Is polyamory the future of relationships or something that will always be limited to a small percent of population? How many people become poly due to their sincere interest in loving more than one person, and how many to play games or avoid the social stigma related to admitting to open/promiscuous relationships? The power dynamics are more complicated, but do you feel that they're on average more fair than in monogamy? Which groups could by disadvantaged in polyamorous relationships?
I think it’s probably the future of relationships, just because most non-religious people can’t produce a coherent case for monogamy except “think of the children”, and most people will very reasonably say “well, I’m not planning on having children for a while so I’ll be poly for now”. It also seems like nonstandard relationships getting more accepted is a trend (gays, interracial marriage, etc) so I guess I should bet on the trend continuing. I’m not sure there’s a real dichotomy between “genuinely in love with many people” and “wants to be promiscuous”. For example, I became poly because my girlfriend at the time was poly and it would have been weird to have a mono person in a relationship with a poly person. Then I continued because why not.
There’s lots of stories about women succeeding at traditionally male things (e.g. Mulan, Legally Blonde) but almost none about men succeeding at traditionally female things. When a woman does male things, it’s “she’s a woman but she’s awesome enough to live up to male standards”, but when a man does female things, it’s treated as a joke at his expense.
We need more stories about “he’s a man but he’s awesome enough to live up to female standards”.
I imagine you don’t count, like, Mrs. Doubtfire?
While I can see how Mrs. Doubtfire is sort of about a man learning to succeed at femininity, I find it deeply unsatisfying for two reasons. First, Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams’s character) only attempts to learn feminine skills in order to pass as a woman. This reinforces the idea that femininity is a female thing. Second, at the end of the movie, I feel that he’s presenting as a more-well-rounded masculine, rather than simply feminine. The message seems to be “it’s okay to cook and clean and spend time with your kids, because it doesn’t compromise your masculinity”. I want a message of “it’s okay to not be masculine”. I’m vaguely reminded of countersignaling; I get the feeling that Daniel Hillard is allowed to have feminine traits because he manages to not let them overshadow his masculinity.
By contrast, consider Kanahe Tomohisa, from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. He’s a stay-at-home husband who wears an apron and takes care of the housework, his build is slim and his demeanor submissive, and this is (at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far) not remarked upon at all or treated as a source of either drama or humor. It’s treated as perfectly normal, natural, ordinary, healthy, unremarkable that he should tend the home and the children while his wife earns the family income as a career businesswoman. The show isn’t really about him, he’s only a supporting character; but he’s the sort of character that would be a natural consequence of the shows I want to see.
I feel like the fact that Elle didn’t compromise her femininity was a big part of Legally Blonde, though. Do the two movies do this differently or am I just completely misunderstanding what you’re saying? (I haven’t actually seen Mrs. Doubtfire. I’m just going off what you say)
I’ve actually only seen a couple of scenes from Legally Blonde, but I got the impression that, while she’s femme in a shoes-and-lipstick kind of way, she’s also characterized as having qualities that are necessary to success specifically in classically male endeavors: proactive, academically gifted, a take-no-shit attitude, etc. She’s undeniably girly, but I don’t think she could be characterized as soft and vulnerable. What I know of Legally Blonde gives me a “women can be strong too” vibe, as opposed to the “it’s okay not to be strong” that I’m looking for.
popular culture cannot bear the sight of a weak man.
Can the median neurotypical cishet woman?
I think that’s a lot of where this really comes from. That kind of man isn’t really seen as desirable, and that isn’t going to change soon outside of atypical women, which in some ways is fine because we can’t demand they change their preferences, but on the other hand there are a lot of side effects and it isn’t just evil masculinity that’s the cause of them.
Either you can say anything that is allowed in at least one jurisdiction, ie. there are no restrictions at all, or you can’t say anything that is banned in at least one jurisdiction, ie. you can’t say anything whatsoever.
Come and see the contradictions inherent in the system!
Seriously though I’m glad the internet was largely invented by Anglosphere people raised in a cultural tradition of free speech, and particularly Americans, who have a particularly strong cultural tradition of free speech even by the standards of the Anglosphere.
Luckily he has accumulated sufficient capital that he has no further need to work to maintain a higher standard of living than most of the people on this planet.
In a distant second behind "culture war and everything to do with culture war", the worst thing ever to have happened to fandom might well be Who Would Win threads. As an intellectual exercise by people familiar with both characters, they're fine, but when they become a pissing match between fandoms, revealing that all present haven't matured past the childhood habit of using fictional characters as tokens in a game of Calvinball, it makes me want to pray for faster nuclear armageddon.
yeah, they’re pretty crummy, especially when they verge into territory of “praising stories and rewarding authors for being bad at depicting power and not thinking about the actual ramifications of things in their story” – which they often do, any time science fiction or Goku is involved
Now I’m wondering what if students could spend student loans on other things, like starting businesses.
So you’ve come around to the radical libertarians calling for voluntary slavery?
Just highly suspicious of the American student loan system! Like most American institutions it seems to neatly combine the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism. Why not just have regular loans (allow bankruptcy etc.) or just socialise the system entirely like a sensible country??
