Why did you leave that last reply to me within the comments? I want to be able to reblog it to add a reply! (though if more blogging sites took a cue from LiveJournal and implemented comment trees we wouldn't have this problem)
Wasn’t big enough to justify a full post since my followers have already seen the post on my feed.
Supposedly there’s some official way to do it, but eh.
Regarding that topic, while I don’t believe all Robert E. Lee statues were erected in the name of white supremacy, one in the news for being removed recently was.
So if rednecks putting up a Robert E Lee statue bothers you even if they’re not actually racist per se but because it’s symbolically racist and offensive, then it’s just part of their culture you don’t approve of, which makes you uncomfortable, which was the entire point of using rednecks as the example in the first place. Respecting such things is itself part of culture.
And if you’re assuming it means they’re actually racist, then that delves into more harmful/threatening territory.
(Yes, I know not all rednecks are like that, but I saw how libs/lefties responded to the election, including btching about rednecks, and that post is intended to have libs/lefties that say “HOW COULD ANYONE EVER BE OPPOSED TO DIVERSITY?!” stop and notice that they, too, don’t actually terminally value diversity.
And thus while it may be worth the tradeoff, the opposition are not actually a bunch of weird evil people being evil to be evil.)
I hate this idea that “listening” equals “submitting.” Like if you don’t agree with someone, it’s not because you see their point but don’t agree with it, it’s not because you have your own reasons for feeling or believing differently. It’s because you’re not listening.
Like “I see where you’re coming from, but…” isn’t a thing here because if you see where I’m coming from then you would also be coming from there.
You mean more, “don’t listen to TERFs or Trump supporters” or more, “Why won’t you listen to me?” “I am listening, I just am not convinced by your position.”
I think this might be more the “sit down, shut up, and listen” thing you have to do to “be a good ally.”
Where you “listening” means you understanding that you must be wrong about something if a person who is marginalized in a way you aren’t tells you you are.
See also: People requesting that others “critically examine” why they like something when they actually seem to mean “adopt my beliefs about why the thing is bad and stop liking it.”
This is often said of “problematic” media, but anti-kink people as a whole do it all the time. It’s basically one of their most generic arguments by this point.
The belief that
people who play violent videogames will go do violence is internally
consistent, and you can pick out examples that seem to support it. The
belief that people who are predisposed to violent behavior are drawn to
violent videogames (potentially reducing their IRL violent behavior) can
also explain most of the same examples. But if we can accept that
religious texts dramatically alter behavior, it’s hard to see how more
immersive media can’t do the same. The primary difference seems to come
down to the responsibility of the user/consumer to distinguish between
fiction and reality. Obviously some people have trouble with this, so
it’s sort of victim blaming to ask sane people to limit their media
consumption based on the needs of the insane (especially if some of the
sane people claim that the same videogame or religious text helps them
remain sane). To what extent should global limits be imposed to
accommodate dangerous subgroups?
This also applies to affirmative consent, banned books, pornography,
profiling, immigration, internet privacy, satire exemptions, hate
speech, death threats, gun control, etc.
But, of course, everyone with a loud opinion on the matter clusters
at one of the poles. Ideological consistency seems to fuel zeal (maybe
people mistake it for correctness?) even if the internally inconsistent
middle ground is probably the most globally consistent position in this
case, given the limited evidence on both sides.
I’m starting to think maybe individual people just dramatically differ in degree and organization of neuroplasticity. Analogous to how only a few people make it to age 95, and a surprising fraction of them haven’t made particularly healthy life choices. Also seems analogous to alcoholism and other addictions. Or, well, not analogous. Probably closely physically related.
So then the question is how do you optimally distribute choice (freedom?) when people differ substantially in their proclivities and fail states?
Mass/few-to-many mediums (e.g. magazines, movies, religious codices,
not private letters, not home movies, etc.) seem to start out as mostly
homogenizing forces that end up becoming maximally customizable (e.g.
pre-industrial writing limited to scribe output –> movable type),
probably just because industry specializes in cheap clones and it’s
easier to sell new technologies when there is a large population that
can afford them (and industrializing customizability is hard). The
internet is a maximally-customizable amalgam of a lot of the preceding
mass media forms (movable type, radio, TV, movies, magazines, etc.).
