceptional in more verbally-oriented fields (mainly aside from things involving fiction). During the earlier half of high school, I continually stood out in academics, and the school was highly selective to begin with. (During the latter half, I collapsed into a burnout that rendered me incapable of meeting even minimal academic requirements, and dropped out my junior year.) So, over the course of my life, no coarse-grained ability level has been alien to me.
And the bad tail? When I struggled to make sense of single-digit addition late into first grade? So much fucking worse. And not just overall worse, either, not just worse in the final tally of the benefits and drawbacks: moving to the high-achieving end of the spectrum was a Pareto fucking improvement.
Because all the things that nerds complain about having been harassed for? When I was a dimwit, I got all that, too. I still got screamed at for talking about special interests; I still got manipulated and hurt for my dearth of social skills; I still aggravated people by coming across as conceited and pompous; I still got thrown into the bathroom and doused in water and sexually harassed for… something, I guess. Except then I also had to deal with the disappointment of the adults around me and the sneering condescension of my smarter and more popular peers. (Of course there absolutely existed brilliant social butterflies between kindergarten and graduating high school—why would this one extremely attractive trait not correlate with all the others?)
So when I read people speculating on the causal link between smartness and nerd persecution, it cuts, and smells of more than a little vanity. It would flatter my ego to think that the feature that ultimately attracted all the harassment I endured as a child was also the one that has garnered me the lion’s share of my glory and praise. But I know it’s not true.
This has largely been my impression, too. Thinking back to school, there was a very strong positive correlation between intelligence and popularity. The most popular kids were all really smart and the least popular kids were all really dumb.
In the middle it was varied, but the unpopular smart kids were always unpopular for some reason unrelated to being smart – usually something like being ugly, unfit, socially awkward, or poor, more rarely some kind of defiant flouting of social conventions like being openly gay. The nerd chauvinism thing seems like it’s specifically about the idea that being smart compensates for deficiencies in that other stuff, and the anti-nerd hostility is conventional society reasserting that no, it doesn’t, fuck off. The model cool popular kid wasn’t a dumb jock, it was Apollo. But insofar as there was some sort of ranking in the recognized social virtues, intelligence was pretty high; almost nothing was worse than being stupid.
It’s worth remembering that Every Context is Different and that Your High School is Not Archetypical (whoever you are).
In particular, I think the “persecuted contemptible brainiac vs. popular dumb jock” meme is an old one that gets more and more obsolete every year, at least in urban and liberal-suburban America.
During the days of the Boomers’ youth, I gather, it was very real indeed. Adolescent society had a very high premium on conformity, there was a very narrow range of acceptable interests, and being too devoted to academics was a strong sign that you were insufficiently devoted to winning the acceptance of your peers. During my own early-Millennial youth in the ‘90s, it was still at least sort of athing; the very smartest and highest-achieving kids in my (liberal-suburban) school were in fact outcasts by dint of being too weird, and the valorization of the football team etc. was still a social fact that was to some extent being actively supported by the community and the administration. Looking at high school now, it seems to be true not at all.
At least to some extent, this probably has to do with the ever-increasing academic pressure on American teenagers.
So you’re making a substution here that’s really important, and it gets to the heart of the issue, because this actually seems like you agree with what I wrote above: being smart is not the same as being too devoted to academics. Because no, being smart is pretty much never a deficiency. But being too devoted to academics, which is not in any respect the same thing, absolutely is. (This is kind of question-begging wording because “too” makes reference to some agreed-upon standard of how much is acceptable, but the point is that it’s way, way easier to be too smart than too devoted to academics.)
Society expects people to uphold a variety of virtues, and people who are good at one virtue but bad at all the others will get cut down to size on the basis of their weaknesses, regardless of whether this is about being a smart nerd or a dumb jock. Maximizing your social reputation means maximizing all the virtues, which is why the upper echelons of popularity were mostly very clever people.
If you’re some kind of math robot or lit snob and don’t participate effectively in other spheres of school life, you’ll be bullied for that, but that has almost nothing to do with how intelligent you are; the bullying is aimed at your (socially perceived) deficiencies, because that’s how bullying works. People who are as smart or smarter, will not be bullied if they don’t have those deficiencies, and if they have different ones they’ll be bullied differently. Nerd chauvinism is about rejecting this and arguing that actually it’s more virtuous to not be interested in sports and fashion because you’re so devoted to computers and books, or whatever, which in turn exacerbates the hostility since then people are explicitly attacking social values rather than implicitly eroding them.
So it’s true that raw intelligence, absolutely uncoupled from anything (including any kind of perceptibility or social display), is pretty much always going to be a social asset. Especially if you put that intelligence towards social purposes in a Machiavellian sort of way.
But in fact the social culture has rules, and those rules can change over time, and they’re likely to be different between different milieus. And if the rules say “popular people don’t do well in their classes because that’s Lame Nerd Shit, popular people don’t think about anything other than the tiny canon of prescribed socially-acceptable interests, popular people don’t utter sentences that convey complex ideas” – well, you can be both smart and popular under those rules, but you have to be very careful and make a lot of sacrifices and repress major parts of your mind. Even if you’re not antagonistically nerdy or whatever. Intellect is overall probably more of a social detriment than a social advantage, because whatever Machiavellian advantage you gain is more than counterweighed by all the performative playing-dumb that you have to do.
Something like “independent of other considerations, is getting straight As coded as cool or uncool?” is in fact a variable. Its value has changed between 1960 and now.
This is a reflection on the nature of power, and on human desire.
It is also, in part, a ramble about Brent Dill.
I feel very weird inserting myself into that conversation. I don’t know any of the participants, at all, it’s just distant discourse-fodder for me, and I’m aware that some of the people reading this may be personally affected by the situation in a very serious way. So this is your up-front warning: if you don’t want to deal with a poorly-informed rando nattering on, just steer clear this time around. You probably won’t be missing much.
In all likelihood, everything I’m saying here is very well-understood by a lot of people, but…at the least I find it useful to think through it for myself.
So: probably the weirdest aspect of this whole Brent thing, from an outsider perspective, is the disjoint between his goals and his means. Which is to say, the thing he explicitlywanted was to feel dominant and powerful and in-control with regard to his paramours, and the way he tried to get himself there was…inescapably wormy and pathetic.
He was literally begging people to submit to him, and when they failed to do so, he tried to guilt-trip them with claims that they were hurting his feelings. It doesn’t take Wildean levels of social-critic-fu to look at this behavior and say “that is the opposite of dominant or powerful or in-control.” It seems naively like someone with Brent’s stated desires and self-image should have been flinching away from that kind of strategy, if only to avoid the concomitant self-loathing.
And, OK, you can imagine someone with literally zero self-awareness going ahead and doing it anyway. Maybe that’s all there was to it.
But somehow I suspect it’s something deeper, and sadder, than that.
Go back to the very lowest levels of analysis for a bit. A dude wants to have power over a girl, or over girls-in-general, or something. What does that actually mean? If he got what he wanted, how would that “cash out” into actual observable phenomena?
There are, I think, three basic answers to this question, all of which have their adherents.
1. “Power” is basically an aesthetic. This is the thinking that underlies most normal-ish safe/sane/consensual BDSM, as far as I can tell. The dom and the sub are playing a game together, a game of roles if you like, in which they help each other get what they both wanted going in. The word “scene” is super appropriate. Everyone gets to have a good time with melodramatic behavior, nifty evocative titles like “master” and “slave,” etc. Maybe there are fun toys made of black leather or whatever. Orders are being “given” and “followed”…but in some important sense there’s no actual power here at all, except in a fakey pretend kind of way. The dom gives only orders that he believes the sub actually wants to follow (and is giving them largely for that purpose), and indeed the sub is following orders largely because it is personally fulfilling to do so. If the dom demands something that the sub really doesn’t want to do, well, that’s very awkward and probably it breaks down the thin shell of narrative holding the scene together.
I gather this can be rewarding in various ways, if you’re of the right temperament, but it doesn’t have a lot in common with the concept of “power” as it manifests in most other contexts. In particular, “having power” in an aesthetic sense does not really give you an advantage in term of getting what you want out of your interactions with other people. Mostly it’s a job – in fact, a kind of service-y job when you look at it the right way – and I gather that trying to do that job makes engagement more stressful rather than less.
2. “Power” is about being able to make other people give you what you want in a concrete sense. This is a much more conventional conception, obviously. You can have power over someone else in all sorts of ways – financial control, superior rank in a hierarchy, blackmail material, etc. etc. – and it means that the other person basically has to do whatever you say, or at least finds himself with strong incentives to do so.
People use this kind of power to have sex, too. In many cases they get off on it, and prefer it to non-power-dynamic-laden sex. It doesn’t look much like the BDSM stuff described above. Here we’re talking about, y’know, casting couches and the like. Coercive employers of domestic servants. Handsy bosses. Inappropriate academic relationships. You get the idea. The sexual acts themselves are, in all probability, very “normal.” There are unlikely to be whips or chains or evocative titles. It’s just that one (or more) of the participants is there under duress.
The important truth about this kind of power is that you can use it to get certain things but not others. In particular, you can elicit compliance – you can even elicit a social display to go along with the compliance, a show of joy or gratitude or whatever – but you can’t elicit actual thoughts or emotions. It’s very likely that the person you’re coercing is going to be filled with hatred and resentment and fear. Even if he’s not, even if he sees it as going-along-to-get-along, even if he’s positively star-struck by your rank or charisma or whatever, all it means is that you got lucky and you definitely can’t count on it continuing to be true.
If you’re really into this kind of thing, it’s probably because you don’t really care much about the thoughts and emotions of your sex partners, or else because you actively enjoy lording it over people who are filled with hatred and resentment and fear. There are many such people in the world, sadly. They are, inter alia, people who are really keyed into concrete social reality as opposed to anything else. They don’t actually seem to have much in common with Brent, apart from the general interest in feeling powerful.
