an-irrelevant-truth:

kicked out of the new bodega for “EaTiNg tHe FrUiT oF KnOwLeDge” smdh

OK, this is something I genuinely don’t understand.

The trad types love to make hay out of changes in architectural fashion.  “Grand medieval / Gothic architecture = beautiful, modern architecture = hideous” is a constant refrain.  And it’s often specifically tied to a concept of degeneration, like “the ancient masters knew how to do this wonderful thing but we’re worse so all we can do is make things ugly.” 

…and, look, this seems kind of overblown and absurd to me, there are lots of different aesthetics that can work well, there are lots of glass-and-steel modernist creations that look really good, the Hong Kong skyline is one of mankind’s glories, etc. etc.

But.

It’s true that “classical edifice with lots of columns and vaulted roofs” and “ornate Gothic pile” are two of the most aesthetically successful architectural styles in the history of history.  Lots of people really really love them; specifically, lots of people really really love them more than they love more-modern-looking things.  (I am one of those people, when all the factors are weighed.)  Most of the most visually iconic buildings in the world are old-timey stone things rather than sleek contemporary things.  Hell, for that matter, most of the “Total Epic Fail” buildings that everyone hates are experiments in contemporary design that didn’t pan out.

So why aren’t we building any more of the old-timey buildings that so many people think are beautiful?  Like, at all?  It seems like a safe, conservative, popular choice.  But as far as I can tell it doesn’t happen these days.  As late as the 1930s we were making grand classical-style buildings like the National Archives.  So what happened?  Even with a trend towards sleek contemporary stuff, you’d think that someone would want to buck the trend and cater to the taste for old-timey grandeur, but apparently not.

Possible explanations I can imagine include:

1) We didn’t stop making them, I just don’t know about them, the publicity is all in the direction of “look at this modern shitpile.”  (This sounds extremely wrong to me, but I’d like to see evidence.)

2) The trads are correct, we’ve degenerated, we actually don’t have the skills to produce another Notre Dame.  (This also sounds super wrong.)

3) Contemporary glass-and-steel-and-concrete architecture, with lots of sleek plain lines, is so much cheaper than elaborately carved stone that no one with any kind of budget accountability could get away with old-timey stuff. 

4) Grand old-timey architecture is only plausible for giant high-impact projects, and no high-level architect wants to do the safe old-fashioned conservative thing for a giant high-impact project, it’s always “let me show off my bold new idea.”  (The “bold new ideas” often seem pretty samey and derivative to me, but maybe they’re still coded as bold and new?)

5) It’s just the tides of fashion, fashion is way stronger than I think and doesn’t allow for exceptions.

Thoughts? 

thathopeyetlives:

unknought:

I’m not sure how to state this more precisely but there’s a lot of dating advice which seems to portray a world where the concept of like, being on the same side as your partner is naive or totally alien. And I’m really glad I don’t live in that world.

By the grace of Christ I and many others have escaped from that world. Temporarily or permanently. 

But an awful lot of people are caught in this hell-century adversarial thing. And it’s not necessarily easy to escape. 

This particular phenomenon is not a “hell-century” thing, it is as old as civilization and probably older.  It’s not healthy, it’s not wise, but…“men and women have different interests, you should treat your romantic interaction as a battle that you’re trying to win” is not a take that you need contemporary culture in order to generate.

Like, check out almost any Shakespeare comedy.

(There’s a much broader discussion to be had about the widespread tendency to blame These Terrible Times for problems that have been around forever, but – we don’t have to do that right now.)

oligopsalter:

on one hand the ability to sort and choose what information we receive is going to get us all killed, on the other the alternative is you pull up one of three identical news sources and it tells you about marvel movies, a politician stole some money, features on the next phone model. a stumper really

I realize that I’m ruining the joke here, but…these things aren’t opposing forces, they’re the same force, right?

Mainstream media became complete lowest-common-denominator pablum at precisely the moment when it was subjected to the full pressures of a free information market and forced to fight for every advertising dollar it could wring out of a no-longer-captive public.  If we somehow went back to a system that could actually be gatekept…well, we’d have gatekeepers.  They’d select for the things they thought were valuable.  And I doubt you’d like their standards any more than I would, but they’d be trying to do Good Serious Work by their own cultural lights, not pushing pablum for clicks.

an-irrelevant-truth:

boycotting Big Water for spillingmy entire cup of water directly into my crotch, obliterating my marriage

discoursedrome:

I’ve been expecting for a while that major politicians and stars would transition to being something more like mascots or vocaloids, out of recognition that their job is to appeal to people and have an air of legitimacy, and this is a job that real people are very unsuited for.

I think you’ll see it first with movie stars, because the degree of liability associated with your stars being real people is enormous, and you’re not using any of their realness anyway. These jobs already require large staffs of full-time experts to systematically scour away all their human particularity in order to prepare them for the investiture of an archetypal role, so at this point the actual person is a vestigial inconvenience. Once you fully virtualize celebrities there’s no longer the same kind of risk of scandal – if cultural norms render their old presentation taboo you can change it gradually, and if there’s a scandal it will typically be localized in particular staff who can be sacked without permanently damaging the brand. This also works better for media companies – practically speaking, they already treat stars as assets, but they can’t really own or maintain full control over them as long as they’re real people, so full virtualization makes business sense and is a logical continuation of the current trajectory. At this point the main hurdles are technological, I think.