Rather than catering to a mostly static collection of demographic groups
(e.g. Nielson qualifications were probably chosen to focus network
competition on optimizing the idealized American family unit, as opposed to…)
the internet uses link trees (and, nowadays, complex creepy profiles)
to sort people by preferences. So all this shrieking and tweeting and
recording and whining seem to mostly just reflect the ways presently
popular media shape the zeitgeist. Indie videogame culture seems to have
gestated the spark of a major critique about how virtual worlds are
critiqued (yes, a critique of critiquery) that has since been shown to
apply to many other trusted simulation media (e.g. symbols attempting to
accurately and honestly portray the real) that society has come to rely
on – including the newsmedia.
Assuming in-personcommunication involves nonclassical information that is robust against decoherence
(I know I’m alone in thinking this, but I have a soccer ball with a
bloody handprint to keep me company, so it’s cool), it’s at least
possible that mass media has been giving us a very lopsided view of the
observable world. A quantum internet might finally reverse the trend,
starting with Seth Lloyd’s secure search algorithm (a properly entangled
database can be searched with complete security in a way that is only
classically available if you custom encrypt the entire index for each
new query) and continuing on to some sort of “one observation per
transmission” snapchat/DRM thing for analoggish media (audio, video, not
text, etc.). I also expect smellovision to finally become a thing
because of the aforelinked vibrational theory of olfaction. Also-also, quantum voting.
Television slightly sort of ‘sobered us up,’ because the radio society was the worst society we ever invented, and the most dangerous one. That was Adolf Hitler in Germany the nineteen thirties and that was Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties and it was Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties…Radio societies - where a dictator [is] speaking on the radio and you can’t even see how evil he is - can really make you go out and kill your neighbor…Radio was a really dangerous thing.
Ignoring basic human variation also gets innocent people killed. It may even turn out to be as costly as assuming human variation is absolute and immutable. Classical media obfuscates subtle cues that are present IRL (vocal stuff, facial topology, probably also rest mass stuff like pheromones or microbiota, etc.). We’ll see if things shape up when we start communicating via quantum secure channels. Quantum voting should finally fix the douche vs. turd sandwich problem.
I think religion is different in kind here, as it has standing orders that tell you to do stuff in the real world, and video games do not.
How so? In a Petersonian sense, how is the mythological perspective not just a form of augmented reality (e.g. pre-psychiatry mental disorders = demonic possession)? Is the distinction here that claims are made about eternal damnation and stuff, but videogames don’t do that?
Most likely, it’s true that both media influences thought and that preferences influence media selection, but it was never 1:1. (Thus not everyone reading the Communist Manifesto becomes a Comrade, but sometimes Ayn Rand is recommended for those with excessive scrupulosity.)
Religion, then, if we’re talking about ones with established holy books currently vying for control of our countries, is more similar to political ideologies than it is to video games.
Grand Theft Auto famously presents a simulated environment in which you can run over hookers with cars. If that were the only environment one’s child was raised in, it could be a serious problem. But normally it’s just a little part of the day, stuck behind a plastic window, looking less real than reality.
And unlike the holy books, it does not tell you do anything outside of its media.
In my estimate, this makes it less likely to impact behavior.
Similarly, in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica (which was amazing for me back in the day), there are Cylon infiltrators within the last remaining fleet of human ships. But BSG does not insist that Cylons are real outside of its fictional context.
Communist, Libertarian, Liberal, etc texts all take it as a given that they’re describing reality.
I’m not sure that the GamerGaters even believe that media has no impact on development, so much as they know that if they give these people one inch, it will be used to crowbar the entire field of game development.
Honestly, the point of that post was just intended that Trump voters are not some uniquely evil thing, and that cultural groups around the world, of all races and religions, generally would not like to be edged out, including the reader. Now ofc you can bite the bullet on it, but it specifically says you might bite the bullet on it with a plausible reason.
