tfw your early writings that would ruin you if connected to your life now, can’t be, because the name you wrote them under was so unoriginal that other people have made dozens of accounts with the same name and a higher pagerank than any of yours.
One frightening possibility I have considered: Hell is not merely a misunderstanding of a single thing, but a conflation of two misunderstood things: the aforementioned cessation of existence for people who fail to recognize God, and an inevitable manmade Unfriendly Singularity that will cause a finite but vast amount of suffering for every person so unlucky as to be assimilated into it.
is this the thing where souls are tormented for some amount of time and then destroyed? I think at least one sect of one religion believes in that.
IMO it's not as alien as you might think, so long as you accept the existence of Heaven. Life as we know it is a minute portion of our life cycle, a tutorial, if you will. God is trying to make as many distinct beings as possible to enjoy eternity in Heaven; our finite sufferings here are random seeds for those beings, and the infinite joy that is to come infinitely outweighs it. It's not alien, just... Correct.
Have you heard of Rob Bell and/or his book Love Wins? Quote: "It's been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as conscious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy" That eternal torment by a loving good is *insane* isn't strictly an atheist belief
TBH, one thing I thought about from time to time is that if you’ve got an adversary figure with real magic powers, it could fake a bunch of miracles and make a fake religion with a fake Word of God, and even influence the emotions of people to make them feel like they were getting a real connection out of that. And how would you know?
But just inserting a few sprinkles here and there in the right places of an ordinary holy book could be pretty effective.
IMO the many worlds interpretation is the single most shockingly underused response to the "omniscience of God vs free will" dilemma; I suppose that Christian apologists and theoretical physicists must simply travel in the same circles infrequently. God knows exactly what you're going to do, and the answer is an unimaginably large number of different things which separate yous will experience. Every moment has a single past and a vast variety of futures.
That was along the lines of something I considered, although I don’t really believe in Many Worlds myself.
Omnibenevolence shouldn’t be something we look at and it’s clearly wrong, but it could be something we look at and it’s clearly alien. So, “make all possible worlds, such that all possible people have a chance to exist” is more along the lines of what one would expect. Or, “God cannot imagine a world without creating it” (nesting realities proposal) “and this is part of the reason evil exists - lack of infinite forethought”.
Want some extra fun? Christian here who subscribes both to annihilationism (IE, the "hell = nonexistence" doctrine you're describing) *and* quantum immortality; I call this combination quantum universalism.
While many futurists anticipated broad advances across the technological economy, in fields ranging from computing to materials science, few foresaw the radical advancements in theology that advanced quantum theory would bring.
- The Quantum Fields of God, Ned Halibut, Kansas Revival Timeline, 2308 (retrieved from Church of Mars archives 2609 with permission of Father Gregory)
Want some extra fun? Christian here who subscribes both to annihilationism (IE, the "hell = nonexistence" doctrine you're describing) *and* quantum immortality; I call this combination quantum universalism.
While many futurists anticipated broad advances across the technological economy, in fields ranging from computing to materials science, few foresaw the radical advancements in theology that advanced quantum theory would bring.
- The Quantum Fields of God, Ned Halibut, Kansas Revival Timeline, 2308 (retrieved from Church of Mars archives 2609 with permission of Father Gregory)
I will admit, the most calming take I found on Christianity was some guy arguing at length on a forum that the whole “Hell” thing we take for granted was really, essentially, a translation error, and that the alternative to divine salvation is not eternal torment, but non-existence.
Reading it, I felt a lot of my desire to argue about religion fading out, at least for that time.
on that note @mitigatedchaos I can’t thank you enough for bringing us the quality “atheists belong in camps” posts
As far as I can tell, you’re not really going for persuading them, nor do you seem to really gain much from interacting with them.
And your audience (that is, people who follow you) aren’t likely to be influenced away from their nonexistent seething hatred of atheists. (And it’s not that much more compelling to me than you just talking about futurist stuff by itself.)
I’m actually kind of curious, why do you try to argue with them if not to persuade?
I’m pretty sleep-deprived today because I’ve been having to watch this dog all week and he’s undergoing separation anxiety and howling at 4 in the morning.
So I got kind of annoyed at the emotional tone of the original series of posts it was in response to, and wanted to knock it down a peg.
Usually, I curate the mitigatedchaos blog for reading and would shunt such arguments to the -extras sideblog, but I also wanted to clarify a few opinions I have WRT religion that I haven’t really clarified yet on this blog.