But it’s more interesting to note how politics works this way, and what actually got me reflecting on this again recently was the Ukraine election – how a wholly fictionalized brand can not simply substitute for but outperform an actual political career, and therefore may become the kind of thing that ambitious politicians need to build in advance, and political factions need to cultivate. Major politicians are already as fictionalized and committee-designed as movie stars, and having the brand face be a notional figurehead who serves the interests of one or more back-room owners would be a more efficient arrangement than the current process, where you need to be the former type of person to get elected and the latter type of person to actually “do politics”.

This theory is disconcertingly plausible…and, I’ll be honest, it freaks me out like no product of the discourse has done in years.  Not so much because of the points made directly, but the first-order implications – yikes.

We’re not supposed to outsource our symbolic occult glory to robots.  We’re supposed to outsource literally everything else, and keep the only prize worth having for ourselves.

It is, indeed, contemptible when your opponents whine about how they don’t completely control the public square – how they have to put up with ideas they don’t like being around, with people who espouse those ideas not getting punished.

It is also contemptible when you do it.

I am feeling a lot of contempt these days.  It is very wearying.  I should probably stop reading discourse things for a while.

big-block-of-cheese-day:

balioc:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

bambamramfan:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

voxette-vk:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

The Pump and Dump

Don’t you think it’s a little strange that when a person has sex with a new partner and is immediately ghosted, they think:

“S/he only wanted me for sex!”

and rarely, if ever:

“Am I really that awful in bed?”

Seriously, if someone only wants you for sex, you’re a good lover AND there isn’t some other factor making the relationship unpalatable or impossible, why wouldn’t they come back for more?

The kind of people who do this prefer novelty and lack of attachment? Not that mysterious.

I don’t think the kind of men who try to sleep with as many different women as possible are looking for someone with the height of sexual “skill”.

Surely, the novelty doesn’t decline so much from the frisson of a first encounter that a Round 2 with a good lay is too boring to make a call on a sure thing, no?

So OK, maybe you get some kind of edgy dramatic movie sex addict who has has anonymous sex in a church bathroom one minute and then goes back to his surprisingly large apartment to performatively swig from a bottle and then chuck it at a wall the next. He won’t call you back, no matter how good you are, because he hates himself. But it’s not common.

It’s not novelty, it’s validation. On round 2 there isn’t any further support to your ego supplied to your from “yeah I can get that chick to sleep with me… again!”

But yes, it’s valuable to point out “if what shallow men (and others) what is merely the physical experience of sex, there are a hundred ways to get it that don’t look like how shallow men actually behave.”

Not to belabor this, but how many bedpost-notchers are so focused on validation by numbers that they won’t give a good lay a second go-round do you think are actually in circulation? I get that they punch above their weight in terms of numbers of partners, but it just strikes me that they’re more in the realm of statistical aberration.

(OTOH, the gendered sexlessness gap could technically result from 10% of women exclusively having sex with a small cadre of pathological bedpost-notchers and then nobody else, but that seems unlikely.)

This seems like a phenomenon that’s easy to explain through basic social dynamics.

If you go through the seduce-someone-and-have-a-one-night-stand song and dance, you’re on the prowl for casual sex and you’ve successfully bagged a target.  It’s an easy, legible story that you can tell yourself (and others!) about your motivations and methods.  It basically has a script.  If the other party deviates from the script in a major way – for example, by visibly “catching feelings” – you can lay the blame elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that you held up your end of the social bargain.

If you seduce someone, have casual sex, and then call back for an encore…

…well, now you’re off-script and into the weeds of actual human interaction, right?  Whatever else you’ve done, you’ve unavoidably said “I want to spend time with you,” in a way that isn’t totally mediated by a well-understood ritual.  The other party isn’t just “someone you banged,” s/he is a person with actual desires and emotions that you can’t predict with a trivial model.  Now ghosting would be rude and cruel.  Now “catching feelings” is a lot more understandable.  If you’re pretty sure that you just want casual sex, it would have to be really good sex to risk all that.

This does suggest that some populations might find value in creating a ritual for, essentially, booty-calling someone whom you know only through one or more previous hookups.  But this doesn’t seem likely to work super well.  As soon as the relationship becomes less transient, it…gains all the features of being non-transient, no matter how much you might wish it didn’t.

I get that, but is this something that a lot of people actually do? I’ve met a few extremely attractive and personable men, and none of them have that sort of serial killer ritual attitude about casual sex. The men most likely to have that sort of pathology don’t get many chances to live out the ritual.

This is speculation on my part, to be clear.  I also know men who are very attractive and personable, and they don’t go in for this kind of thing at all; they are sensible and decent human beings, and therefore they find sexual and romantic partners within their actual social circles, as God intended.

But obviously there are people who do the chatting-up-strangers-for-one-night-stands thing (and people who hang around in places, online or in meatspace, where they expect to be chatted up for one-night stands).  I could not tell you how many of them there are.  I suspect their culture is grossly over-represented in media etc.  That said, I suspect that you don’t actually have to have a “serial killer ritual attitude” or a “pathology” in order to be part of that culture, you just have to…be really into the idea of scoring casual sex, and not into the idea of socializing with your sexual partners.  Which actually does make sense, if your sexual partners are mostly strangers who are totally un-selected for personal compatibility, especially if you have basically-homosocial interaction norms to start with.

big-block-of-cheese-day:

bambamramfan:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

voxette-vk:

big-block-of-cheese-day:

The Pump and Dump

Don’t you think it’s a little strange that when a person has sex with a new partner and is immediately ghosted, they think:

“S/he only wanted me for sex!”

and rarely, if ever:

“Am I really that awful in bed?”