I hate this idea that “listening” equals “submitting.” Like if you don’t agree with someone, it’s not because you see their point but don’t agree with it, it’s not because you have your own reasons for feeling or believing differently. It’s because you’re not listening.
Like “I see where you’re coming from, but…” isn’t a thing here because if you see where I’m coming from then you would also be coming from there.
You mean more, “don’t listen to TERFs or Trump supporters” or more, “Why won’t you listen to me?” “I am listening, I just am not convinced by your position.”
I think this might be more the “sit down, shut up, and listen” thing you have to do to “be a good ally.”
Where you “listening” means you understanding that you must be wrong about something if a person who is marginalized in a way you aren’t tells you you are.
See also: People requesting that others “critically examine” why they like something when they actually seem to mean “adopt my beliefs about why the thing is bad and stop liking it.”
This is often said of “problematic” media, but anti-kink people as a whole do it all the time. It’s basically one of their most generic arguments by this point.
The belief that
people who play violent videogames will go do violence is internally
consistent, and you can pick out examples that seem to support it. The
belief that people who are predisposed to violent behavior are drawn to
violent videogames (potentially reducing their IRL violent behavior) can
also explain most of the same examples. But if we can accept that
religious texts dramatically alter behavior, it’s hard to see how more
immersive media can’t do the same. The primary difference seems to come
down to the responsibility of the user/consumer to distinguish between
fiction and reality. Obviously some people have trouble with this, so
it’s sort of victim blaming to ask sane people to limit their media
consumption based on the needs of the insane (especially if some of the
sane people claim that the same videogame or religious text helps them
remain sane). To what extent should global limits be imposed to
accommodate dangerous subgroups?
This also applies to affirmative consent, banned books, pornography,
profiling, immigration, internet privacy, satire exemptions, hate
speech, death threats, gun control, etc.
But, of course, everyone with a loud opinion on the matter clusters
at one of the poles. Ideological consistency seems to fuel zeal (maybe
people mistake it for correctness?) even if the internally inconsistent
middle ground is probably the most globally consistent position in this
case, given the limited evidence on both sides.
I’m starting to think maybe individual people just dramatically differ in degree and organization of neuroplasticity. Analogous to how only a few people make it to age 95, and a surprising fraction of them haven’t made particularly healthy life choices. Also seems analogous to alcoholism and other addictions. Or, well, not analogous. Probably closely physically related.
So then the question is how do you optimally distribute choice (freedom?) when people differ substantially in their proclivities and fail states?
Mass/few-to-many mediums (e.g. magazines, movies, religious codices,
not private letters, not home movies, etc.) seem to start out as mostly
homogenizing forces that end up becoming maximally customizable (e.g.
pre-industrial writing limited to scribe output –> movable type),
probably just because industry specializes in cheap clones and it’s
easier to sell new technologies when there is a large population that
can afford them (and industrializing customizability is hard). The
internet is a maximally-customizable amalgam of a lot of the preceding
mass media forms (movable type, radio, TV, movies, magazines, etc.).
Rather than catering to a mostly static collection of demographic groups
(e.g. Nielson qualifications were probably chosen to focus network
competition on optimizing the idealized American family unit, as opposed to…)
the internet uses link trees (and, nowadays, complex creepy profiles)
to sort people by preferences. So all this shrieking and tweeting and
recording and whining seem to mostly just reflect the ways presently
popular media shape the zeitgeist. Indie videogame culture seems to have
gestated the spark of a major critique about how virtual worlds are
critiqued (yes, a critique of critiquery) that has since been shown to
apply to many other trusted simulation media (e.g. symbols attempting to
accurately and honestly portray the real) that society has come to rely
on – including the newsmedia.