3. Power is about being able to make other people think and feel what you want them to think and feel. This is, of course, the thing around which we’ve been spiraling.
It’s an illusion, of course. You can’t make anyone think or feel anything, not ever. That’s not how human interaction works. And the closest you can come involves, well, understanding someone very well and doing everything in your power to meet his particular needs and push his particular psychological buttons. Or, in normal-person language, “being close and attentive.” Doesn’t look much like “having power” in any conventional sense, or in any sense that will make you feel less dependent upon contingent reality rather than more.
Because that’s really what this is all about, isn’t it? The dependence on the contingencies of reality in order to get your psychological needs and desires met. The fear that attention and admiration and love can all just disappear because someone else made a decision, or just underwent a random fluctuation of mind, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
That part, I do understand. I imagine we all do, but…I do, at the very least. Which is the scary thing. That little flicker of recognition and sympathy. I don’t have to travel far outside my own head to recognize
what causes someone to want to have a companion who is infinitely
understanding and infinitely available, with no caveats or exceptions or
inconveniently conflicting needs.
It just takes a pretty big theory-of-mind failure to imagine that you can bully someone into being that thing. Or, indeed, that you can actually get another person to be that at all, for real, through any means whatsoever. There’s no metaphor, no theoretical amount of love or care, that will prevent someone from being an externally-existing brain whose processes are not actually synced up to yours.
Once you’ve deluded yourself into forgetting that this is impossible, though – I suspect that there can sometimes be a strong temptation to use the BDSM-type stuff as a signaling mechanism. It kind of removes the ceiling on how much validation someone can give you, in the short term.
For boring vanilla people, there’s a pretty tight cap on how
demonstratively someone can show that he loves you and wants you to be
happy. He can go to bed with you, stay up late talking to you when
you’re unhappy, etc. These sorts of things indicate a theoretical
maximum of perceptible devotion, and if you get them, either you let
yourself be satisfied or you admit that you can’t be satisfied. But if you can ask someone to do arbitrarily unpleasant things for your
enjoyment, you can punch through that cap and get arbitrarily strong
signals of devotion. This seems like a very abusable drug.
It’s a pretty common complaint in certain corners of the internet that one endured pretty horrible persecution from other children for being a nerd. And, since the people making these complaints are, in fact, nerds, this is often accompanied with fairly detailed intellectual theorising about why nerds would be singled out for persecution. (See here for a prime example.)
A recurring theme in these analyses is that the greater-than-average intelligence of nerds plays a central role in their relentless torment by the Popular Ones. How this explanation goes will vary from theory to theory, but there seems to be something of a consensus that nerd intelligence is not explanatorily idle here. This has always bugged me, partially for personal reasons I’ve only started to recognise.
The thing is, I have seen the situation from both sides of the intellectual performance bell curve. As a young child (until around third or fourth grade), I progressed intellectually much more slowly than most of my peers. It took me significantly longer to read or perform basic arithmetic than was the norm for them, and even then only with the help of much outside tutoring. I can remember my first year at my elementary school thinking that I was distinguished largely by having made at best trivial academic progress since I first arrived.
It eventually improved, though. By eighth grade, I was at least above average in mathematics, and exceptional in more verbally-oriented fields (mainly aside from things involving fiction). During the earlier half of high school, I continually stood out in academics, and the school was highly selective to begin with. (During the latter half, I collapsed into a burnout that rendered me incapable of meeting even minimal academic requirements, and dropped out my junior year.) So, over the course of my life, no coarse-grained ability level has been alien to me.
And the bad tail? When I struggled to make sense of single-digit addition late into first grade? So much fucking worse. And not just overall worse, either, not just worse in the final tally of the benefits and drawbacks: moving to the high-achieving end of the spectrum was a Pareto fucking improvement.
Because all the things that nerds complain about having been harassed for? When I was a dimwit, I got all that, too. I still got screamed at for talking about special interests; I still got manipulated and hurt for my dearth of social skills; I still aggravated people by coming across as conceited and pompous; I still got thrown into the bathroom and doused in water and sexually harassed for… something, I guess. Except then I also had to deal with the disappointment of the adults around me and the sneering condescension of my smarter and more popular peers. (Of course there absolutely existed brilliant social butterflies between kindergarten and graduating high school—why would this one extremely attractive trait not correlate with all the others?)
So when I read people speculating on the causal link between smartness and nerd persecution, it cuts, and smells of more than a little vanity. It would flatter my ego to think that the feature that ultimately attracted all the harassment I endured as a child was also the one that has garnered me the lion’s share of my glory and praise. But I know it’s not true.
This has largely been my impression, too. Thinking back to school, there was a very strong positive correlation between intelligence and popularity. The most popular kids were all really smart and the least popular kids were all really dumb.
In the middle it was varied, but the unpopular smart kids were always unpopular for some reason unrelated to being smart – usually something like being ugly, unfit, socially awkward, or poor, more rarely some kind of defiant flouting of social conventions like being openly gay. The nerd chauvinism thing seems like it’s specifically about the idea that being smart compensates for deficiencies in that other stuff, and the anti-nerd hostility is conventional society reasserting that no, it doesn’t, fuck off. The model cool popular kid wasn’t a dumb jock, it was Apollo. But insofar as there was some sort of ranking in the recognized social virtues, intelligence was pretty high; almost nothing was worse than being stupid.
It’s worth remembering that Every Context is Different and that Your High School is Not Archetypical (whoever you are).
In particular, I think the “persecuted contemptible brainiac vs. popular dumb jock” meme is an old one that gets more and more obsolete every year, at least in urban and liberal-suburban America.
During the days of the Boomers’ youth, I gather, it was very real indeed. Adolescent society had a very high premium on conformity, there was a very narrow range of acceptable interests, and being too devoted to academics was a strong sign that you were insufficiently devoted to winning the acceptance of your peers. During my own early-Millennial youth in the ‘90s, it was still at least sort of athing; the very smartest and highest-achieving kids in my (liberal-suburban) school were in fact outcasts by dint of being too weird, and the valorization of the football team etc. was still a social fact that was to some extent being actively supported by the community and the administration. Looking at high school now, it seems to be true not at all.
At least to some extent, this probably has to do with the ever-increasing academic pressure on American teenagers.
Imagine explaining Pringles to a medieval peasant. A single can contains most of an a adult’s daily value of fat, and a considerable amount of sodium and carbohydrates. Going by its current price on Amazon ($1.59), a minimum-wage worker could buy four of them with an hour’s wages and still have money left over. They’re not exactly healthy, but many find them delicious in small quantities. And when you buy one, you don’t worry if rats have been at it. “Sounds amazing!”, the peasant exclaims. You try to dampen their enthusiasm, “Nevertheless, some consider chips to be a symbol of what’s wrong with our world. You see, some people just eat too many of them, and that’s not healthy!” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”, says the peasant. - Imagine explaining Twitter/Tumblr to a person from 1995. Completely free websites, choose among a great variety of people/blogs to follow, maybe interact with them, maybe have your own account worth following, etc. But not all is well, you explain - some follow people they disagree with, and get really mad at their posts, and rile up their friends about it. “What the hell is wrong with them?”, the 1995 person asks. - Tharg talk to spirit of ancestor Oog. Tharg show Oog new sharp stone knife. "We make knife sharp! Cut deer better!“, Tharg explain. Oog hoot excite. "Some say knife bad. Can use on neck of man.”, Tharg say sad. Oog hooted to indicate, “Language is not that impressive of an invention if it can be used to communicate such nonsense.”.
Maybe these “ancients” are too dazzled by modern wealth to appreciate that some parts of it could have problems. But we tend to be too focused on those problems, while ignoring that they’re often just flaws in things that would seem amazingly good to a world without them. It’s also common to blame tools (and their creators) for their misuse, especially for their users’ personal psychological flaws.
Too often, I’ve heard something like “The modern Western world suffers from anomie and spiritual malaise, and all it has to show for its pursuit of wealth is chips and social media. We need a different approach, something better than economic growth.”. It’s true that wealth isn’t everything, but let’s not forget how important it is. It’s not just Pringles and Tumblr (though we shouldn’t throw them under the bus), nor mansions/yachts/fancy cars, but washing machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, internal heating and air conditioning, fruits and vegetables available out of season… Hardly anyone thinks of that as wealth - to them, it’s just furniture in the background. But imagine how much worse-off we’d be if we had given up on economic growth before these innovations became widespread.
But even ignoring wealth, the modern world is doing pretty well:
“So you’re saying that I can marry anyone who’s willing, even if my parents don’t like them, and I can disagree with my spouse and it’s a crime if they beat me, I can still own property, and work outside the home?” summarized the time-traveling woman. “Yes, but some think that modern liberal norms are bad because, uh, some people are lonely.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with complaining, but maybe we should first make sure that we still want to complain if we imagine ourselves describing our situation to the numerous historical people who’d give an arm and a leg to switch places.
I mean the food thing is a straight up miracle. It’s not super healthy, or long term sustainable, but you can survive in the short-medium term on $1/day in food, easy. $2/day probably is long term sustainable without crippingly nutrient deficiencies. Not great, and I’m not suggesting that’s how much anyone ought to be spending on food, but shit man, I’ve been there, and it’s incredible that it’s even an option.
I can’t stand this kind of thing. Among other things, we know from actual history that many people would not in fact, give an arm and a leg to live in modern society, but would, in fact, fiercely resist its encroachment. Some of these people are valorized and some are demonized, but there’s a lot of them.
Second… Okay, maybe this will have to wait until I’m less drunk, but there’s an extremely pernicious use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs going on here.
Basically, any complaint about a lack of the higher steps on the pyramid is met with “Okay, but the base of the pyramid is being fulfilled. You aren’t saying that you’d rather live a life where the base isn’t fullfilled, right?”