Seriously, if someone only wants you for sex, you’re a good lover AND there isn’t some other factor making the relationship unpalatable or impossible, why wouldn’t they come back for more?

The kind of people who do this prefer novelty and lack of attachment? Not that mysterious.

I don’t think the kind of men who try to sleep with as many different women as possible are looking for someone with the height of sexual “skill”.

Surely, the novelty doesn’t decline so much from the frisson of a first encounter that a Round 2 with a good lay is too boring to make a call on a sure thing, no?

So OK, maybe you get some kind of edgy dramatic movie sex addict who has has anonymous sex in a church bathroom one minute and then goes back to his surprisingly large apartment to performatively swig from a bottle and then chuck it at a wall the next. He won’t call you back, no matter how good you are, because he hates himself. But it’s not common.

It’s not novelty, it’s validation. On round 2 there isn’t any further support to your ego supplied to your from “yeah I can get that chick to sleep with me… again!”

But yes, it’s valuable to point out “if what shallow men (and others) what is merely the physical experience of sex, there are a hundred ways to get it that don’t look like how shallow men actually behave.”

Not to belabor this, but how many bedpost-notchers are so focused on validation by numbers that they won’t give a good lay a second go-round do you think are actually in circulation? I get that they punch above their weight in terms of numbers of partners, but it just strikes me that they’re more in the realm of statistical aberration.

(OTOH, the gendered sexlessness gap could technically result from 10% of women exclusively having sex with a small cadre of pathological bedpost-notchers and then nobody else, but that seems unlikely.)

This seems like a phenomenon that’s easy to explain through basic social dynamics.

If you go through the seduce-someone-and-have-a-one-night-stand song and dance, you’re on the prowl for casual sex and you’ve successfully bagged a target.  It’s an easy, legible story that you can tell yourself (and others!) about your motivations and methods.  It basically has a script.  If the other party deviates from the script in a major way – for example, by visibly “catching feelings” – you can lay the blame elsewhere, secure in the knowledge that you held up your end of the social bargain.

If you seduce someone, have casual sex, and then call back for an encore…

…well, now you’re off-script and into the weeds of actual human interaction, right?  Whatever else you’ve done, you’ve unavoidably said “I want to spend time with you,” in a way that isn’t totally mediated by a well-understood ritual.  The other party isn’t just “someone you banged,” s/he is a person with actual desires and emotions that you can’t predict with a trivial model.  Now ghosting would be rude and cruel.  Now “catching feelings” is a lot more understandable.  If you’re pretty sure that you just want casual sex, it would have to be really good sex to risk all that.

This does suggest that some populations might find value in creating a ritual for, essentially, booty-calling someone whom you know only through one or more previous hookups.  But this doesn’t seem likely to work super well.  As soon as the relationship becomes less transient, it…gains all the features of being non-transient, no matter how much you might wish it didn’t.

antinatalism

oligopsalter:

Which of the following is false?

• It is immoral to cause someone great suffering without their permission, unless doing so is morally necessary.
• Every life involves great suffering, and can reasonably be expected to contain such in advance.
• One is not morally required to have children.
• It is permissible to have children.
• (unstated premise required to link these together)

My current guess (that preserves most of the commonsense intuitions above, or the commonsesne parts of them) is that it’s actually morally obligatory for many people to have children iff they genuinely want them; if you don’t want them then you’ll likely make a bad parent, so it’s not actually “up to you” but just conviently identical to what it would be if it were. But that might be too convenient.

It is immoral to cause someone great suffering without their permission, unless doing so is morally necessary.

This is blatantly false under any schema that anyone actually uses; it privileges inaction over action, and suffering over joy, to such an extent that it makes basically any human activity impossible.  (Forget having kids – if you marry someone, you’ll be causing him great suffering somewhere down the line.  If you hire someone, you’ll be causing him great suffering somewhere down the line.  Etc.)

EDIT: I do realize that “without their permission” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s not enough work.  We take actions that have ripple effects all the time, often without consulting any of the people who will be affected, and even people who do sign on for the base action rarely sign on explicitly for all the knock-on suffering.

big-block-of-cheese-day:

fierceawakening:

balioc:

balioc:

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

just like the election of Donald Trump heralded a new era of right-wing populism, when it may in fact have been the high watermark of that movement.

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

in fact, that’s probably why it’s trying to merge everything into itself, but such energy may be exhausted if the system itself is not designed or evolved for ideological sustainability.  after all, how Communist are the Communist countries now, and how virtuous are they after all these years?

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

…no?

I’m suspect that almost everyone above the rank of Culture-War Grunt 1st Class is aware of this, at least on some level, and most of the remaining battles are just people trying to control the shape of the aftermath and/or grab as many quick victories as possible before it all falls apart.

Can you expand on this?

It’s a big topic and a lot of it falls into “things I would regret posting” territory, but yeah, OK, sure, let’s try for a compact explanation.

---

On a theoretical level:

SJ is fundamentally limited by the fact that it relies on powerful elites to be willing to attack themselves and their own interests in the name of cultural virtue.  This is a very limited resource.  At some point the elites will get tired of punching themselves in the face – at some point, SJ ideology will demand that they give up something they really care about – and then they’ll drop it, as soon as they can find a face-saving way to do so.  