Assuming in-personcommunication involves nonclassical information that is robust against decoherence
(I know I’m alone in thinking this, but I have a soccer ball with a
bloody handprint to keep me company, so it’s cool), it’s at least
possible that mass media has been giving us a very lopsided view of the
observable world. A quantum internet might finally reverse the trend,
starting with Seth Lloyd’s secure search algorithm (a properly entangled
database can be searched with complete security in a way that is only
classically available if you custom encrypt the entire index for each
new query) and continuing on to some sort of “one observation per
transmission” snapchat/DRM thing for analoggish media (audio, video, not
text, etc.). I also expect smellovision to finally become a thing
because of the aforelinked vibrational theory of olfaction. Also-also, quantum voting.
Television slightly sort of ‘sobered us up,’ because the radio society was the worst society we ever invented, and the most dangerous one. That was Adolf Hitler in Germany the nineteen thirties and that was Rwanda in the early nineteen nineties and it was Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties…Radio societies - where a dictator [is] speaking on the radio and you can’t even see how evil he is - can really make you go out and kill your neighbor…Radio was a really dangerous thing.
Ignoring basic human variation also gets innocent people killed. It may even turn out to be as costly as assuming human variation is absolute and immutable. Classical media obfuscates subtle cues that are present IRL (vocal stuff, facial topology, probably also rest mass stuff like pheromones or microbiota, etc.). We’ll see if things shape up when we start communicating via quantum secure channels. Quantum voting should finally fix the douche vs. turd sandwich problem.
I think religion is different in kind here, as it has standing orders that tell you to do stuff in the real world, and video games do not.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
“And the churches are all redneck churches” may be a threatening thing depending on what you mean by that. The statue of Lee absolutely is.
But your example also hinges on all rednecks having identical tastes and only wanting to stick with their own culture instead of broadening. You’re talking about a stagnant population and frankly it doesn’t work that way in real life. Groups grow and change, both the people who move to a new area and the people who already lived there.
Provided that you didn’t mean what seems to be implied by the church example (since it would also assume them to all be bigots, which again isn’t realistic but to my knowledge rednecks don’t have any different churches than the rest of their natural areas) and kept the damn statue out of it, then the rest of it just sounds like natural cultural shifts. I don’t get what the problems would be there.
Oh, since you’re trying to wriggle out of the implications, let’s say then those churches are voting to suppress gays (and others) and that the Robert E. Lee statue stays.
If you think cultures are only aesthetic, you’re going to have trouble. And belief in “human rights” is cultural, so using “but it’s a human right!” is a dodge.
However, the post you responded to just says you won’t like it, which, given your feelings about the statue, is true. It’s not even unusual.
The other stuff may require a sort of cultural awareness to deal with, by new legislation (in the case of certain Robert E Lee statues, things like hate crime laws would be an example), but that’s a discussion for another time.
I was asked once “Why do you even want to have a girlfriend? What do you want to do with her? What do you want her to do?“
I replied “You know, the usual. You know?“
The guy who asked had a deep point to make, but I know he could not have answered this himself to his own satisfaction.
“Redundancy,” I answered. “Two mammals are more likely to reach task completion than one, as their failures are unlikely to overlap, significantly boosting performance as compared to one mammal.”
“The real girlfriend is the girlfriend that was inside you all along,” I answered. He rolled his eyes at my pre-mocking of his deep point.
“Vulnerability,” I answered. “Relationships are a cycle of mutually-increasing vulnerability, something that is dangerous in this world, and intimate physical contact builds bonding and trust, in addition to creating mutual vulnerability.” He was silent for a moment, but then opened his his mouth. “Well, *Actually” he says…
was shopping around before I renew earthquake insurance the other day and one of the agents was Old Cascadian enough (dedicated to virtue within their role for no immediate personal gain) to point out that even if my house came through *a bit* damaged, Portland would not have the infrastructure for rehabilitation for *years* afterward (the PNW only has superquakes every few centuries)
Huh!
America!
Yeah, PNW is overdue for a megaquake, and it’s not adequately prepared for it.
We aren’t really prepared for a Yellowstone Supervolcano explosion either, but that’s far less likely.