To which there is no possible argument; the base of the pyramid is objectively the most important part, so even if we’re sacrificing every other level of the pyramid to keep the base satisfied that is objectively the right thing to do and it is absurd to complain.
Which, on the one hand, is hard to argue with (I first need to actually be alive if I’m going to find love and belonging), but creates a terrible paradox where we can’t demand or conceptualize a way of getting anything more.
“The way you’ve chosen to fulfill my basic needs is also making it much more difficult to meet my more complex psychological needs.”
“Oh, so you’re saying you’d rather die in the gutter because your basic physiological needs aren’t met?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Well then there’s not actually a problem and no reason to change. Go away.”
Yeah, I detest this.
I suspect the reaction would be something along the lines of, “you have this incredible wealth and power and you use it for *this*?”
The part about marriage is… Pretty silly to reduce to “some people are lonely”.
(caveat: many of the people who aggressively resist modern society are specifically resisting becoming the lowest form of peons, where they would have very low purchasing power, but would be subjected to outside interests.)
Many of the most common solutions to modern problems amount to “turn back the clock.” Which is a dumb solution for the Maslow’s-hierarchy-type reasons described above. It is true that meeting people’s highest psychic needs is very important, but any plan for doing that had better account for how you’re going to continue meeting their lower-order needs.
With regard to stuff like marriage norms, people are extremely good at noticing whatever-the-problems-today-are and much less good at comparing them to the unreal-seeming problems of yesteryear. (The number of people I’ve recently seen getting all nostalgic for the days of arranged marriages is kind of boggling, considering…how most of those people would fare in an arranged marriage with a person whose selection is almost arbitrary in terms of certain important kinds of personal compatibility.)
Many of the people who aggressively resist modernity are in thrall to local elites who don’t like the idea of losing their power to less-local elites.
How did Last Christmas get inducted into the Christmas music canon, anyway? This song is incredibly terrible! It sounds just like all the forgettable flash-in-the-pan pop Christmas songs that get shovelled out every year except it’s been consistently popular for 30 years and has been covered a million times
A friend and I were discussing who would be whom in a Muppet Les Misérables
We cast Kermit as Valjean
Sam the Eagle as Javert
Miss Piggy as both Thénardiers
Humans as Fantine, Cosette and Marius
Rizzo the Rat as Gavroche
Gonzo, Fozzie Bear, and Beaker & Dr. Honeydew as students (I think Beaker would be Joly and Honeydew would be Combeferre more specifically; Gonzo might be Enjolras and Fozzie might be Grantaire, although I could also see Fozzie as Courfeyrac. Not sure about the other students)
and Waldorf and Statler would be inhabitants of a house next to the Corinthe, heckling the revolutionaries from the window. Kind of a G-rated version of the shit that goes down between Le Cabuc and the old man in the strategically located house
a radically different vision and yet we both seem to agree that Sam the Eagle is Javert
Oh, man, Muppet castings for random texts are great. A joy of my college days.
The only one about which I seem to remember anything, at this juncture, was our Muppet Lord of the Rings –
Attractive Human Guest Star (Male) as Aragorn
Attractive Human Guest Star (Female) as Arwen
[probably this is, like, Michael Fassbender and Emily Blunt or something]
Kermit the Frog as Frodo Baggins
Fozzie Bear as Samwise Gamgee
Scooter as Meriadoc Brandybuck
Rizzo the Rat as Peregrin Took
Gonzo as The Great Gandalf
Some Very Poorly-Executed Sheet Ghosts as The Nazgul
Sam the Eagle as Elrond
[this is straight-up taken from the movies and makes no sense with actual LotR canon, but it’s still really funny]
Animal as Gollum
[PRECIOUS!!!!!!!! Mna mna mna mna mna mna!!!]
Janice as Galadriel
The Electric Mayhem as Various Elves of Lothlorien
Miss Piggy as Eowyn
Link Hogthrob as Eomer
Dr. Julius Strangepork as Theoden
Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as Saruman
Beaker as Grima Wormtongue
Sweetums as Durin’s Bane
Uncle Deadly as The King of the Dead
Waldorf & Statler as The Mouth of Sauron
I am deeply ashamed that I don’t remember what we did with Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor. Also assorted minor LotR characters. Also, for that matter, the Swedish Chef etc.
Because it turns out that there’s a sweet, important message in: not everyone needs the same things out of life. And maybe especially in the pressures of small-town-ish closely-interlinked tribal existence are very bad for some people, and the greater individual atomized freedom of contemporary urbanity is exactly what they need. And, for that matter, let’s throw in the big city has a magic all its own and that can come in a cheery goodwill-towards-men holiday flavor, because city folk can actually be good people too. All that sounds like a good thematic backbone for a cute and cheesy holiday movie.
But, nope, the important reason to get out of your small town is…politics. That’s definitely what we want more of in our cultural narratives right at this moment.
Isn’t all that stuff political? It’s definitely often politicized. What does the “pressures of small town tribal existed are very bad for some people” me a in practice except “support LGBT rights?”
It can mean that all your aunts and uncles and neighbors and teachers and parents’-friends think that they get a say in what should be important to you and what you should be doing with your time, and everyone agrees that everyone gets a say, and probably also everyone agrees on the object level, and it’s incredibly stifling.
It can mean that even your nearest and dearest are largely driven by the desire to have you serve as a respectable component of their social unit, because otherwise it would lower their social standing in this tight-knit community where everything matters to everyone, and so there’s constant strife with them.
It can mean that there’s some thing that desperately matters to you, and you can’t find anyone else who cares about it in the slightest, because the small town is small and the people take their cues from each other.
…and, yes, that thing could be “being gay,” that’s a popular one. It could also be poetry or Warhammer or moral philosophy or French film or hermetic magic.
All this stuff at least correlates with politics, some, on some level. There’s a reason that the connection between urban terrain and liberal politics seems to be so very widespread. But mostly it’s not about the Issues You Vote On, it’s just about how you live your life day-to-day, in a way that isn’t really subject to policy change even in theory. It’s not even really about the shit that gets made into rallying cries in the culture war. And, well, why would you go out of your way to say “what we really need more of in chintzy Hallmark movies are blows struck for our side of the culture war?”
I mean, it’s not like I don’t know the answer to that question. But.
I meant gay rights to be inclusive, not exclusive. Gay rights is one of the ways this manifests. Of course, as you say, there are many ways in which it can manifest nonpolitically. Except that I wouldn’t characterize it as nonpolitical so much as prepolitical. These are the building blocks from which one’s moral intuition and political orientation are constructed, much like how strong one’s disgust reaction is and how openness to experience is and where one stands on the survive-thrive axis is. The way you describe preference for social atomization, it definitely sounds like the Venn diagram overlap of authority and loyalty in Haidt’s moral foundations model.
I am starting to become convinced that actual politics is just shadows on a wall, and these personality and moral traits are standing in front of the fire. In any case, if politics is determined or at least strongly correlated with these fundamental traits, it shouldn’t be surprising that people use it as a proxy for those things.
I am starting to become convinced that actual politics is just shadows
on a wall, and these personality and moral traits are standing in front
of the fire.
Some. Politics is also, prosaically-but-importantly, about alliances of material benefit – and the weird doublethink in which people engage in order to better live with those alliances. It’s important to remember just how contingent some of the ideological “commitments” of present-day urban leftists are, and how easy it would be for them to feel very very differently about certain issues and certain groups of people.
But, more to the point:
Yes, it’s possible to get some analytic headway out of merging “politics = the difference between our underlying personality modules” with “politics = the important concrete issues of governance about which we have bitter fights for high stakes.” If you want to live in anything remotely resembling a pluralistic society, it is crucial not to do that thing, or (rather) not to let that thing leak from your abstract discourse into the cultural artifacts that underlie your values. It is really, really important that different kinds of people be able to tolerate each other’s existence, at least at arm’s length; the alternative is that we all tear each other apart. Which is what we’ve been doing, for the last little while. Largely because “those people look and talk different from you, and care about unsettlingly alien things” has been spliced with “THOSE PEOPLE ARE DESTROYING ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THE WORLD AND MUST BE STOPPED.”
Because it turns out that there’s a sweet, important message in: not everyone needs the same things out of life. And maybe especially in the pressures of small-town-ish closely-interlinked tribal existence are very bad for some people, and the greater individual atomized freedom of contemporary urbanity is exactly what they need. And, for that matter, let’s throw in the big city has a magic all its own and that can come in a cheery goodwill-towards-men holiday flavor, because city folk can actually be good people too. All that sounds like a good thematic backbone for a cute and cheesy holiday movie.
But, nope, the important reason to get out of your small town is…politics. That’s definitely what we want more of in our cultural narratives right at this moment.
Isn’t all that stuff political? It’s definitely often politicized. What does the “pressures of small town tribal existed are very bad for some people” me a in practice except “support LGBT rights?”
It can mean that all your aunts and uncles and neighbors and teachers and parents’-friends think that they get a say in what should be important to you and what you should be doing with your time, and everyone agrees that everyone gets a say, and probably also everyone agrees on the object level, and it’s incredibly stifling.
It can mean that even your nearest and dearest are largely driven by the desire to have you serve as a respectable component of their social unit, because otherwise it would lower their social standing in this tight-knit community where everything matters to everyone, and so there’s constant strife with them.
It can mean that there’s some thing that desperately matters to you, and you can’t find anyone else who cares about it in the slightest, because the small town is small and the people take their cues from each other.
…and, yes, that thing could be “being gay,” that’s a popular one. It could also be poetry or Warhammer or moral philosophy or French film or hermetic magic.
All this stuff at least correlates with politics, some, on some level. There’s a reason that the connection between urban terrain and liberal politics seems to be so very widespread. But mostly it’s not about the Issues You Vote On, it’s just about how you live your life day-to-day, in a way that isn’t really subject to policy change even in theory. It’s not even really about the shit that gets made into rallying cries in the culture war. And, well, why would you go out of your way to say “what we really need more of in chintzy Hallmark movies are blows struck for our side of the culture war?”