It gets some mileage out of the fact that it’s a useful weapon in certain kinds of internecine elite disputes and power struggles; there are a lot of elites who are non-male or non-white or non-straight etc., and SJ offers them obvious advantages in the workplace and at the cocktail party.  But the nature of the ideology is such that the demands will always keep growing, always keep pressing down harder, and as this goes on more and more elites are going to find that the benefits aren’t worth the costs (especially if their own benefits are already locked in).

(Many things would be different if SJ were a non-elite-driven movement, or if it were even capable of becoming a non-elite-driven movement, but it isn’t and it can’t.  Many things would be different if SJ were genuinely about transfering power from elites to non-elites, but it’s not.)

---

Less theoretically:

You can already see people looking around for an exit.  Writers at respectable mainline-liberal publications like The Atlantic – the very same writers who spearheaded SJ’s rise to mainstream cultural dominance – have been talking nervously about overreach and SJ-gone-mad for a while now.  SNL, a reliable mirror of the elite zeitgeist, did this sketch in early 2018.  Most importantly of all, if you actually talk to people about SJ…not internet weirdos, not the cultural rightists who’ve hated it from the get-go, but actual middle- and upper-middle-class normies…they’ve become scared and upset.  They are worried about the wrath of the righteous mob falling on them, or on the people they love, for “saying the wrong thing.”  They’re angry about the continued indignity that they suffer from continued overt attacks on their identity categories.  Sometimes they’re explicit about the fact that they’re hiding their true views on the subject because they’re afraid of “consequences.” 

On a more practical level: SJ has enough size and power, at this point, that it’s capable of demanding “revolutionary” changes that are real and far-reaching, not just alterations to the etiquette codes at prestige institutions.  And elites, mostly, do not want those. 

(I live in New York and I’m married to a teacher, so I’m probably inclined to over-weight evidence pertinent to the New York educational system.  But it seems extremely telling that de Blasio’s attempt to change the admissions policies at the city’s specialized high schools – to get rid of the well-prepared-elite-child-favoring exams, and open up the schools to many more kids from disadvantaged minority backgrounds, a move that was 100% in line with SJ orthodoxy and vociferously promoted with SJ arguments – was roundly defeated by the very same Times-reading latte-sipping urban liberals who make up the SJ power base for all intents and purposes.)

I’m inclined to say that if Hillary had won, we’d already be seeing the beginnings of the real backlash, with upper-middle-class mostly-white folks latching onto whoever offered them the chance to become whatever-we-call-Reagan-Democrats-now and stop flagellating themselves.  Trump is enough of a bogeyman to rally the base and keep things together for a while longer.  But, fundamentally, this cannot continue forever and so it will stop.

---

ALL THAT BEING SAID:

I don’t think this is very deep insight.  I don’t think I have access to any information that other people don’t.  If in fact I’ve put together the puzzle pieces, it’s one of those four-piece plastic puzzles for three-year-olds. 

There are people so young that they genuinely don’t remember the world not being like this, and there are people who spend so much of their time in online echo chambers that they genuinely believe people like the world being like this.  I imagine they mostly expect to keep doing what they’re doing, which mostly amounts to “saying angry things on the internet,” and will do so until the culture-at-large makes them stop by drying up their streams of external validation.  They’re the ones I’m referring to as Culture War Grunts. 

But the people who are older and more grounded than that…I get the feeling that they’re desperately trying to figure out when it’s all going to come tumbling down, and how, and what’s going to happen next. 

I think that all sorts of people, from Pete Buttigieg to the craziest far-right cults, are trying to position themselves to sweep in and be the prophets of a scoured-clean land looking for some principle that isn’t SJ by which to guide itself. 

(I should really get on that.)

I think that there’s a desperation, a nakedness, to recent mainstream SJ positions that I didn’t see in their predecessors.   A willingness to dispense with the formalities, to come out and say “yes, the identity category is the only thing that matters here, no further discussion is necessary.”  This is a very vague thing and I’m not coming up with any particularly-compelling examples at the moment, so maybe it’s all in my head, but…I do have some sense that people have given up trying to spread or even cement SJ ideology, and are now just trying to wring as many favorable outcomes out of it as they can before the culture-at-large takes away that option.

I don’t know whether I agree with all of this, but I find some of it insightful.

Asking whether SJ is “sustainable” may not be the right question. Kooks will always be with us. Unlike Marxism - which is still with us after a century of death and failure - SJ hasn’t even had the chance to fail as a governing philosophy.

I think elites treated SJ/culture war like a sandbox: a small group, cordoned off into academia and media, that could rip each other into shreds while everybody else just gets along with the business of running the world. Even better, elites could go to the sandbox and pat someone on the head or drop a new toy into the sand and they’d get praised for it! So they larded their HR departments and university administrations with diversity bureaucrats. They hired enough tokens to run a small light rail system, then charged them with enforcing behavioral codes on underlings. They put Sarah Jeong on the editorial board of the Times. They paid for glossy advertorials in which brands trotted out their “commitment” to Pride Month.

The problems came when the SJers started becoming an embarrassment. Those grubby, sandy hands were starting to reach outside the pit. That media sandbox created a false impression of a huge woke groundswell that just doesn’t exist, and real Democratic politicians started using narrow SJ jargon to stay on the right side of a surprisingly small group of people while everyone else just scratched their heads.