Honestly, if I were in control of the government, the level of disaster readiness I’d mandate would have everyone thinking America was preparing for nuclear war.
im thinking about that godforsaken fishing pyramid again
what the Fuck
why is there a hotel inside of it. This Is Bullshit
thats fucked up. thats fucking me up. if you go in there at like 3 in the morning you have to fight the fucking. Resurrected Mummy Of The Ultimate Dad
you cant do this without posting a picture of the fucking ominous glowing elevator leading to the final boss
oh you mean the LIFT POWERED BY THE DECK-BUILDING SOULS OF THE DAMNED
It took over 4000 years but Imhotep‘s true vision has finally been realized.
I LOVE buildings that build fake outdoors indoors. I mean not that having an actual outdoors is bad, but there’s this one restaurant out West that’s got this entire indoor fake village and it’s just so cool.
Are you responsible for knowingly sharing thathopeyetlives posts to a Tumblr harassment mob? I'm not sure how else they would have wound up in Bogleech's hands given thathopeyetlives' obscurity.
No, I don’t know any people who directly follow me and participate in harassment circles. If they do, I block them.
There is a common back-and-forth where the outgroup points out toxic people on the your side doing bad things, and your first impulse is to defend them, but your second impulse is to point out that these bad people are not typical of the ingroup.
The outgroup then clarifies: These people are what’s wrong with ingroup, because these shitty people are a symptom of all the shittyness, and suddenly you have to defend them and say they are not so bad after all.
Okay, but while the average Soviet citizen was not Stalin, the USSR having Stalins/etc was in part the product of its ideology.
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.
This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.
Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.
Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.
The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.
Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)
But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.
You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.
After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.
I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.
Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.
But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”
The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.
I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.
I feel you did not read this post.
The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”
The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.
Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.
If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.
Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.
(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)
Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.
There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.
You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.
(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)
I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating. I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating. I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me. Fuck the ideology. I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.
The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.
y’all need a Tumblr safeword; I’ve been interpreting your regular screams of “please stop / bad post op / delete your account / blocked and reported” as countersignalling hyperbole between friends and doubling down.
get off this site. tumblr is for humans and human-derived semi-artificial constructs, NOT BIRDS
#the iron hand - the State #the invisible fist - Capitalism #the red hammer - Communism #thx xhxhxhx - you know who you are @xhxhxhx #chronofelony - time travel #mitigated future - futurism #art+#oc - hand-made, free-range, gluten-free, organic, locally-sourced PNGs #shtpost - quality, 100% serious post, always repost this #politics - elaborate joke post, never repost this
#trump cw - self-filter tag for anti-memeist bigots who are prejudiced against our first Meme-American President due to the orange color of his skin
#discourse preview 2019 - retrocausal posts from the New Mexico Timeline
#nationalism - posts banned under the 2089 Human Dignity Act of the Earth Sphere Federation, filtering these is recommended for normies and anyone who isn’t a NatSep
#augmented reality break - (alternate (reality) break) tag intersection, but with coffee so it’s better and therefore augmented (like me)
Future Tags (Vegas Timeline):
#this week on woke or broke - exciting new youtube show in which contestants try to guess what is social justice orthodoxy and what was cooked up by the producers. failing contestants are fired from their jobs
#miti draws dallas - performance art piece in which thousands of teleoperated drones are released in a swarm over Dallas, Texas, and pictures of frightened and heavily-armed Texans are posted to Tumblr in five minute intervals
#super love love demon battle - SLLDB fandom drama. eventually boils over into discussion of the SLLDB fandom murders
#HobbesWasRight - series of articles laying out the philosophical groundwork for Googlezon Dynamics’ Leviathan Project and its benefits for the security of the state and the populace
#dogs - dog photos and canine cybernetic augmentations. also ferrets, to go with the ferret mistagging fad
#national technocracy - hypothetical point within the N-dimensional ideospace lattice originally theorized by RAND Geospatial Dynamics Working Group in the 1950s, generally summarized as “that thing that comes after prediction markets”, many researchers dispute whether it can actually exist. abandoned by Silicon Valley CEOs in favor of a system based on Facebook likes.
#dogfree - actual dog photos, just dog photos
Future Tags (Montana Timeline):
No tags for this timeline, possibly unstable. Radsuit suggested.