I mean, it’s not like I don’t know the answer to that question. But.
Because it turns out that there’s a sweet, important message in: not everyone needs the same things out of life. And maybe especially in the pressures of small-town-ish closely-interlinked tribal existence are very bad for some people, and the greater individual atomized freedom of contemporary urbanity is exactly what they need. And, for that matter, let’s throw in the big city has a magic all its own and that can come in a cheery goodwill-towards-men holiday flavor, because city folk can actually be good people too. All that sounds like a good thematic backbone for a cute and cheesy holiday movie.
But, nope, the important reason to get out of your small town is…politics. That’s definitely what we want more of in our cultural narratives right at this moment.
It’s surprisingly hard to accurately parody wokeness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attempt that passed the ideological Turing test. Most of them focus on all the wrong things – it’s 2018, otherkin discourse has been dead for years – and miss subtleties in such a way that you can tell no one writing these things has actually interacted with Extremely Online types. Which implies that they’re not really parodying wokeness qua wokeness, but rather the version that trickles down to them via shitty right-wing outrage bait.
If it passes the ideological Turing test, it’s not a parody at all. Parody involves comedic exaggeration, which is always going to trip a flag in the test.
Right, but it doesn’t even pass in terms of what issues are presented as important. Like, to use an example I see a lot, no social justice activist in 2018 is going around starting otherkin discourse. Good parody, while exaggerated, still accurately represents the fundamental principles. Just turned up to 11.
Not right now, but should people stop telling jokes just because they’re not politically topical? Has social justice changed in a manner such that the underlying theory and praxis that caused otherkin activism no longer exists?
Of course no one should stop telling jokes just because they’re politically topical. I’m less concerned with topicality than with *staleness*, and a lot of SJ parodies are tediously stale these days. Endless iterations of “did you just assume my gender” don’t actually capture the absurdities and contradictions of wokeness as it exists in 2018. I don’t know who, if anyone, would be able to capture them.
This seems like a good opportunity for active contribution. Do you have a list of fresh contemporary-feeling SJ discursive/behavioral stereotypes that are ripe for parody?
You know, I wish the censoring of perviness in Japanese games when they’re brought over here was considered okay for progressives to be concerned about.
I mean, I know there’s the “localization” argument and also some of that perviness is being removed from characters who are minors according to the federal laws of the United States of America, but still…
There comes a point where it starts to bother me when female characters keep getting their boobs shrunk or their cleavage covered or their skirt lengthened all in the name of “modesty” or “decency”.
99% of the time, when I see people complaining about this and having side-by-side comparison screenshots and the like, it’s either people talking about how this is a part of “the grand sjw conspiracy” or wokes mocking said people for being concerned.
“Female Presenting Too Much Sexiness” should set off more alarm bells, is what I’m saying.
The difference between “female presenting nipples” and this is that the former is a case of something being seen as inherently sexual and titillaitng because it’s female, and the latter is a case of something being made hypersexual and titillating because it’s female. Domestic media was like this not that long ago too – everything was full of outrageously hypersexualized women, whether or not it made any sense contextually, for basically the same reason as all the food in the US is full of corn syrup. And, you know, there’s a lot of markets where companies have to put less corn syrup in their food because everyone finds it outrageously sweet there, and that’s a good thing.
Like, the point isn’t that we don’t do cheesecake here, it’s that we don’t want massive amounts of cheesecake in absolutely everything for no reason other than “it sells”, we don’t like cheesecake to be the single most acceptable format for presenting female characters, and we don’t do the “everything has hypersexualized softcore of 14-year-old girls aimed at 35-year-old single men because after our economy collapsed they’re the only ones wlling to spend hundreds of dollars on the deluxe add-on shit that our business model requires.” I’m really okay with this!
There’s I think a broader argument about how an increasingly interconnected field feels about localization in general – to continue with the food example, I remember some heat recently over Eastern Europe getting altered versions of western food products – and when it comes to media, it’d be nice if we broke down all the artificial international barriers so people could get the versions they prefer, law permitting. But I’m pretty OK with “we turned this 12-year-old’s thong bikini into a one-piece” and “we toned down the ass physics a bit for the international market” as a thing that happens; Lord knows it’s preferable to the kind of localization that got done when I was a kid.
Like, I guess the question here is – do you think “going overboard in having ubiquitous sex-object girls” is possible? Because I think you can make an argument that it’s possible but anime and japanese video games aren’t there yet – it’s a bit tough, but you can do it. But it seems like you’re objecting that toning it down is inherently suspect, regardless of what the original content is like, and it feels to me like, at that point, it’s a much more difficult discussion to have.
This seems like it’s basically a process argument in a way that you’re eliding. It’s not about the Ideal Balance of Aesthetics in Pop Culture – which we generally regard as a thing that isn’t worth trying to centrally-engineer even in theory – but rather about the methodology of the people who are reacting to the situation.
I’m no great fan of cheesecake (although it doesn’t especially bother me either, usually it strikes me as Not Worth Noticing, I grew up in the olden days before genre media did its mainstream pivot). Less cheesecake in pop culture doesn’t seem like a bad thing. But I’m in the OP’s camp here nonetheless. If the thing is being modified because the makers are afraid of censors or destructive zealots, that’s very bad, because there shouldn’t be censors or destructive zealots who have any power over art. And if the thing is being modified because the makers think it’ll sell better that way in the new market…well, that’s still kinda bad. This gets into very floofy philosophy-of-art thoughts, but at the least there’s something distasteful about the original composition and execution of a work being mangled for commercial considerations. If you want to consume it, better to take it as it is rather than having it remade to your sensibilities. This is obviously a vague and mutable idea at best – I’m not going to say that language translation is undesirable, for example – but even so, there’s something in the whole dynamic that smacks of immaturity and consumer entitlement.
Or, in briefer terms,
“Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds: the Expurgated Version”
It is well-understood by now that penis size matters an awful lot more in porn than it does in real life. The trope where women are devoted to Big Cock, where penis size is the measure by which a man’s worth and virility is measured, is a porn trope. (And to the extent that it can be found in real life, well, a lot of that is cultural backwash. We all know from porn that cool experienced sexually-voracious women evaluate men by penis size, and if little Jane wants to be a cool experienced sexually-voracious woman, well…)
Porn is made for men. It is not, particularly, aimed at men with much-larger-than-average penises; I have encountered no evidence that such men use porn to a greater-than-chance degree. And yet the trope came into existence, and spread, and persists. Men are eagerly signing up to fantasize about being judged by a standard that most of them, by definition, will not meet. This is weird. It demands explanation.
There are many interlinked causes behind the phenomenon, no doubt, but one of them is this: the elimination of ambiguity is, itself, a comforting fantasy. The collapse of sexual appeal into a single well-defined variable makes the world of sex less existentially dreadful.
In actual existence, finding and keeping sexual partners is a bogglingly complicated and never-ending process that dominates people’s lives and fills them with anxiety. It is inextricably intertwined with love, emotional validation, and all sorts of other very-important things. It requires navigating the unique preferences and sentiments of each other human with whom you interact. The prospect of being able to dispense with all that, and to have women fall all over you simply by revealing your Big Cock, turns a labyrinth of fearful neurosis into something gloriously simple. Even if you don’t actually have a Big Cock, you can imagine that you do, and…that goes pretty far, when we’re talking about porn.
I’m not here to tell you what kind of porn you should or shouldn’t enjoy, but there are obvious ways in which this fantasy, in particular, can be very bad for you. Not only is it completely unachievable even in theory, it runs completely counter to most people’s endorsed non-masturbatory values; the world in which Big Cock works as advertised would be a worse world than the real one, a world in which love and attraction and even just straight-up sex would be less precious and less interesting than they actually are. And if you’re jerking off to the idea that women could only feel desire for a Big Cock that you don’t have, you’re not only a loser even by your own standards, you are actively enjoying the fact of your own loser-ness, you are – what’s that word? – cucked.
Recently I’ve been reading a bunch of culturally-far-right writing, of the kind that is at least trying to be intellectually serious, and the Big Cock concept-plex has been coming to mind more and more.
The unifying factor amongst these essayists, insofar as there is one, seems to be an insistent belief in some kind of absolute universal telos. Every human being is actually playing the same game, or so the argument always seems to go; everyone knows what success and failure really are, deep down at least, and the value of a human’s existence can be measured according to that one transcendent metric. This is most intuitively obvious with the religious conservatives, for whom the universal telos is synonymous with the will of God. But sometimes the telos is alleged to be a sort of collective cultural greatness, in a system where things like scientific discoveries and artistic achievements and big wholesome families provide Valuable Points that must be maximized. And – often – macro-level evolutionary theory is overlaid onto micro-level human psychology to produce a claim that the telos is about reproducing and passing on your genes. (This post came together after I saw someone claim that the best way to attack liberals, to really get their goat, is to play on their “deep insecurities” about their reproductive fitness.)
These various alleged Objective Meanings of Life do not have a lot in common. But there is a lot of commonality in the way that their proponents will fold, spindle, and mutilate their perceptions of human behavior in order to make it center on the preferred telos. You see unsupported claims that vast swathes of people are deeply, deeply unhappy and sick at heart. You see unsupported claims about a golden age when Things Were Better because we were More in Tune With Our Purpose. You see a persistent refusal to acknowledge explanations for social phenomena that are more Occam’s-Razor-y (material explanations, explanations centering on the random variables of individual psychology). Most of all you see a radical simplification of the human mindscape, a collapse of people into a smallish number of categories, so that everyone can be accounted for by the theory.
(…I have a lot of sympathy for people who do that last thing. I, too, am an abstract systematizer with a love of pigeonholes. But it’s important to realize when your mapping system is blocking out information rather than using it.)