Now we’re in a place and time when the public agrees with the Democratic Party on taxing the rich, climate change, healthcare and a lot of other things, yet the party’s nominees are falling over one another to come up with a position on … reparations? The no-chance, wildly unpopular concept of reparations. Seriously. That’s why Buttigieg is surging and Biden remains untouchable at the top of the list. The sandbox is small.

Don’t expect the ideology to just go away. Instead, expect people to stop paying attention. Student protests will be ignored or laughed off. Entryism will be severely curtailed. Cancellations, which only ever worked in the sandbox anyway, will be harder to make stick.

This is more or less what I’m saying.  The point (obviously) isn’t that the land will be completely purged of all SJ-think.  Nothing ever goes away entirely, once it comes into the world.  At the very least, SJ will continue to exist alongside crunchy hippie-ism and throne-and-altar conservatism etc., as a suite of ideological memories available for people to seize for subcultural or academic reasons. 

I think you’re somewhat underselling the role that SJ plays right now in the culture, and particularly in elite psychology.  The population of true down-in-the-bone believers is small, but there’s a much larger population of people – many of them rich and powerful people – who have vaguely bought into the idea that SJ stuff is important to being a good person.  Those diversity bureaucrats weren’t put in place cynically. 

@bambamramfan likes to talk about this as a sort of moral outsourcing, where all the liberal-side normies basically decided to accept whatever rules the academics and the demagogues choose to promulgate, even though they’d never come up with such rules themselves and even though they wouldn’t have blinked if the rules had turned out to be very different. 

The upshot being that there’s an actual psychological change that’s going to have to happen before the elites can start doing the sorts of things that you describe.  Someone respectable is going to have to say “I don’t care anymore whether I am judged by the priests to be Doing a Racism” or whatever, and other respectable people are going to have to follow along.  But, yes, I imagine that the endpoint of this process will look like the zealots being ignored (and shrinking in numbers as their prestige shrinks) rather than them all somehow disappearing from the earth.

balioc:

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

just like the election of Donald Trump heralded a new era of right-wing populism, when it may in fact have been the high watermark of that movement.

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

in fact, that’s probably why it’s trying to merge everything into itself, but such energy may be exhausted if the system itself is not designed or evolved for ideological sustainability.  after all, how Communist are the Communist countries now, and how virtuous are they after all these years?

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

…no?

I’m suspect that almost everyone above the rank of Culture-War Grunt 1st Class is aware of this, at least on some level, and most of the remaining battles are just people trying to control the shape of the aftermath and/or grab as many quick victories as possible before it all falls apart.

Can you expand on this?

It’s a big topic and a lot of it falls into “things I would regret posting” territory, but yeah, OK, sure, let’s try for a compact explanation.

On a theoretical level:

SJ is fundamentally limited by the fact that it relies on powerful elites to be willing to attack themselves and their own interests in the name of cultural virtue.  This is a very limited resource.  At some point the elites will get tired of punching themselves in the face – at some point, SJ ideology will demand that they give up something they really care about – and then they’ll drop it, as soon as they can find a face-saving way to do so.  

It gets some mileage out of the fact that it’s a useful weapon in certain kinds of internecine elite disputes and power struggles; there are a lot of elites who are non-male or non-white or non-straight etc., and SJ offers them obvious advantages in the workplace and at the cocktail party.  But the nature of the ideology is such that the demands will always keep growing, always keep pressing down harder, and as this goes on more and more elites are going to find that the benefits aren’t worth the costs (especially if their own benefits are already locked in).

(Many things would be different if SJ were a non-elite-driven movement, or if it were even capable of becoming a non-elite-driven movement, but it isn’t and it can’t.  Many things would be different if SJ were genuinely about transfering power from elites to non-elites, but it’s not.)

Less theoretically:

You can already see people looking around for an exit.  Writers at respectable mainline-liberal publications like The Atlantic – the very same writers who spearheaded SJ’s rise to mainstream cultural dominance – have been talking nervously about overreach and SJ-gone-mad for a while now.  SNL, a reliable mirror of the elite zeitgeist, did this sketch in early 2018.  Most importantly of all, if you actually talk to people about SJ…not internet weirdos, not the cultural rightists who’ve hated it from the get-go, but actual middle- and upper-middle-class normies…they’ve become scared and upset.  They are worried about the wrath of the righteous mob falling on them, or on the people they love, for “saying the wrong thing.”  They’re angry about the continued indignity that they suffer from continued overt attacks on their identity categories.  Sometimes they’re explicit about the fact that they’re hiding their true views on the subject because they’re afraid of “consequences.” 

On a more practical level: SJ has enough size and power, at this point, that it’s capable of demanding “revolutionary” changes that are real and far-reaching, not just alterations to the etiquette codes at prestige institutions.  And elites, mostly, do not want those. 

(I live in New York and I’m married to a teacher, so I’m probably inclined to over-weight evidence pertinent to the New York educational system.  But it seems extremely telling that de Blasio’s attempt to change the admissions policies at the city’s specialized high schools – to get rid of the well-prepared-elite-child-favoring exams, and open up the schools to many more kids from disadvantaged minority backgrounds, a move that was 100% in line with SJ orthodoxy and vociferously promoted with SJ arguments – was roundly defeated by the very same Times-reading latte-sipping urban liberals who make up the SJ power base for all intents and purposes.)

I’m inclined to say that if Hillary had won, we’d already be seeing the beginnings of the real backlash, with upper-middle-class mostly-white folks latching onto whoever offered them the chance to become whatever-we-call-Reagan-Democrats-now and stop flagellating themselves.  Trump is enough of a bogeyman to rally the base and keep things together for a while longer.  But, fundamentally, this cannot continue forever and so it will stop.