New Tags:
#the mitigated exhibition - collection of 2-dimensional pixel arrays hand-crafted by Tibetan space monks (according to product packaging)
#one thousand villages - militarized bus maps and civil defense planning for the city of Springrock, Arkowa
#urban planning - development plans for Hypersuburb One
#gendpol - (exploration of) Neurotype Space with Social Characteristics
#racepol - unsuspecting visitors are painted exciting new colours in this avant-garde art installation
#otv game - greyskin politics discussion tag
#私 - 自分がない。
#ミチは日本語を話します。 - Non-existent post category. Forget you ever saw this.
#this is a joke - leaked document from the Trump Administration, forward to WaPo & HuffBuzz
#the year is - descriptions for movies retroactively deleted from the timestream
#flagpost - stealth post, only you can see it (yes you, specifically)
Future Tags (Boston Timeline):
#orly - series of interviews with rogue VN AI Orliana Reilly
#owlpocalypse2k18 - Melbourne comes to a halt as experimental Google mosquito suppression project causes owl duplication glitch and residents are lagged off of the server
#the coming mouse utopia - new tag originates following dramatic shift in Alt Right interests towards mouse ethnostate, surprising all observers (except me)
#baka baka baka - flagging tag for bot which prints out all mitigated chaos Tumblr posts and air drops them inside the US Congress building
Also, it’s surprising that the fact that as many as one in five women may have a condition which results in elevated androgen levels almost never comes up in the gender discourse. Like, here we are debating about whether hormones have an impact on cognition and development, and if so, what that might be, and meanwhile the distribution of androgens is not uniform within women as a sex!
“men and women have statistically different preferences” is a statement universally acknowledged and incredibly controversial at the same time
probably the dissonance is resolved by carefully distinguishing actual men and women (who have statistically differing preferences due to existing in this fallen world and being shaped and moulded by society into the twisted creations that we see all around us) and the Platonic ideal of men and women, who are equal in every way and have identical preferences and behaviour at a statistical level.
admission time: I think that some of the gender forbidden shadowspeech is probably true for a sizeable chunk, once you’ve removed the lesbians, the gays, the bisexuals, transgender individuals, queers, asexuals, autistics, adhders, those with PCOS… basically anyone who has a good reason that they might differ from main plan. (as many as 1/5th of women may have PCOS for instance - not a trivial number)
lmao pathetic fascist retards like you who don't know how to actually interact with people and will die nobodies having contributed nothing to society shouldn't argue or even dare to talk to people clearly better than them and with not shitty politics. go kill yourself in the forest so at least your death will serve some purpose in feeding the animals and enriching the earth.
corollary to “japanese people draw other japanese people with big eyes because they envy the white race”
I have it on good authority that the Japanese are, in fact, the only white people on Earth.
The year is 2068. The forces of global Neoreaction have been defeated by the armies of the Islamo-Progressive Earth Congress. The final survivors retreat to Japan, the last bastion of the white ethnic identity on Earth…
You should do AUSJ. It's the sort of thing you'd be good at.
This is right up there with “Scott Alexander keeps recommending me as a good right-wing writer“ in terms of confusion as to what in my post history could possibly have prompted such a reaction.
Giving the Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists a number of cities to practice their immigration policies in isn’t such a terrible idea. Cosmopolitan Liberal Globalists love cities.
I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.
Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.
(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)
anaisnein
It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.
Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.
Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging. Until 2012, this was mandatory. So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.
But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.
Cultural practices have inertia. Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.
They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.
And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.
That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.
To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing. (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.) It also takes a while.
The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary. It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.
Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).
Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).
If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it. If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President. If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King. The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.
It’s interesting to me that modern progressives make so much hay about the tendency for election systems to deliberately overrepresent rural and low-population areas, since that’s one of relatively few cases where protections for a traditionally marginalized group actually are enshrined in law. Obviously this comes in part from a tendency not to think of “marginalized groups” along those lines in the first place, but I wonder how much of that comes from the fact that people are used to them having disproportionate power and influence because it was given to them intentionally as a counterbalance. “Urbanites fuck the provincials” is one of the most timeless axes of exploitation, and rural and other low-population areas are kinda fucked even with this system, so they’d be ridiculously fucked without it.