For the most part these are not especially comforting fantasies, at least on the surface. The people who peddle them tend to be very pessimistic, as conservative intellectuals so often are. Maybe God is good, but the idea that everyone is just profoundly obsessed with mating opportunities and gene-spreading is…not a happy idea, and not presented as such. And, to credit them with integrity where due, many of these guys are very open about the fact that they themselves are not winners by the standards of winning that they propound.
But the Power of Big Cock is not a comforting fantasy either, on the surface, for most guys. And yet.
A universal telos simplifies moral and cultural life in the same way that the Big Cock myth simplifies sexual life. It says “you can imagine being a winner, even if you aren’t in fact a winner, because winning is at least a thing that exists.” It says “you don’t have to model the universe as a vortex of chaos where nothing means anything and nothing makes sense, you can model it as a game with rules, and whether or not you’re winning you can get some pleasure out of constructing and mastering your model.” It says “you could, at least in theory, prove to those jerks who are laughing at you that you’re better than they are.”
The alternative is, well, actual existence: a world in which everyone is different and nothing is commensurable and all you can do is roll with it, or impose your conceptual will on a tiny corner of reality through sheer power. I can see why a certain breed of person would be very driven to escape that.
I wonder how much overlap there is between the people clinging to a telos and the people who fantasize about the dominance of Big Cock.
This is armchair psychologizing, and therefore necessarily kind of dickish. I feel bad about that. Not bad enough not to do it, I wanted to share these thoughts, but…bad. Speculating about what people really think (independent of what they say) is rude, even if they make a practice of doing it themselves.
I do want to say, though:
Facing down reality, in all its horror, is a virtue. But I really, really, really do not blame anyone for finding the nature of reality horrific. “You should just learn to be cool and go with the flow and not care about ultimate meaning” is not the lesson here, not even a little bit.
If there is a world you want to inhabit, you should get to build it, and you should get to live there. I would like to help you do that, if I can. It doesn’t matter whether the Great and Good, or anyone else for that matter, would find that world appalling. Just…don’t insist that other people would necessarily want to live there with you, and don’t try to gobble them up in your attempts to justify your desires. Your desires do not need to be justified on universal grounds. There is world enough, and time.
I’m not getting into the nerd discourse right now because I’m not supposed to be posting tomorrow, but it does remind me of something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a bit because I find it super weird: Tumblr argues about nerds as a social group all the time, and it argues about “not like other girls” all the time, but hardly anybody seems to have recognized that these are the same topic. “I’m not like other girls” is about being weird and nerdy– sometimes actually, sometimes just because you’re fully aware of your own self rather than the masks people wear in public – and framing it as a kind of humblebrag, a kind of “yeah this thing makes me weird and lame but really it makes me interesting and authentic, wink wink.” This is, like, the default YA protagonist, especially in books since it tends to appeal to the bookish. “Not like other girls” is just a particular variant of that.
Like, everyone remembers the creamsicle thing, right? KYM doesn’t trace it back that far, but there was at least one actual serious nerd-chaunivism post that the original creamsicle thing was parodying, and I’ve seen any number of those over the years. It’s just the nerds-vs-jocks thing, and the backlash against it – the ridiculing of not-like-other-girls chauvinists as arrogant and socially stunted – is part of the same backlash against nerd chauvinism more generally, which, there as elsewhere, boiled over into hostility toward nerds as a class. I think both sides on these fights have some good points and I’m not really here to lay down the law because it’s a very complicated issue, but do I feel like there ought to be more awareness that these are different aspects of the same fight.
Relatedly, a lot of people try to frame some of this stuff as “feminism vs. nerds” and once you recognize that “nerds” encompasses this much broader group that angle sort of falls away, because nerd women are often shamed for being too into feminism, and the wrong types, and a lot of the discourse we do here about choice feminism and makeup culture is orbiting that conflict. (I wonder if it might be more accurate to say that nerds tend to have strong opinions about feminism qua feminism, whereas non-nerds are more likely to view feminism as just one of many arenas to Do Society? I need to think about that a bit more.)
I don’t really have an overarching point here beyond “we can eliminate a number of redundancies in these discourse streams”, I guess, but that was enough for me to say it because this has been driving me up the wall for a while now.
Relatedly, a lot of people try to frame some of this stuff as “feminism
vs. nerds” and once you recognize that “nerds” encompasses this much
broader group that angle sort of falls away, because nerd women are
often shamed for being too into feminism, and the wrong types,
and a lot of the discourse we do here about choice feminism and makeup
culture is orbiting that conflict.
This is interesting. Not saying you’re wrong, just…I don’t think I’ve ever heard nerd-girls-qua-nerd-girls slammed for excessive feminism, or indeed for anything other than Betraying the Sisterhood via excessive nerdery and insufficient feminism.
Maybe a milieu thing? In places outside the Hip Urban Centers, where e.g. the Perky Sorority Girl with her big smile and her downhome values is still an ideal that’s very much in force, I can imagine the nerdy girl stereotype getting crossed with the conservative-land Ugly Hairy Feminist stereotype. But in liberaltopia, well, the archetypal stylish popular well-put-together woman is super feminist, and you have to go many rungs down the fashion ladder before you get to “actually not caring about your looks” (as opposed to “going for a grungier and more proletarian-chic form of stylish”), and overall it really doesn’t seem like there’s room for nerds to be more-feminist-than-average.
Also,
I’m not getting into the nerd discourse right now because I’m not supposed to be posting tomorrow
Why not? Are you ditching this place for good? Observing some kind of extended moment of silence?
Contrarianism level -1: “Democracy is a degenerate sham. We need a strong manly man in charge, like Putin.”
Contrarianism level 0: “Democracy is pretty great. We should appreciate it.”
Contrarianism level 1: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”
Contrarianism level 2: “Democracy is an awful mess of perverse incentives, do you even free market, you plebs?” *tips fedora*
Contrarianism level 3: “Bourgeois democracy is useless to the common people and a tool of the ruling class, and here’s why we need a one-party leftist state with our own ruling class.”
Contrarianism level 4: “Democracy is pretty great. We should appreciate it.”
Sitting hard at level 4.
Levels 1 and 4 are difficult to separate
Contrarianism level Correct: “Democracy is a manly sham. We need a degenerate in charge to preserve our sacred decadent values.”
I’ve had a couple requests on here to talk about my feelings towards comic book movies. I’m gonna try to make this as direct and simple as I can.
There are a lot of wonderful things that art made for children can do. We all have beloved books and movies that moved us as children that still move us, and I certainly would never want anyone to feel shame over continuing to access them. But there are also many things that child-appropriate art cannot do. Yes, there’s the obvious in terms of sex, violence, and language, but that’s not exactly what I mean here. I mean that there are themes and subject matter that are not typically found in art for children, even though precocious children can sometimes enjoy them. I am thinking of topics like infidelity, the meaninglessness of existence, loneliness, perversion, the pain of the absence of god, the crushing boredom of adult life, and so on. These topics matter, but both the culture and economics of art for children prevent them from being encountered there, at least in most cases.
There are aspects of the human condition that can be explored through art, that must be explored through art, that are not conducive to stories about superheroes, wizards, cyborgs, monsters, or similar. And, in those cases where such themes are explored with genre tropes, they are generally unattractive to (some would say inappropriate for) children. And so adults should look beyond art intended for children, in order to deepen their understanding of life and the world and grapple with what it means to live a mortal life in a universe without meaning.
Here I think of a film like Michael Haneke’s Amour. Among other things, it’s about the horrors of aging and the inevitability of death. These are heady topics, to be sure, and perhaps not ones that we want to expose to younger children, if only because they should probably enjoy the fact that they are blissfully unaware of these sad conditions. But adults need to access them; we need to process them, and art can help. Unless you’re unlucky, you too will grow old. You will inevitably die. So you have to do the emotional and intellectual work of coming to terms with those things, and for that reason you turn to a movie like Amour. You cannot find those things in Narnia, nor are you meant to.
Beyond the goal of art that is morally edifying is the goal of art to induce various kinds of pleasure. Different kinds of art impart different kinds of pleasure; it’s no insult to either to say that Carly Rae Jepsen and Merzbow intend to produce different feelings in their listeners. In life we have both cookies and kimchi, both lemonade and whiskey. There are, in other words, acquired tastes as well as obvious ones, and the former are some of the best stuff in life.
Now the common rejoinder is to say “do both!” And indeed - watch both, read both. I can’t complain about that. But the entire point is that people aren’t watching both. Do you know how many people consume literally nothing but superheroes, sci-fi, zombies, video games, and so on? Very, very many. And how could there not be? Any sense that we should feel embarrassed to remain fixated on art for children in existence that once existed - and I have never been convinced that it ever did - has long since been utterly obliterated in our current moment, a time when art populism manages to both be utterly commercially and critically dominant and yet cast as a perpetual underdog. Precisely because they need to be acquired, acquired tastes have a higher barrier to entry than others, and so their embrace by the public will always be more tenuous. But there are treasures there. Think of how much is lost for so many when there is no social pressure at all to try new things, new types of things.
It is no coincidence that we are all living in the digital world alongside a cadre of angry, embittered, activist nerds who rage out endlessly about all of the perceived slights against them. After all, there culture has told them to never leave their fantasies behind, so how can we be surprised that they react violently to the difference between those fantasies and their reality? That’s what all of this does, after all - it gives us an excuse to remain in the numbing bubble of fantasy, forever. Sometimes you have to force yourself outside of the comforting worlds you can find in fiction. There are people who spend their whole lives waiting for that letter to come from Hogwarts. And sometimes, when that doesn’t happen, they snap, and that’s how you get the toxicity of online fandom.
In life you should want there to be an arc to your tastes. Just as you moved on from a mac’n’cheese and popsicle diet as a child, you move on to a more varied, more complex, more challenging diet as an adult. But in art, so many people like the same things at 40 as they did at 10. That can’t be healthy. But it is understandable, in a world where the likes of Stranger Things tells you to be 10 years old forever.