The money must be laundered through the private sector to prove that it isn’t Socialism™.
Nevermind that either doing it in a more capitalist, more socialist, or just straight-up better national centrist way would be more effective.
I was doing semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.
Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis. One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off.
Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described. Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.
And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem. If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.
But really, can there truly be post-scarcity? Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.
I consider “post-scarcity” as describing when technology has advanced to the point where the common material desires like food,
housing, and entertainment of any person are trivially easy to fill.
Then aren’t we there already in some countries?
Indeed. “Post scarcity” more refers to “when people believe there is not a scarcity of stuff.” And as the discourse over the $500,000 New York family shows, it is unrealistic that that would ever happen no matter how many resources our society generates.
The year is 3122. Transhumanity has colonized the entire solar system. The total GDP of mankind and its descendant species long ago exceeded its 2340 high of 14 quadrillion US2016 dollars. A new discourse arises.
The PewDiePie discourse seems to help illuminate two schools of thought regarding the inculcation of extremism and such.
One school of thought, favored by SJ and left-wing people, is that extremism is generative: if left unchecked, it grows.
The other school of thought, favored by less-than-left people, is that extremism is reactive: it is always growing in opposition to perceived overreach/overreaction.
We keep having trouble coming up with good ways to describe the sorts of e.g. feminism that are harmful and abusive, so I propose that we go with “Discourse Feminism.” Discourse Feminism:
- focuses on naming and shaming individuals as a means of ideological enforcement and/or abuse
- tends to misuse academic terms, often in ways that are the exact opposite of their original meaning. Example: patriarchy, intersectionality, emotional labor
- really just wants a list of who the Bad People are so they can accuse anyone they dislike of being a Bad Person
- puts excessive focus on making sure people use the right identity labels (“if you think women are people you’re a feminist!) and PC language relative to actual substance
- treats anyone who disagrees as an Enemy To The Movement
But this is by no means limited to feminism! You can use it to describe the bad parts of any political group:
Discourse Social Justice
Discourse Anti-racism
Discourse Men’s Rights
Discourse Sex Positivity
Discourse Christianity
Discourse Communism
I would argue that we haven’t actually tried having social policy that doesn’t suck yet. A combination of factors produced by our society and policies incentivize bad outcomes.
You get the outcome the incentives produce. To change the outcome, one must change the incentives.
Some of this ongoing race issue in the United States could be fixed, but it would require stepping on about ten different ideologies, spending a lot of money, and being very pragmatic. None of those things are realistically going to happen, except for the middle one, which when used just by itself would fail spectacularly.
(Before anyone gets too excited, I’m talking about things like school reform, wage subsidies, removal of welfare trap, etc.)
what I’m trying to do is end the dominance of capital over all our lives, end the endless wars for profit, the system of white supremacy and settler colonialism that has resulted in generations of suffering, and end the actual destruction of our ecosystems. and since the only alternative to capitalism is communism,
I see this conflation all the time and I’m compelled to be bugged by it every time.
There just haven’t been that many wars for profit lately relative to historical standards, the ideology of white supremacy has little to do with adoption of capitalism across non-white nations, settler colonialism is orthogonal to all of these issues, and destruction of ecosystems is a side effect of industrialisation and ballooning population growth that needs to be addressed in similar ways regardless of economic system.
I am confused by people who dislike rap specifically because it’s not singing when, like, since when is reciting poetry not an ancient human form of art that has pretty much existed forever?
Also there are crap tons of white musicians who growl, scream, or otherwise gargle their lyrics so since when is singing a requirement anyway?
*wanders off to listen to some people gargling words*
like, since when is reciting poetry not an ancient human form of art that has pretty much existed forever?
yeah, and a lot of us aren’t crazy about that either. Or maybe that’s just me.
Do you believe in an Optimal population for countries and the planet? I know climate is a big factor in it, for instance countries or regions that face almost routine natural disasters (drought,flooding,heatwaves,etc) should probably not be home to millions of people simply for economic gain.
>2017 >Being concerned about things fixed by us terraforming Mars
A common talking point that comes up in the healthcare debate is that having a right to healthcare is a right to the labor of another person. That you can compel a healthcare professional (shorthanded to “doctor”) to act without compensation for their labor.
This is fundamentally wrong. Rights can only compel inaction, not action.
To draw a parallel: you have the right to a gun (second amendment, yay). Does that mean that you are owed a gun? That gun manufacturers must make you a rifle? No. It doesn’t. It’s a laughable claim to make and it stands contrary to hundreds of years of American history. Having a right doesn’t compel others to action, at best it compels them to inaction.
The right to not be assaulted means you don’t get to punch me.
The right to self-defense means you don’t get to jail me for protecting myself.
The right to control my labor means you don’t get to enslave me.
The right to have kids means you don’t get to force me to have an abortion.
State’s rights compel the inaction of the federal government.
The state of a country to its internal politics compels the inaction of its neighbors from interfering with its domestic politics.
The right to a lawyer doesn’t compel people with law degrees to give you free legal representation.
Anyone trying to represent a right as the ability to force action is either a fool or a liar.