Like, I’m reconstructing Nationalism and social centrism so people might otherwise assume I would also be pro-religion rather than far more neutral on it.
the other Weinstein move seems to be puffing up the impression of his power for both carrot and stick purposes; sleeping with him doesn’t guarantee you a good role and not sleeping with him isn’t going to ruin your career, but either way you don’t know that, you don’t know exactly how far his influence extends, and he does everything he can to convince you that his opinion matters.
Hating men for no reason won't solve your personal problems
I was really expecting to be accused of misogyny, actually. I’m trying to calculate how many levels of misdirection this ask is on.
Maybe it’s about this post?
They can’t undo Toxic Masculinity, because they don’t understand Masculinity, and they don’t want to.
…because that would mean understanding things about themselves that they don’t want to understand, either.
In which the “they” is actually Mainstream Feminists.
Patterns of male behavior are in part driven by what straight women like/don’t like, or more accurately who they treat as hot/not hot, who they date/don’t date, etc.
Undoing what the Mainstream Feminists call “toxic masculinity” would mean that straight women, on average, would have to change, which would mean they’d have to first understand how cishet female preferences shape the very male power/dominance/status hierarchies they ostensibly oppose.
However, Feminism does poorly at attributing agency and power to women (beyond some of the “rah rah, girl power” stuff), as it’s more politically useful to present as the unpowered underdog.
Feminism cannot ever possibly be defeated and it will burn down every single thing that makes living tolerable and salt the earth just for the joy of annihilation.
You honestly think they’re going to stop the cybernetics/tissue industry?
Because what it means to be “a woman,” as a category, is on a countdown timer right now.
There may or may not be a god. We're working on building a few of our own, to neutralise the threat posed by any preexisting gods. We hope to be in a position to withstand any divine hostilities by around 2085, but in the meantime diplomatic and economic countermeasures must make up the balance.
Man, this is a bit too close to some worldbuilding I did where, in the wake of a supervolcano eruption, a bronze-age civilization flipped from being polytheists to being anti-theists.
The Storm the Heavens and Cast Down the Golden Thrones kind of anti-theists, not the internet article writing kind.
(A cult expanded in the wake of the catastrophe and became the new religion.)
They are to train over multiple reincarnations for the literal, not metaphorical, battle at the end of time.
Anyhow, the good news is that gluten has been deemed one of their unholy foods.
Most of the religious opinion you're getting recently is shit tier. Try: the soul is not a separate object, the soul is the _pattern_. And you need something theist-like not to believe in objective morals but to _ground_ them.
I need to re-read this ask when I’ve had more than 4h of sleep.
In order to believe in objective moral facts, you end up needing some kind of theism. (Not necessarily Christianity, or any other specific variant.) Without it, the only rational grounding you can give for any moral claim will boil down to “because I feel like it”. This can work for individuals (though probably only if they’ve internalized the moral system of a surrounding theistic society), but good luck getting it to pass stably across generations.
I could go one of three ways on this.
Theists don’t actually believe in something objective. They’ve tricked themselves into thinking they do.
Of course that’s what a Theist would say.
If we’re being aggressive about it, it boils down the same way for theists.
Either non-theists can believe in objective moral claims, or theists can’t believe in objective moral claims. Gotta be one or the other.
Then of course, there’s the matter of why should finding the ultimate secular morality be easy? Physics isn’t easy. Chemistry isn’t easy. Mathematics, which isn’t a natural science, isn’t easy.
I’m not sure what your background is like here. You don’t ordinarily seem the type to go off from a position of ignorance, but it’s in fact fairly universal in my experience that vocal internet atheists don’t actually have any understanding of theological arguments.
These arguments basically have the same counter, which is that free will is actually really important, and God does not violate it. By humans’ free will, sovereignty over the material world passed to the Devil, “prince of this world”; this, in short form, is why bad things happen to good people. Similarly, Hell is identified with the state of willing rejection of God; He desires that everyone be saved, but this can’t happen absent the individuals’ decision to accept salvation.
This is a topic that could support (has supported, even) an arbitrary length of arbitrarily detailed argument, which I am surely not the best one to make. Since diving full-speed into theodicy would be fairly tangential to the original question, I’ll not continue along this vein.
“Free Will” is a cop out, and free will has always been a cop out.
Don’t posit beings of infinite power and then make excuses for them not to use that power.
Look, inside you, when you make a decision, that decision must be made somehow. If there is no somehow, then it is random. If there is a 1:1 fixed somehow, then it’s deterministic. If it’s somewhere in-between, probabilistic, then it’s a weighted random.
If you’ve got infinite power, then you’ve got time and resources for infinite mind engineering. If you decide not to bother with that engineering, then the outcome is arbitrary and therefore random. That’s not the kind of freedom you’d need to make to justify Hell.