Also I just don’t think comic book movies are any good, when we aren’t grading them on a huge curve. Every Avengers movie is a bloated mess. Logan was good, up until the ending. But your tastes will be different than mine. So knock yourself out. Just understand all that you might be missing, if you’re not careful.
Sigh. This is so close to being the right point, but it gets botched so badly.
I have basically no tolerance for contemporary media populism. It’s true: a serious person should not gorge himself exclusively on art for children. It is also true that a lot of the mega-blockbuster media of our time (MCU, Harry Potter, the Game of Thrones TV show, etc.), whatever its virtues may be, is not particularly deep or sophisticated or intellectually complex, and using that stuff as the central tentpole of your art consumption is not going to be great for your intellectual development.
That said,
There are aspects of the human condition that can be explored through
art, that must be explored through art, that are not conducive to
stories about superheroes, wizards, cyborgs, monsters, or similar.
– speaking as someone who writes stuff for adults full of wizards and monsters etc., stuff that is meant to be philosophically engaging and emotionally complex to a degree that is genuinely highbrow, this is a giant load of horseshit. F/SF worlds don’t stop having room for adult thoughts or adult difficulties just because they contain magic or spaceships. Why would they?
I don’t approve of reading only F/SF, because there’s a lot of really good stuff that isn’t that, and cutting yourself off from good art based on genre boundaries is dumb. But, Freddie, dude, based on your understanding of genre fiction, it sounds like you’re doing quite a bit of that yourself.
Obviously this is a Big Serious Topic and I’m not even remotely doing it justice here, I just felt some need to rant a bit.
Keep almost coming up with a take on netflix, pricing, and competition, that consumerism thing made me think I had something for a bit but I still do not.
But there’s something to the way that online video libraries are split and priced that is weird and maybe meaningful that I feel I can’t quite put my finger on.
Seeing Stoller’s takes on tech and monopoly also, netflix could basically be the consumer case for monopoly and so because there is no justice in the world will it be the first company to be broken up?
It does feel a little weird to hear the same people who talk about how Amazon or Facebook have too much power turn around and complain that everyone is going to start pirating stuff again because everyone is making rival streaming services. Like, Netflix hasn’t done anything particularly extractive yet, but in a world where even a media titan like Disney couldn’t launch a rival service, things would be pretty different.
I wonder what the economics of that sort of enterprise are – how low depressed demand could actually drive prices before everybody just gives up and goes home.
multiple streaming services with a video neutrality rule that allows you to watch any show on any service, boom, sorted.
To people who are trying to do armchair cultural analysis, or trying to comment on The Discourse, or trying to make big sweeping insight-porn-y claims about what The Problem is, I exhort you with all my might:
get out of your bubble get out of your bubble get out of your bubble
(Or, at least, acknowledge that you’re talking mostly about the stuff inside your bubble, and that it is your intention to keep on doing so. Which is fine, so long as everyone is clear on it, and no one is trying to apply your insights to Society-at-large.)
So often, of late, I’ve found myself asking: “why is this person issuing assertions that make no fucking sense?”And in so many cases, the answer seems to boil down to “he is trying to wrestle with something that is happening right in front of his eyes, something that really matters to him, and the fact that things look super different in most of the world doesn’t much enter into his calculations.”
A couple of unnecessarily touchy examples:
* I was recently rereading a couple of @slatestarscratchpad‘s old nerds-versus-feminists pieces (because he linked to them), and sharing in his bafflement that so many feminists seemed to be so angry at nerds-as-a-class, given that nerds are actually a very feminist and feminist-friendly group of people and that so many obvious subcategories of men seem so much worse on that front. But most of those men genuinely do not matter to your average feminist participating in the discourse, except maybe in some very abstract sense. If “Henry” is out there continually beating his wife, cheating on her with his previously-beaten ex-wives, exploiting her economic contribution to his household, and generally being a monster in every sense by feminist standards…well, unless you’re in a very unusual position (like a doctor in a hospital that provides services to the poor), you’ll never interact with him, or with anyone who knows him, or with anyone like him. Your world consists of the sort of overeducated young people who live in coastal cities and participate in middle-to-high-culture activities, plus the sort of people who engage in Serious Conversations on the Internet, which is mostly a subset of the above. So: women who are mostly feminists, the sort of socially adroit men who are very vocal about being good feminist allies (because they don’t want to be pilloried and/or because they want to get in your pants), and…nerds. Nerds are the closest thing to a local visible enemy. Nerds are the people who argue with you when you make assertions, who exist within your field of view while maintaining institutions that are weirdly alien to your sensibilities. Saying “they should have less of the good stuff and people like me should have more” is a social maneuver that makes sense, in context. And, more charitably, it makes sense that nerd opinions/habits/customs seem salient enough to be worth critique, whereas Henry’s straightforwardly-worse predilections are pretty much out of sight and out of mind.
And, on the flip side,
* If you read the writings of certain kinds of thinkers on the far-right fringes, there is a certain kind of essay you’ll come across sooner rather than later: “the Why Women Are All Like That” essay. Usually it’s got a lot of evo-psych in it of one stripe or another, usually it ends up concluding that women have to be absolutely mastered and controlled by men for their own good and the good of society. (Also, usually, concluding that this is secretly what they all want.) And, completely leaving to one side the quality of the argumentation, there’s a certain element of…why did you think this was a good hypothesis in the first place? Have you met any women, literally ever, or are you just trying to imagine what they’d be like based on your favorite novels? Because, I assure you, they are most definitely not All Like That. Except I’m starting to believe that, in the unhelpfully limited experience of these men, women actually kind of are All Like That. Humans self-segregate in a wide variety of important ways. In particular, the nerdy abstract-minded women – the ones who seem like they ought to be most personally relevant to these guys, who are obviously abstract-minded nerds themselves – are mostly segregated into enclaves that are heavily urban, liberal, etc. If those traits don’t appeal, you’re going to be stuck hanging around places where the women are overall a lot more alien, and that will take its toll. In particular in particular, if you’re starting off from a half-formed assumption that Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus and mostly you’re trying to find a reproductive partner rather than a friend…and you’re also trying to be Sexually Successful with Objectively Attractive Women according to some preformed criterion…you’re going to center in on the kinds of places where women act the very most, uh, Like That.
I agree with about 90% of this, but I do think in your second part you’ve misidentified where the feeling that Women are Like That is coming from. In particular, it’s not the culturally conservative spaces that give rise to this, because in conservative climes women usually aren’t Like That, but specifically the conservative(-ish) men in progressive zones.
In particular, ground zero for this kind of thinking in the present era seems to have been the PUAs, whose insights into female psychology are all optimized for banging chicks that you meet in bars, ie. urban women who are really into social-justice-as-fashion-statement, but would get really turned off if you tried to apply it in your personal life.
This is fair. I do think it’s important to note that the women who would work well with these guys mostly aren’t clustering in actual conservative climes either. This is the place where, e.g., the difference between being a trad-themed intellectual and being an actual dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist becomes extremely salient.
ironically i find the implication that all professional-class men are
either woke huckers or socially inept nerds totally bizarre, but i guess
that only reinforces your meta-level point
…it’s a fair cop. I meant to put in a stinger to the effect of “this applies as much to myself as to the people I read,” and I forgot, and obviously it would have been very apropos in this particular situation. I do think that if you drill down to the male sectors of the Discourse Class, those two groups are going to dominate; people who like to spend their free time talking about ideas tend to be either nerds or Intellectual Cool Kids, and the male archetype of the latter these days is the woke hucker. But the Discourse Class is obviously a lot smaller than the professional class in general.
@ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:
the implication that urban liberal women aren’t Like That is p bizarre
given that urban liberal women are most likely the ones they’re talking
about, and at least IME *are* Like That
I mean, the class of urban liberal women is massively heterogeneous, just like every human class of comparable size. I’m sure plenty of them are Like That. I’m especially sure that you’ll find many of them who are Like That if you go looking for women while prioritizing the kinds of traits that these essayists talk about prioritizing.
Many of my friends are urban liberal women. With maybe a couple of minor exceptions, they are not Like That. They have all the traits that the essayists claim that you can’t find in women. Their romantic choices, in particular, look nothing like the ones that the essayists attribute to All Women. The snarky part of me wants to shake these dudes and say maybe you should fucking take a look around, or else own up to your revealed preferences. The more-charitable part of me thinks that they’ve been trapped in a bubble where they can’t find the thing they’re looking for, and that this is at most only a little bit their own fault. But either way, man. The world is wide.
To people who are trying to do armchair cultural analysis, or trying to comment on The Discourse, or trying to make big sweeping insight-porn-y claims about what The Problem is, I exhort you with all my might:
get out of your bubble get out of your bubble get out of your bubble
(Or, at least, acknowledge that you’re talking mostly about the stuff inside your bubble, and that it is your intention to keep on doing so. Which is fine, so long as everyone is clear on it, and no one is trying to apply your insights to Society-at-large.)
So often, of late, I’ve found myself asking: “why is this person issuing assertions that make no fucking sense?”And in so many cases, the answer seems to boil down to “he is trying to wrestle with something that is happening right in front of his eyes, something that really matters to him, and the fact that things look super different in most of the world doesn’t much enter into his calculations.”