The right to free association means you can’t force my business to- OH WAIT LOL
the right to tell your free association meme to fuck off means you can’t discriminate against an entire race
Except that the right to a lawyer DOES compel the state to provide you a public defender if you can’t afford your own. That’s been the accepted interpretation for centuries.
it compels the state to provide you with a lawyer but not to force this specific lawyer to defend you for free
Why, that almost sounds like the state hiring doctors, who can leave the profession or emigrate, to perform medical services.
Unfortunately the actual reason there is such confusion is that rights theory is false, but under Consequentialism it’s quite acceptable for the state to procure healthcare for citizens if it does a good enough job at it. Man, it would be so nice to save 5% of the GDP.
In the year 2028, Hipsters use curved LCD technology to recreate the old Cathode Ray Tube style monitors and televisions, only with bulky, laughably light-weight empty plastic housing. 90s-punk becomes a hit style for a few years.
the discourse around this Testosterone Rex book has been deeply irritating in its stupidity; I mean how many hours must be lost to arguing over whether it’s even theoretically possible for a man to sire more than one child a year.
perhaps we’ll look back on this as the high watermark for sex-does-not-exist smugness.
You clearly haven’t heard of my plan to use surrogates to have three dozen genetic children simultaneously. Other people, well… they just lack ambition.
“The Postmodern Symbolism of Predatory Birds in Post-Rationalist Mythology”
@mitigatedchaos, with excerpts from WP:ForestWander, WP:Stemonitis, et al. Tumblr Journal of Sociology, 31 Mar 2017. (CC-BY-SA)
Anarcho-Capitalism and hardcore Libertarianism both assume the political and cultural conditions under which they can be created and maintained. If some other group comes along that can undermine the cultural support for their ideals over the long term, or better unite to use force, they will inevitably be dethroned and replaced with something else.
New Alt-Right Browser Extension Replaces “Liberal” With “Cuck” How America’s New Nazis Wrap Themselves in Layers of Right-Wing Delusion
But hey, what if we made one that removed all the Fnords?
You run into the scunthorpe problem with commies complaining about neoCUCKism, which is meant as an insult against centrists, not lefties. Apply honey CUCKly to the glazed ham! Breitbart complains about the ilCUCK left in social justice.
I’m not sure whether we’ll see an increase in it under the Trump Administration.
Nationalism and Social Centrism are both more defensible than Bush and Obama-era American Conservatism, which is part of why we’re seeing them rise, although they’re not calling it Social Centrism yet. A less jingoistic Nationalism is also a better counter to the Globalism popular among the Left, more capable of exploiting the holes in modern Multiculturalism that have been made vulnerable by the increased stress on the system, but it seemed that for a long time the Jingoism was all we got.
The existence of Google is a moral blight across humanity, but my pet socialist dictator is a benevolent anti-Imperialist advancing the cause of workers around the world.
Concept: A text-replacer extension which corrects “pandering to [group]” to “being enjoyable for people who are not me.”
This was actually the best idea:
We were upset by people claiming we only wanted to make things suck for them because we can’t stand it when other people are having fun in ways we don’t like, so we created a browser extension that replaces their speech with a straw man version, part 5/?
OP should be careful, since this also bites the other direction. How many articles are about “pandering to mandudegamebros” but with a different phrasing? Implicitly, this extension suggests that making a game that doesn’t care one whit about SJ is of the same value.
When did 4Channers and Redditors get so bad at setting up honeypots?
Does it matter? If a bad honeypot still works when it is so obviously a honeypot, it becomes easier to point and laugh and harder to defend those who fall for it.
Like Nigerian scammers, by making the bait so blatantly obvious they actually increase the odds of success by hooking morons.
Society isn’t safe for the truly unintelligent and the willfully clueless. I think it might have been safer for them some years ago.
while some extremist blogs are an endless source of entertainment I’m feeling a bit uneasy about contributing to possible dogpiles and trust that people won’t send them anonymous obnoxious shit; if you’re not willing to put your own name on something it’s probably best not to send it in the first place.
Endorsed, more or less. As a matter of public record, don’t send mean anons to people I’m arguing with.
If gender refers to a complex web of internal associations specific to a given individual’s life history and mental model of the world then this is essentially incommunicable.
If gender refers to the external categorisation assigned by one’s peers then really I should be asking you.
you can only either be completely okay with capitalism as it stands currently or be an unironic gulag jokes-making communist because these are the only two genders
tfw you can only have the ability to develop policies that will help workers but not the will to enact them, or the will to enact policies intended to benefit workers but not the ability to design actually-good ones
it doesn’t sit well with me that “emotional labor” in it’s original context was Arlie Hochschild talking very specifically about how taxing face to face service industry jobs are for people (namely women) with this very nuanced context and is now used in everything from “i had to explain something to someone on twitter” or heavily in contexts of romantic relationships. not all emotional management and exchange is labor! to insert the idea of “labor” excessively into interpersonal relationships creates a system of “i performed ____ and now you OWE me for exerting ____” and it’s not healthy or what the term is for.
bambamramfan reblogged this
But bambam what if I believe in Relationship Anarcho-Capitalism