Either way, you’re going to have a hell of a time, so to speak, getting infinite moral liability to stick to finite agents that were made by someone else who could have made the very laws of reality different but didn’t bother for some reason.
One could posit that God cannot imagine a universe without creating it, but that is not what religion teaches. One could posit that hell is temporary and you’re only there until you change your mind, or that only those who will never ever change their minds will go there, but that isn’t what religion typically teaches.
I’m not going from significant research here either, just general historical knowledge. To formalize my hypothesis a bit, I would say that every time a movement that is ideologically atheist has attained societal control, atrocities have followed on the part of that movement.
This doesn’t make any statement about the behavior of religious governments and power structures; clearly these have also committed atrocities historically. By this standard, I would say that the US has never qualified as atheist (despite getting closer over the late 20th century).
Ruling out religious governments and power structures is cheating.
This hypothesis would suggest that all, or a majority of, anti-religious advocacy is carried forward on the justification of concrete abuses (as universally agreed) on the part of religious people or organizations.
This is not at all my observation. Not all, not even a tenth of anti-religious argument is in this category. Perhaps a hundredth, and of this most is transparent gotcha arguments that are obviously not the interlocuter’s true rejection.
Come now, how much rejection of Communism do you think is because of how badly, historically, Communism has fucked up?
There are always going to be die-hard opposition members no matter how great your ideology is, for any sufficiently large population. It’s a natural variation. But to get bigger than that, your ideology has to have flaws.
I can tell you right now that if the Soviet Union were chill and sitting on $80,000 PPP per-capita income and this was an economic miracle wrought by Communism, I wouldn’t be bothering to oppose it. Lots of other people are like this, and yet you will find me bitching about Communism on this very blog.
The typical tactic here is to pick some modern leftist political position, enshrine it as a moral absolute, and then attack religion for not obeying it. Normal examples include opposition to abortion, gay marriage or divorce.
American religious groups blew an absolutely enormous amount of social capital fighting homosexuality, when homosexuality is only really a problem when combined with something like promiscuity - which, unsurprisingly, is not great for heterosexuals, either.
Now, unless I can cause a secular reasoning against it to catch on, there’s not as much social capital to fight polygamy.
But the real key thing here is that you want to apply literally infinite punishment to something like homosexuality. This is massively disproportionate to any sort of harm that it causes. It would be one thing if it were murder that was being punished in this way, but it isn’t.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept any of these as knock-down moral arguments against religion.
Not the point.
The point is the level of outrage over the actions by atheists, the whole “this is why everyone hates atheists” thing, the sympathizing-with-putting-in-camps, is disproportionate.
It’s entirely understandable that atheists would behave this way without being tools of the devil or even just cynically fighting for personal power.
Look, I get that some people find religion more than just a little helpful, but extremely helpful, something that prevents their lives from falling apart.
And so I get concerned about the “we need to purge all religion everywhere” position, since I worry that it might accidentally break something that we won’t even realize is broken for some time, and then it will take a lot of time and effort to fix.
However, having experienced pretty directly that our control of ourselves is partially indirect, including ways in which personality is biologically-rooted, I cannot endorse infinite moral liability for finite moral flaw.
That’s also one of my oppositions to Anarcho-Capitalism. None of us truly have the agency to agree to an infinite deal, much less to be threatened into one.
God did exist, but He's been slowly fading out ever since He died. John Michael Greer had a good post about it: www(.)ecosophia(.)net/death-god-speculation/
Anon-kun brings us some excellent worldbuilding material.
Hey, you want to hear something?
If there are souls, and they aren’t just glorified backup devices, but are involved in our decision-making process, then the behavior of an ensouled body must be different in some way from an unensouled body.
And thus, the behavior of ensouled matter, too, must be different from unensouled matter.
The degree of difference in behavior from the hypothetical unensouled version would determine the magnitude of interference. If it’s fairly high (and it would need to be in order to justify certain religious beliefs), then it should be detectable statistically by comparison with control atoms.
I still think the better solution to the gender wars is the mass destruction of femininity through hormone disruptors in the water supply. T O M B O Y S A N D C H A D S W I L L R U L E T H E W O R L D
Anon, secretly owner of the largest testosterone factory complex east of Nebraska:
That’s an interesting idea. I suppose here it serves a similar purpose as philosophical skepticism; acting as universal acid, it attacks the philosophical justification of the existing system, letting the new movement come in and take power based on no philosophical justification other than “because I have all the guns”.
The next consideration is that believing things (in general) is actually good, and a philosophical universal acid is therefore a bad and noxious thing.