A couple of unnecessarily touchy examples:
* I was recently rereading a couple of @slatestarscratchpad‘s old nerds-versus-feminists pieces (because he linked to them), and sharing in his bafflement that so many feminists seemed to be so angry at nerds-as-a-class, given that nerds are actually a very feminist and feminist-friendly group of people and that so many obvious subcategories of men seem so much worse on that front. But most of those men genuinely do not matter to your average feminist participating in the discourse, except maybe in some very abstract sense. If “Henry” is out there continually beating his wife, cheating on her with his previously-beaten ex-wives, exploiting her economic contribution to his household, and generally being a monster in every sense by feminist standards…well, unless you’re in a very unusual position (like a doctor in a hospital that provides services to the poor), you’ll never interact with him, or with anyone who knows him, or with anyone like him. Your world consists of the sort of overeducated young people who live in coastal cities and participate in middle-to-high-culture activities, plus the sort of people who engage in Serious Conversations on the Internet, which is mostly a subset of the above. So: women who are mostly feminists, the sort of socially adroit men who are very vocal about being good feminist allies (because they don’t want to be pilloried and/or because they want to get in your pants), and…nerds. Nerds are the closest thing to a local visible enemy. Nerds are the people who argue with you when you make assertions, who exist within your field of view while maintaining institutions that are weirdly alien to your sensibilities. Saying “they should have less of the good stuff and people like me should have more” is a social maneuver that makes sense, in context. And, more charitably, it makes sense that nerd opinions/habits/customs seem salient enough to be worth critique, whereas Henry’s straightforwardly-worse predilections are pretty much out of sight and out of mind.
And, on the flip side,
* If you read the writings of certain kinds of thinkers on the far-right fringes, there is a certain kind of essay you’ll come across sooner rather than later: “the Why Women Are All Like That” essay. Usually it’s got a lot of evo-psych in it of one stripe or another, usually it ends up concluding that women have to be absolutely mastered and controlled by men for their own good and the good of society. (Also, usually, concluding that this is secretly what they all want.) And, completely leaving to one side the quality of the argumentation, there’s a certain element of…why did you think this was a good hypothesis in the first place? Have you met any women, literally ever, or are you just trying to imagine what they’d be like based on your favorite novels? Because, I assure you, they are most definitely not All Like That. Except I’m starting to believe that, in the unhelpfully limited experience of these men, women actually kind of are All Like That. Humans self-segregate in a wide variety of important ways. In particular, the nerdy abstract-minded women – the ones who seem like they ought to be most personally relevant to these guys, who are obviously abstract-minded nerds themselves – are mostly segregated into enclaves that are heavily urban, liberal, etc. If those traits don’t appeal, you’re going to be stuck hanging around places where the women are overall a lot more alien, and that will take its toll. In particular in particular, if you’re starting off from a half-formed assumption that Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus and mostly you’re trying to find a reproductive partner rather than a friend…and you’re also trying to be Sexually Successful with Objectively Attractive Women according to some preformed criterion…you’re going to center in on the kinds of places where women act the very most, uh, Like That.
Additionally, the guy writing that essay, who wants Men to be in Charge of Women - well the men he’s thinking of - they’re the men he knows. His friends and colleagues, who obviously also shouldn’t be in charge of women, but who probably aren’t monsters.
Somebody should remind that guy that Henry exists, and should be in charge of exactly nothing.
…for better or worse, the guy writing that essay is assuredly very aware that Henry exists. Kind of obsessed with it, in fact. Inclined to see the project of “saving society” as being largely “saving society from the fast-breeding hordes of Henry and his ilk,” a plan that at the very least involves throwing all the female members of Henry’s social groups under the bus (and probably writing them off as unsalvageable from the get-go).
To people who are trying to do armchair cultural analysis, or trying to comment on The Discourse, or trying to make big sweeping insight-porn-y claims about what The Problem is, I exhort you with all my might:
get out of your bubble get out of your bubble get out of your bubble
(Or, at least, acknowledge that you’re talking mostly about the stuff inside your bubble, and that it is your intention to keep on doing so. Which is fine, so long as everyone is clear on it, and no one is trying to apply your insights to Society-at-large.)
So often, of late, I’ve found myself asking: “why is this person issuing assertions that make no fucking sense?”And in so many cases, the answer seems to boil down to “he is trying to wrestle with something that is happening right in front of his eyes, something that really matters to him, and the fact that things look super different in most of the world doesn’t much enter into his calculations.”
A couple of unnecessarily touchy examples:
* I was recently rereading a couple of @slatestarscratchpad‘s old nerds-versus-feminists pieces (because he linked to them), and sharing in his bafflement that so many feminists seemed to be so angry at nerds-as-a-class, given that nerds are actually a very feminist and feminist-friendly group of people and that so many obvious subcategories of men seem so much worse on that front. But most of those men genuinely do not matter to your average feminist participating in the discourse, except maybe in some very abstract sense. If “Henry” is out there continually beating his wife, cheating on her with his previously-beaten ex-wives, exploiting her economic contribution to his household, and generally being a monster in every sense by feminist standards…well, unless you’re in a very unusual position (like a doctor in a hospital that provides services to the poor), you’ll never interact with him, or with anyone who knows him, or with anyone like him. Your world consists of the sort of overeducated young people who live in coastal cities and participate in middle-to-high-culture activities, plus the sort of people who engage in Serious Conversations on the Internet, which is mostly a subset of the above. So: women who are mostly feminists, the sort of socially adroit men who are very vocal about being good feminist allies (because they don’t want to be pilloried and/or because they want to get in your pants), and…nerds. Nerds are the closest thing to a local visible enemy. Nerds are the people who argue with you when you make assertions, who exist within your field of view while maintaining institutions that are weirdly alien to your sensibilities. Saying “they should have less of the good stuff and people like me should have more” is a social maneuver that makes sense, in context. And, more charitably, it makes sense that nerd opinions/habits/customs seem salient enough to be worth critique, whereas Henry’s straightforwardly-worse predilections are pretty much out of sight and out of mind.
And, on the flip side,
* If you read the writings of certain kinds of thinkers on the far-right fringes, there is a certain kind of essay you’ll come across sooner rather than later: “the Why Women Are All Like That” essay. Usually it’s got a lot of evo-psych in it of one stripe or another, usually it ends up concluding that women have to be absolutely mastered and controlled by men for their own good and the good of society. (Also, usually, concluding that this is secretly what they all want.) And, completely leaving to one side the quality of the argumentation, there’s a certain element of…why did you think this was a good hypothesis in the first place? Have you met any women, literally ever, or are you just trying to imagine what they’d be like based on your favorite novels? Because, I assure you, they are most definitely not All Like That. Except I’m starting to believe that, in the unhelpfully limited experience of these men, women actually kind of are All Like That. Humans self-segregate in a wide variety of important ways. In particular, the nerdy abstract-minded women – the ones who seem like they ought to be most personally relevant to these guys, who are obviously abstract-minded nerds themselves – are mostly segregated into enclaves that are heavily urban, liberal, etc. If those traits don’t appeal, you’re going to be stuck hanging around places where the women are overall a lot more alien, and that will take its toll. In particular in particular, if you’re starting off from a half-formed assumption that Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus and mostly you’re trying to find a reproductive partner rather than a friend…and you’re also trying to be Sexually Successful with Objectively Attractive Women according to some preformed criterion…you’re going to center in on the kinds of places where women act the very most, uh, Like That.
OK, look, I am definitely not any kind of economist, but I’m pretty sure of this one:
An economy in which all the large successful enterprises are primarily in the business of selling ads, to each other and to small struggling enterprises trying to make it to the point where they can become primarily ad sales businesses, is not going to work.
…or is this the beginning of some kind of Bostromesque madness where the economy consists entirely of large firms selling ads to each other, and providing free services for individual humans is simply the vector along which they achieve that?
OK, look, I am definitely not any kind of economist, but I’m pretty sure of this one:
An economy in which all the large successful enterprises are primarily in the business of selling ads, to each other and to small struggling enterprises trying to make it to the point where they can become primarily ad sales businesses, is not going to work.
I was reading your excellent article about Hastur on bambamramfam’s Understanding Egregores, and thinking about the fictionalized, idealized self, and the mask as more real than the face that wears it. And then I thought, “Oh my god, Hastur is the god of furries”, and my train of thought understandably derailed
He’s got to fight that one out with Shub-Niggurath, I think. But, yes, He is the god of all personas, and I suppose that includes fursonas.
Hi there! Long-time reader, first-time writer. A while ago I found your "Tarot of the Ages of Humanity" post and, since you wrote that you would stop at the text, and that you released the concept in public for any to use, I figured I'd give a shot at combining your symbols and text with pictures, that in the future may or may not be replaced with fully original artwork. Would you be interested in seeing the result? If so, how may I contact you? (I'm not on tumblr myself, nor likely to be soon)
This is awesome, and I eagerly look forward to seeing whatever you’ve got, or will have.
The obvious plan would be “put links in a comment on the original post.” If that doesn’t work for some reason, let me know and we’ll figure out something else.
The super-aggressive gun abolition position – not just, “we should make the laws be like Australia or most of Western Europe”, but the position where these people go full ragemonster and make appeals to might…
It just seems so empty, and revelatory. Like, have these people seriously thought so little about where power and expectations come from?
I have many doubts about a (nationwide) revolution against tyranny in this country being supported by legal gun owners, but these people are proposing the exact course of action that would provoke one (and also provoke sympathy from normally unsympathetic quarters).
They feel about this the way that you feel about abortion.
…not that I imagine that this analogy will move the needle for you in any way, substantively, or indeed that it would move the needle for them were I talking to them instead of you. But it might help to make the other side’s thinking clearer.
They see a cruel, alien culture whose representatives are saying “we support the status quo in which masses of children are killed, and indeed we are willing to fight for that status quo, so that we can continue having fun.” Their reaction to this fails to be temperate.
That intemperate reaction isn’t justified, any more than (by your own standards) it would be justified for you to start preaching holy war. But I imagine that you can grok the impulse.
It’s always amusing to point and laugh at how your enemies on one issue are also compete fools on another. It’s even better to see that your allies on one issue are also excellent human beings on others. Here’s Laurie Penny on crypto today, giving exactly the “SJ with a heart and an appreciation” take you’d expect.
Oh my god that piece is great. I might have to add Penny to my list of people I read just because their writing is so much fun, next to Michael Lewis and Matt Levine.
I am…surprised…by this reaction. I’ll be honest, the article infuriated me.