ALL THAT BEING SAID:

I don’t think this is very deep insight.  I don’t think I have access to any information that other people don’t.  If in fact I’ve put together the puzzle pieces, it’s one of those four-piece plastic puzzles for three-year-olds. 

There are people so young that they genuinely don’t remember the world not being like this, and there are people who spend so much of their time in online echo chambers that they genuinely believe people like the world being like this.  I imagine they mostly expect to keep doing what they’re doing, which mostly amounts to “saying angry things on the internet,” and will do so until the culture-at-large makes them stop by drying up their streams of external validation.  They’re the ones I’m referring to as Culture War Grunts. 

But the people who are older and more grounded than that…I get the feeling that they’re desperately trying to figure out when it’s all going to come tumbling down, and how, and what’s going to happen next. 

I think that all sorts of people, from Pete Buttigieg to the craziest far-right cults, are trying to position themselves to sweep in and be the prophets of a scoured-clean land looking for some principle that isn’t SJ by which to guide itself. 

(I should really get on that.)

I think that there’s a desperation, a nakedness, to recent mainstream SJ positions that I didn’t see in their predecessors.   A willingness to dispense with the formalities, to come out and say “yes, the identity category is the only thing that matters here, no further discussion is necessary.”  This is a very vague thing and I’m not coming up with any particularly-compelling examples at the moment, so maybe it’s all in my head, but…I do have some sense that people have given up trying to spread or even cement SJ ideology, and are now just trying to wring as many favorable outcomes out of it as they can before the culture-at-large takes away that option.

mitigatedchaos:

argumate:

just like the election of Donald Trump heralded a new era of right-wing populism, when it may in fact have been the high watermark of that movement.

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

in fact, that’s probably why it’s trying to merge everything into itself, but such energy may be exhausted if the system itself is not designed or evolved for ideological sustainability.  after all, how Communist are the Communist countries now, and how virtuous are they after all these years?

perhaps, but on the other hand, is the Social Justice movement as it currently is, given its narrow focus, sustainable?

…no?

I suspect that almost everyone above the rank of Culture-War Grunt 1st Class is aware of this, at least on some level, and most of the remaining battles are just people trying to control the shape of the aftermath and/or grab as many quick victories as possible before it all falls apart.

the-grey-tribe:

rendakuenthusiast:

the-grey-tribe:

drethelin:

supernulperfection:

drethelin:

supernulperfection:

drethelin:

supernulperfection:

drethelin:

supernulperfection:

antinegationism:

drethelin:

drethelin:

A general rule for advice: People can only be so wise in things outside their domain of experience. Usually not very. 

Men: Do not go to weird lesbians for dating advice

Wait … 

Taken together, this means either I shouldn’t trust this advice, or men falling to the advice of weird, presumably well-meaning lesbians, is an all too common problem in your circles.  

I think @drethelin is vagueblogging about @theunitofcaring, which I find rather weird (and possibly quite rude to Kelsey) considering the content of her recent dating advice.

It didn’t seem worth tagging her since I was mostly “replying” to the anon that was going “Hey your relationship advice seems to come from a place of privilege” or whatever. 

I think that anon was probably another weird lesbian, though ? She (?) was reacting to dating advice by Kelsey that was specifically aimed at lesbians suffering from internalized homophobia.

Maybe? It read to me as a guy but I wouldn’t put a lot of money on it. 

I’m not sure what it means for an ask to read as a guy, and I’m not sure what would be the meaning of the ask if it was a guy writing it.

Very few guys have strong opinions on entitlement in discussions of internalized lesbophobia.

I guess this is the problem with not explicitly replying to things but

“I don’t want to be mean about this because I do like you, but your dating advice tends to feel just… incredibly entitled. You’ve clearly never had trouble finding dates or companions, you have a whole bunch of simultaneous relationships right now, I don’t think you get what it’s like for people for whom it’s *not* easy. You can afford to never put effort to making anything work, because you’ll always have another opportunity come soon. A lot of us have one or two a year, and need to try then”

This has nothing to do with internalized lesbophobia or whatever and is the thing I was responding to.

This was a response to a post by Kelsey about internalized lesbophobia.

a) death of the author

b) be that as it may I infact made a completely separate comment without mentioning tagging or specifically responding to Kelsey so that I could say a separate thing

c) if you had anything to say about the actual content of the thing I said go ahead and say it otherwise fuck off with this meta tattletale shit

To stay on topic for once:

1. You are correct about the dating advice thing.
2. That said, a straight man might be better off taking advice from lesbians than from straight women, for numerous reasons.
3. Straight women are also terrible at giving dating advice to lesbians for the same reasons.
4. You need to take all dating advice with a grain of salt
5. I know you talked about lesbians, but this is a prime example of #men and women
   

Knowing whether or not someone is a weird lesbian isn’t enough information to know if they are likely to give you good dating advice or not, regardless of what gender you are.

Any dating advice that makes dating impossible for you or sets high standards that rule out >50% of the single women in your area is right out.

…it shouldn’t be.

There are a lot of straight men – and lesbians as well, I’d presume – for whom the actual inescapable no-fooling key to romantic happiness starts with “figure out how to identify, and find, the < 5% of available women in your area with whom you have any chance of being compatible.”