Of course this is a flashpoint because the regions in question are arch-conservative reactionary hotbeds and cosmopolitan urban liberals resent being held hostage to their demands, and objectively many of those demands are very damaging for huge swaths of society that voted against them. But, like, that’s not that unusual an outcome when you give otherwise-disenfranchised groups an outsized influence to compensate.The liberal coalition of the disenfranchised is only a liberal coalition because the ones who would prefer something else have nowhere to get it.
You should do AUSJ. It's the sort of thing you'd be good at.
This is right up there with “Scott Alexander keeps recommending me as a good right-wing writer“ in terms of confusion as to what in my post history could possibly have prompted such a reaction.
I don’t have enough firm conviction to say that a national divorce is the only answer to the future of America but it’s seriously looking like that’s the case
A number of people have responded “well if there are open borders, can’t you just move?”
However, if your culture has low crime and lots of money, then those are very desirable qualities and people will follow you, even if their cultural practices generate more crime and less economic value. Eventually you will have to make yourself so toxic or live somewhere so otherwise naturally terrible that it isn’t worth the price to follow you, otherwise there will be nowhere left to run to.
There are ways you can manage this and still have higher immigration, but not if you flat-out refuse to acknowledge the trade-off even exists. Singapore could be considered an example here.
You’re envisioning a swift transition to a sort of perfect global preference equilibrium. I don’t think that’s remotely likely.
Assume all borders became open tomorrow. (I don’t think there’s a scenario short of the total dissolution of all nation-states into a single world government in which “open borders” could ever mean literally zero customs and immigration apparatus, just walk in, so to keep “open borders” a remotely plausible and coherent concept even just at a policy thought experiment level, I’m defining it as the scenario in which it is feasible for anyone to move anywhere. That is, residency with a path to citizenship in any country is available to the average person who’s willing to jump through manageable hoops, e.g., long waiting periods for full citizenship/social benefit eligibility, basic language skills testing for same, adequate security screening. This is vastly different from current-world reality, and I’m very comfortable calling it an open borders scenario.)
Huge numbers of people will not instantly decide to just up and move to another country simply because they like the idea.
Moving to a different country is undertaking a massive, pervasive, whole-life transition. It is not a thing you just up and do in the spirit of comparison shopping like buying a Honda when you’ve always had Fords.
Emigration is a huge, frightening, difficult, ~alienating~ undertaking for many, many more reasons than just the thorny logistics of obtaining legal residency status.
Even the most ~rootless~ technocratic globalist universalist types generally have families, local ties, careers premised on the industrial and credentialing infrastructure of the country they already live in, comfort zones, etc, and most won’t just up and leave everything they know and move far away to a strange place without a lot of weighing and considering. And if you’re concerned about immigrants showing up here with values inimical to Western culture or whatever (cf the big chunk of thread already cut off, readers with a strong stomach should see the notes), those aren’t really the people you’re worried about. You’re worried about people who have very strong rootedness in their own tribal and community norms, where those norms differ from ours. Those sorts of people won’t all just instantly up and flock here in droves for reasons much less compelling than “my home city has just been bombed to smithereens” or “my government is currently rounding up people of my [race, sexuality, religion, etc] and shooting them.” A fat pay rise might be enough to swing the open and curious globalists; it’s not going to be a good enough reason for the superrooted.