There’s a whole journalistic genre that is “I, a member of the cool intellectual elite, will make evaluative comments about the minutiae of some people’s clothing and social affect while promising an insight into the workings of the world that somehow never comes.” I always hate it.
Sigh. On some level I don’t understand why there are all these online publications offering purported wisdom, given that you can get a much better product for free with very little effort.
“[T]he thing is, all the articles lamenting the demise of Tumblr porn try to elevate their argument into defense of the oppressed, including gays. They assert that Tumblr porn is a critical lifeline to the existence of marginalized groups. I posit that if porn is the basis for your identity, then you have a huge problem.”
This seems rather like cracking down on, idk, Irish pubs and saying “if alcohol is the basis for your identity, you have a huge problem.” The statement is accurate when applied to extremes, but it’s clearly just being used to support some combination of prohibitionism and anti-Irish sentiment. For most people, both alcohol and porn are fun diversions and social lubricants. Rooting out social lubricants used disproportionately by a particular group in the name of trying to save everyone from a vice that only becomes a serious problem for a few is something I’m against.
Which is the social group disproportionately engaged with porn? NEETs? This is a serious question, actually, as I’m actually a little perplexed why Tumblr is so outraged over this given that the groups that I most associate with porn use are not the groups that Tumblr usually sympathizes with.
“Nerd/hipster hybrids, many of whom are queer.” Y’know, stereotypical Tumblr denizens.
Except that the word “porn” here isn’t doing the work that you instinctively think it is.
This is getting into heavy speculation, take it with as many grains of salt as you think appropriate, but…
Saying “porn is primarily a social lubricant” does sound insane on first blush. Porn is, famously, a solitary vice in its classical instantiation. But in fact the “porn” that fills Tumblr is mostly stuff that is in fact serving an expressive/artistic/social purpose rather than a directly masturbatory purpose; you can tell because people are sharing it, showing it off, which is precisely how you deal with expressive/artistic/social content and how you don’t deal with masturbation fodder. If you post something “adult” on Tumblr, probably someone somewhere is actually getting off to it, but a lot more people are nodding appreciatively and liking/reblogging just like they would with anything else. People who really just want an orgasm…probably are not turning to Tumblr to help them deal with that.
Of course, you can’t actually draw any kind of hard line between “social erotica” and “real porn,” so no one tries to keep the categories distinct. But if you could, I’m sure that many of the smutty fanfic fans would be reasonably happy to throw the mainline porn business under the bus. In fact, many of them are happy to do that, although they use the usual social-justice-y sorts of arguments rather than content category distinctions in order to achieve it.
If the question is “why would a community choose to build itself up with sexy stuff as one of its central expressive/artistic/social pillars?” – well, uh, in addition to all the obvious universal things, a lot of these groups are sexual-minority groups and “this is the weird stuff we find hot” is in fact a major bonding material.
So like, major tech businesses that really have changed how we live our day to day lives like Uber and many social media sites are also unable to actually turn even a modest profit. They keep chugging along, but something has to give at some point, right? And when that happens, what then? Do these services just go away leaving a void, or are replaced, or…?
Then we rediscover the concept of the public utility, I sincerely hope.
sort of agreed, but “we won’t ban anything ever” has the failure state
that eventually the government will send people to shoot you and society
will cheer them for doing so, which seems like it’s also not really a
stable equilibrium to me
The glib thing to say here is “I’m prepared to wait and prepare for the day when the government sends men with guns to go deal with the wicked wicked Tumblr posts.”
But in fact that’s too glib, because there is in fact a category of Tumblr posts where this is something akin to a genuine danger: Actual For-Reals Child Porn.
And that example does a pretty OK job of illustrating the principle I have in mind. You can have a viable ban on Actual For-Reals Child Porn, because a large majority of the userbase is willing to say “yes, not only is that terrible, it is distinctively worse than all the other kinds of posts that I hate.” A policy that bans Actual For-Reals Child Porn, and nothing else, can have legs; it exists at a level of censure whose existence has widespread intuitive support.
This does not work with (for example) bans on “Nazi propaganda.” Even though, in fact, pretty much everyone loathes Nazi propaganda. There’s no real agreement on what content falls into that category, and there’s no bright line distinguishing that category from a host of adjacent categories, all of which are beloved and despised by different combinations of constituencies.
[To be absolutely clear: this is pure pragmatics. There is also the overarching moral rule by which banning speech is bad, and by which banning speech by dint of its discursive content is very bad. But I am not particularly trying to have that moral fight right now.]
One gets the sense that internet people are very bad at understanding how Schelling points work.
It’s not inconsistent or incoherent to say “Thing X should be banned, but not Things Y or Z, because of distinguishing factors A and B and C.” But this works, as a consensus rallying-point, only if a sizeable majority of the people actually buy into the principle that underlies the distinction that you’re making. You can’t usefully fudge this one – you won’t get too far saying “well, we at least all hate Thing X, and this lets us clamp down on it, so basically we all agree” – because your “allies” will almost immediately try to use the precedent to get rid of further things that theyhate. If you try to resist, there will be dissension, and it’ll be clear that you don’t have a commanding influence, and the pro-Thing-X people will come rushing back with a vengeance trying to exert their own sociopolitical influence.
“We absolutely won’t ban anything, no ifs, ands, or buts” is not necessarily the best policy, or even the most stable one, in all circumstances. But it does have one huge advantage shared by nothing else: by not singling anyone out, it avoids creating a defensive cohort invested in ginning up political attacks on the rule. In purely pragmatic terms, if you’re going to start banning things, you’d be well advised to make sure – not only that there’s a strong majority in favor of doing so – but that there’s a strong majority willing to acknowledge a qualitative difference between the thing you’re banning and the other things you don’t want to ban. Otherwise you’ve signed up for endless warring over where the line is drawn, and you’re sunk.
So apparently way more people use tumblr for nsfw stuff than I realized
Nah, I think you just read a lot of academic/intellectual-types who care a LOT about where ideological lines are drawn, and various precedents, than proportional to what will actually effect their life.
This is true but misleadingly phrased. I don’t think it’s mostly the high-minded principled “first they came for the communists…” thing, although there is that.
A ban on adult content is a sword that can cut anything, because basically anything serious runs some risk of shading into something “adult” at some point. The policy is a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of all material that isn’t strictly anodyne. This is the same phenomenon that results in Discord channels hosting all their deep philosophical talk on the #nsfw channel – it’s not that philosophers are super horny or anything, it’s that philosophers want to freethink without constantly monitoring themselves for fear of running afoul of restrictions.
…and that’s all assuming that the policy is actually applied in a non-blind-idiot sort of way. I don’t think anyone is willing to trust in that part either.
If you’re looking at the arguments made by any kind of small insular group – which can be small either because it’s fringey or because there are very few people with the expertise/credentials/whatever to get involved – you can safely assume that, right or wrong, most of those arguments represent the actual thoughts and sentiments of the people making them. When you’re a member of a small insular group, there are not a lot of reasons to dissemble. Generally the group members’ interest lie in spreading the group’s ideas, which involves making the best arguments that they know for those ideas, which are…the things they actually believe. (In theory you could have something where an evil and Machiavellian group makes palatable-sounding arguments for things that will actually benefit group members at everyone else’s expense, but…that brand of conscious evil Machiavellianism is not common, it’s especially not common amongst people who think that being identifiably weird in discourse is a good plan, and in general the burden of proof here is a very heavy one.)
If you’re looking at arguments made by members of a large and popular group, especially one that’s dominant within a wider social sphere, argument-made-in-bad-faith becomes a much more salient issue. People will say things they don’t believe in order to gain status within the group, because “gaining status within the group” comes with meaningful benefits even for those who aren’t already invested. Similarly, the group is likely to contain a lot more people who are only kinda-sorta believers, whose membership came about through going-with-the-flow or even through inheritance, and those people will subvert the group’s ideology by making specious arguments in order to get what they personally want. Even outsiders can gesture at the group’s ideology to call in discursive “air support,” if the group has broad enough sway. And, of course, actual Machiavellian types are going to be drawn like flies to high-status groups (and ideologies) that can give them power rather than marginalizing them.
This is a structural feature of society, and it works independent of the content of any particular ideological argument.
it is possible that I’m an asshole, but it is 2 0 1 7 and we’re still doing books where the main conflict is “mages/wizards/magic users are banned by an Oppressive Catholic Church analogue” and i am tired of it
So, with regard to The Armored Saint specifically, I will say –
It’s not a great book overall by any means, it’s all kinds of contemporary Extruded Fantasy Product trite and one of them is the thing you mention, but it redeems itself enormously at the very end with one big act of literary courage.
Spoiler under the cut:
The Oppressive Catholic Church analogue is completely right about its central ideological point. And I really, really, really did not expect that, not after the way it was portrayed and after the way its victims were portrayed.
The asshole templars go around beating people up, razing villages, forcing innocent bystanders to be complicit in their atrocities, etc., all in the name of hunting wizards. And they justify this with “if you do magic, eventually your eye will turn into a portal to Hell and demons will come out to destroy the world.”
The book goes to a lot of effort to make this sound like a bullshit excuse for being horrible to people. A simpleton babbles about wizardry and eye-portals because he’s disturbed and doesn’t know any better, and everyone in town knows it, but when the templars catch wind of it they end up forcing everyone in a neighboring village to help them murder everyone in that village in order to make a point about Not Tolerating Anything That Smacks of Magic. That kind of thing.
And then we meet this adorable wise woodsy ranger dude who generously offers a lot of help to our disaffected protagonist girl, oh and by the way he’s been persecuted for being gay (which is like the single most reliable morality trigger for a modern F/SF audence), and hey! he knows magic! he does magic a lot! it’s totally safe, and he’ll teach some to our heroine!
…and then there’s a crisis, and the ranger dude digs deep down to do a mighty work of magic that will save the day…
…and his eye turns into a portal to hell, and a super-powerful demon comes out, bent on destroying the world.