Or, for that matter, “go to a place where there are actually some women around with whom you have a chance of being compatible, because there aren’t really any where you are.” 

And you can stomp your feet, you can complain that this is unfair and grotesquely difficult…it is!…but the fact remains that humans aren’t fungible.  If you don’t get along with most people, ipso facto you’re not going to get along with most women. 

This particular thing is a bit of a discursive hobbyhorse for me.  If only because I see so many lonely, embittered dudes who have arrived at genuinely insane beliefs about women-as-a-class precisely through the application of logic like “it makes no sense to rule out > 50% of the single women in your area.”  Somehow we don’t think it’s bizarre or uncalled-for to operate under the knowledge that there is staggeringly important diversity amongst humanity-in-general, but when it comes to the specific subset of humans whom we want to bang…

onecornerface:

rendakuenthusiast:

collapsedsquid:

balioc:

I cannot think of anything more self-defeating than a “religious exemption” enshrined in law.

Anyone who professes any religion – anyone who cares about any religion – should really, really, really not want the government chiming in on what qualifies as legitimate orthodoxy or orthopraxy.  That is a task for your priest or your prophet or your guiding angel, not for an agent of the secular state; and if you let the state’s agent make the call, at some point you’re going to find yourself very unhappy with what he has to say.

Anything that a believer should be allowed to do, in the name of his faith, is something that anyone should be allowed to do for any reason.

Think the real matter is more practical, the law enforcement apparatus has gotta navigate between Ruby Ridge and Aum Shinrikyo.

Religious exemptions are more often about religious people demanding potentially-costly accomodations (that people *not* of that religion don’t demand because they don’t care), rather than demanding the right to do something that is otherwise illegal because of their religion. For instance, it’s perfectly legal to wear a hijab, regardless of whether or not you are a sincere Muslim, the law doesn’t care. But if you want to wear a hijab and also *not get fired from your job* for wearing unusual headgear, you have to invoke the body of law that restricts the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of religion - and that’s when the secular state has to determine whether wearing a hijab is legitimate-enough orthopraxy for the anti-discrimination law to apply.

One exception I can think of is peyote laws, which really did entail specific native american religious groups asking for an otherwise-illegal drug to be made legal in specific religious contexts (or how wine for communion was one of the several types of alcoholic drink that was legal during prohibition). But of course prohibition of alcohol was a failure and there are good civil libertarian arguments for making recreational peyote legal too.

The case of the Amish is interesting - they successfully lobbied the government to not have to pay the social security tax, on the grounds that their religion treats social security as a type of haram lottery, and that they would take care of their own community’s aged. Assuming you think that social security is a good idea on its own merits, you probably *don’t* want anyone to be able to get out of paying the tax for it by saying they have a religious objection to it. It’s an actuarial system that works only because most of the population pays the tax! But does that mean that the exception the Amish carved out is unfair? Unfair to people who have legitimate anti-social-security beliefs but are less good at lobbying than the Amish were? Unfair to people who have no beliefs against social-security and do pay the tax themselves? Unfair to trolls whose made up ad-hoc anti-social-security belief should be considered as valid as the Amish’s in the eyes of the secular state?

Religious exemptions used to be popular among both the left and the right. More recently, much of the left has become suspicious of them, largely because of how the right has mobilized them in order to avoid following what they see as a leftist social agenda, and also partly due to concerns that religious exemptions are a form of religious supremacism that privileges religious conviction over secular worldviews.

In the last several years, the legal/political philosophy literature on religious exemptions has exploded in size. Now there are a ton of articles about many topics, e.g.: the “sincerity test” (”Is there something messed up about the courts/laws deciding whether someone’s religious claim is sincere? Does the practice of religious exemptions require the sincerity test, or can the sincerity test be avoided while still doing religious exemptions? If we discard the sincerity test, is there still a way to exclude troll religions e.g. Flying Spaghetti Monster religious exemption claimants? If not, is that okay?”), concerns about fairness/unfairness and burdens (to the religious claimants and/or to non-claimants who are affected), and many more topics.

The question “Does defending religious exemptions imply that there should be analogous secular/moral exemptions?” has become especially big.

Also there are questions on what, if anything, justifies religious exemptions. Some philosophers think the basis is mainly the “futility” argument: “Religious exemptions are sometimes necessary not due to intrinsic concerns of justice or religious freedom, but simply because so many religious people won’t obey this particular law, so it’s futile to try to enforce it.“ But other philosophers think religious exemptions, and perhaps also analogous secular/moral exemptions, have intrinsic weight.

I don’t know for sure if there are articles about whether there’s something objectionable about having the courts decide that some religious claims are “properly orthodox” or “official” (or suchlike) enough to qualify for an exemption while other religious claims aren’t. If there aren’t any such articles yet, I expect there soon will be– that’s a natural concern to raise, and it deserves to be taken seriously!

Many phil articles (not sure how many are readable w/o a university web connection):

https://philpapers.org/s/religious%20exemptions

The Impossibility of Religious Freedom is all about

whether there’s something objectionable about having the courts decide that some religious claims are “properly orthodox” or “official” (or suchlike) enough to qualify for an exemption while other religious claims aren’t.

It’s not very good, but it certainly represents a literature trying to grapple with the topic.