I of course speak as someone who is interested in proactive/elective emigration. But I didn’t acquire that interest in a glib or facile way, or merely on the basis of superficial preferences in climate or architecture, as much as I like talking about those sorts of things. I have experience living abroad as an adult, and found it challenging, despite my natively low susceptibility to loneliness. I also have already immigrated once, with my family to the U.S. as a small child, and even though we had every advantage as immigrants — my father is a neurologist and ours was a thoroughly considered, planned, self-funded, legal and aboveboard move from another anglophone country to an America in a welcoming post-bicentennial “melting pot” mood — the psychological toll on all of us
was meaningful, deep, and lasting. I don’t trivialize what emigration involves. I don’t think that most people do. (It was worst for me as an introverted child and my mother as an extroverted adult; my brother as an extrovert starting kindergarten assimilated far more easily into U.S. school culture, and my father as an introvert took less damage from social uprooting and precipitous loss of regular interaction with cotribalists. As an adult, I figure I’m relatively temperamentally advantaged for weathering the stresses, and I have good language skills, but I expect to go through some very tough times during the first few years if I do manage to move. This shit is hard. It’s not a Consumer Reports clipboard shopping kind of decision.)
Look, the existing policies which are described as racist and discriminatory and evil and bigoted were not enough to prevent acid attacks from taking off in London.
So I would say no, those people actually do move to Western countries, and they actually do bring practices such as FGM with them. You would think that they’d rather stay rooted in places where acid attacks are normal, but that is demonstrably not the case.
Would fewer of them move if the welfare system were much less gentle to immigrants for multiple years? Possibly. I gave Singapore as an example of how higher levels might be tolerated for a reason. But do the people with “refugees welcome” banners think that way? As far as I can tell, no.
And, as far as I can tell, they’re against longer waiting periods and screening, against having an official language that everyone has to learn, say “there is no such thing as British food”, don’t draw a distinction between the risks of Sihks immigrating and the risks of Sunnis immigrating, and so on.
So I’m not inclined to shift in support of greater levels of immigration from any argument that doesn’t say “and also, we will cane anyone who commits an acid attack, and we will execute anyone who commits an honor killing.” But that isn’t very liberal.
I view welfare spending not so much as a matter of rights, but as something you get away with.
If you have enough money, and you’re clever enough about it, you can get away with spending money on people who are not net economically productive members of society. This is good if you can manage it, since people don’t really deserve to suffer for not being very economically productive, but you have to keep in mind the underlying economic reality - only what is produced can be consumed.
And if you’re smart about it, then you can set the situation up so you have more production relative to the people that need welfare over the long term, and you can then either increase the welfare (or send it to more people) or reduce its (per capita) effective burden.
Also, I’m pretty sure that some of that American secret for integration is just that America is really big, costs more money to get to, and that it erodes cultures through Capitalism. Low density of an incoming population makes staying separated more difficult.
I know some of you are going to read this and think I’m a big evil person, but whatever.
You know, I didn’t care about the immigration issue so much ten years ago.
Having immigrants from India, from China… that was NORMAL. That was what I grew up with.
But then suddenly
Acid attacks are “a normal British tradition”
Bombings are “part and parcel of living in a big city”
Child sex trafficking at elevated rates is evil bigotry to bring up
Cousin marriage rates massively increasing the risk of birth defects because they have gone on for multiple generations is now a problem, even though the native groups rarely engage in it
Van attacks and truck attacks where people walking on the street are run over becoming a thing
“Honor killings” became a thing here
Now, a lot of people are going to object “but you’re in America, this hasn’t happened (much) in America!” YET. There is nothing different enough about America to prevent this if America adopts the same policies, except that we have guns, and so if someone tries to sex traffic our children people might find them and shoot them.
We already had an underground FGM ring busted in Michigan. They told me that wouldn’t happen.
My standards are not especially high, here.
Now I know some of you want really absurdly high levels of immigration.
But if you want that, then you have to accept a very different and significantly less liberal framework for criminal justice and citizenship rights.It is possible to resolve these issues, but you must be willing to pay the ideological price.
A number of people have responded “well if there are open borders, can’t you just move?”
However, if your culture has low crime and lots of money, then those are very desirable qualities and people will follow you, even if their cultural practices generate more crime and less economic value. Eventually you will have to make yourself so toxic or live somewhere so otherwise naturally terrible that it isn’t worth the price to follow you, otherwise there will be nowhere left to run to.
There are ways you can manage this and still have higher immigration, but not if you flat-out refuse to acknowledge the trade-off even exists. Singapore could be considered an example here.