Poem: I lik the form

microsff:

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d
Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail
I am my best / when formats are not mix’d
Wen poits play / subversions often fail

Stik out their toung / to rebel with no cause
At ruls and norms / In ignorance they call:
My words are free / Defying lit'rate laws
To lik the forms / brings ruin on us all

A sonnet I / the noblest lit'rate verse
And ruls me bind / to paths that Shakespeare paved
Iambic fot / allusions well dispersed
On my behind / I stately sit and wave

You think me tame /
  Fenced-in and penned / bespelled
I bide my time /
  I twist the end / like hell

---

* “lik” should be read as “lick”, not “like”. In general, the initial section on each line should be read sort of phonetically.

Written for World Poetry Day, March 21, 2018. When I had this idea earlier today, I thought it was the worst, most faux hip pretentious idea for a shallow demonstration of empty wordsmithing skill in poetry ever. So I had to try to write it. I mean, how often do you get to fuse the iambic dimeter of bredlik - one of the newest and most exciting verse forms - with the stately iambic pentameter of the classic sonnet?

…carping about a five-year-old article is kind of petty and pointless, but –

– if you have a mental category labeled traditional high culture, and it includes both jazz and “experimental fiction,” then you are failing to understand something very important about what high culture is and how it conventionally works.

The elite tendency to embrace things like jazz and experimental fiction is driven by precisely the same impetus that lies behind the more-recent elite tendency to embrace geek chic, and it lies in direct opposition to maintaining the construct that is traditional high culture.  I have no objection whatsoever to someone being an avant-garde hipster whose avant-garde-hipsterism happens to be 50 years behind the times, that is a fine and noble thing to be, but at some point you really ought to acknowledge that that’s what you actually are.

I cannot think of anything more self-defeating than a “religious exemption” enshrined in law.

Anyone who professes any religion – anyone who cares about any religion – should really, really, really not want the government chiming in on what qualifies as legitimate orthodoxy or orthopraxy.  That is a task for your priest or your prophet or your guiding angel, not for an agent of the secular state; and if you let the state’s agent make the call, at some point you’re going to find yourself very unhappy with what he has to say.

Anything that a believer should be allowed to do, in the name of his faith, is something that anyone should be allowed to do for any reason.

You can have an ideology that says, “It is virtuous to be attracted to people with Trait X for Reason A, and unvirtuous to be attracted to people with Trait Y for Reason B; to the extent that your natural instinctive desires are not in accord with the path of virtue, you should work on yourself.”

You can have an ideology that says, “People want what they want, man.  Some people will be attracted to people with Trait X for Reason A, some people will be attracted to people with Trait Y for Reason B, that’s just the way of the world, hakuna matata.”

Hell, if you really want, you can have an ideology that says, “It is virtuous for men to be attracted to women with Trait X for Reason A, while it is virtuous for women to be attracted to men with Trait Y for Reason B, because men and women are fundamentally different and thus their proper desires have different shapes.”  You’re probably going to run into a lot of problems when it turns out that human psychology doesn’t break down along gender lines as neatly as you think it does, but whatever, normativity is normativity and you can’t argue with terminal values.

Any of this is worlds better, intellectually and socially, than the cultural default now.  As far as I can tell, the cultural default now works something like this:

“It is virtuous for men to be attracted to women with Trait X for Reason A, but really we all know that men are always and only attracted to women with Trait Y for Reason B – [never mind that, empirically, this is obviously not so] – and that this is both completely unconscionable and completely unchangeable.  Thus, forever, all men’s desire will be unvirtuous; and thus, forever, it will be virtuous for women to desire men with Trait Y for Reason B, precisely because men shouldn’t desire women in that way but do it anyway, and so for a woman to have such desires is a sign that she has claimed the mysterious dark power that allows men to be unvirtuous.”

mitigatedchaos:

Any given American superhero can have a reasonably well-defined powerset and limitations around which a story can be built.  However, the available powersets of any given American superhero are effectively arbitrary, and because they tend to crossover a lot from the looks of it, or even just to have a suitable nemesis, it seems that at any moment we could encounter a new character of any possible kind of power.

The superheroes don’t appear to exist in an ecosystem where repeated layers of competition cause things to be shaped according to the pressures of the environment, like humans or main battle tanks.  At any moment, someone might be under the effect of powerful mind control, or a man at the atomic scale could be infiltrating a character’s alien super-kidney, or a character could be revealed to be a giant flying psychic death planet in disguise.  The power levels just feel kinda arbitrary.

Remove the crossovers and the powers are more likely to come from the same source or exist within the same framework, and therefore might be governed by something like RPG classes in terms of balancing, tactics, and expectations about the world.  However, this risks moving you out of the superhero genre and into one of the fantasy genres or even cyberpunk.

We can also establish expectations about power levels by having a season-long plot with villain progression such that we know this episode’s villain is more powerful than last episode’s villain, and thus might potentially defeat the protagonist.

This isn’t to say that all American superhero stories are limited in this way, but rather that, if someone says that they don’t like American superhero stories and prefer anime, something like this may be one of the underlying reasons.

I mean, maybe, but I suspect that most of the time it has much less to do with any particular issue of plot crunch and much more with issues of theme / aesthetics / psychology / narrative construction.  It’s true that American superhero comics are more random with their power level stuff than anime usually is, but this seems like a really minor issue next to the fact that American superhero comics focus a lot less on character and a lot more on plot. 

The analogy to Western video RPGs vs. JRPGs feels apt.

Now taking recommendations for “a good One Book for someone interested in learning about leftist thought.” 

…it’s only when you actually start reading Carlyle that you realize just how bad a Carlylean Moldbug is.