You don’t need Theism to believe in things. Theists are generally the ones who claim that you do, seeing as their belief system works that way.
The other problem is that Atheism is most-likely just plain true. Its prediction - “there will be no divine intervention” - pretty accurately describes the world we all live in. Every instance theists cite is unclear or not sufficiently provable - which is exactly what you would expect from someone whose god isn’t real that has to make excuses for something that’s supposed to be all-powerful.
Worse, the reasoning used is “don’t test God, you have to show faith.” That sets off my internal memetic defense intuitions something fierce.
That’s setting aside how unforgivable the entire Hell thing is. And that’s what really gets me more than the rest of it, seeing as it’s so incongruent with “ultimate perfect good.”
Some conceptions of Ultimate Perfect Good could look pretty fucking alien, but they wouldn’t look like that.
Now usually, I let religious belief slide for what you might call Utilitarian reasons - some people use it to keep themselves out of jail, others to keep themselves alive, there are various charity things, and so on.
Plus farther back there were things like monks copying and preserving texts. Overall, I’d say it’s difficult to determine the net moral impact of religion.
But then we get to things like “we’ll be cheering putting the New Atheists in camps,” and I feel the need to prod back a bit.
(also, worth asking why ~every stable and non-atrocity-generating power structure in history has used religion of some kind as part of its base.)
Now see, I know this must be bullshit, but I’m not enough of a culture warrior to give a firm rebuttal.
However, first you have to consider that most of human history is religious, therefore you’re limited to stuff from, essentially, the 1700s onward, otherwise there’s a massive selection bias.
Then there’s the fact that many of the “religious-based” structures also committed atrocities - unless you selectively handwave away the Divine Right of Kings type stuff.
And then you can count something like America as having committed atrocities and not being religious on the grounds of the founders’ Deism being closer to Atheism than other belief structures were at the time, but then you can’t count it as stable and religiously-rooted in opposition to all those medieval wars of succession.
I strongly suspect there’s going to be strategic equivocation of that kind somewhere in any such argument.
This is where there’s a bait and switch happening.
I’ve seen the anecdotes from people abused under a religious justification. I don’t begrudge these people their bad impressions of religion in general, even thinking they’re mistaken. I also don’t believe for a moment that the real driving force behind major societal-level pushes like this one is actually people who were abused and therefore have an instinctive animus. There aren’t enough of them. And the message behind these societal pushes is not “we must disempower religion because it led to these concrete abuses” (except occasionally, from a very few people, as a motte). It’s some mix of “we must destroy religion for its own sake” and “we will define this perfectly-okay thing as an abuse, then use it as an excuse to tear down religion”.
The people behind this by and large don’t have any such concrete and morally-justifiable motivation for their advocacy. They’re attacking religion for its own sake and/or because it’s in the way of their powermongering. We are called to love our enemies, but it’s with relation to this that I can sympathize with the urge to shove them in camps.
Oh come on, like those instances aren’t supposed to be able to motivate others?
You surely don’t think all anti-Communists are supposed to be those who personally suffered under Communism, do you?
And besides, some of those “perfectly okay things” really aren’t so okay.
Nazis don't exist; they just haven't accepted it yet. Guys, we dropped the Unwish on you decades ago, you're literally fading from existence, your protests actually don't matter at this point, they're just annoying. "This is unfair, the Holocaust never happened!" Yeah, because we retconned you and all of your actions away, you dumb motherfuckers. Wave your swastikas around all you like; they're becoming ghostier and less real each passing year. Can't even remember why I'm mad.
You miserable fools.
All nations reforged their national mythologies in the crucible of the Second World War.
Having transformed Imperial Japan into the sole remaining bastion of such cruel and violent Nationalism, you are about to unleash a form of weeb that not even gods can comprehend.
And now I, standing outside of Time, will be forced to watch this unfold. You jerks.
I still think the better solution to the gender wars is the mass destruction of femininity through hormone disruptors in the water supply. T O M B O Y S A N D C H A D S W I L L R U L E T H E W O R L D
Anon, secretly owner of the largest testosterone factory complex east of Nebraska:
Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.
Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.
This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.
Self righteous superiority complex.
“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump
Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?
And people wonder why Atheists are hated.
Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.
You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.
The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.
And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.
Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.
As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.
And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?
Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.
You want an explanation?
Atheism is simple. It’s obvious. It doesn’t contain much information. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Because there is no one powerful enough and willing to stop them.”
But because it doesn’t contain much information, because it’s mere non-belief, it can only achieve widespread support in societies that are religion-dominated by riding on some other, more powerful, more viral ideology which displaces the main one - and those kinds of displacements tend to be a lot more violent.
Atheism doesn’t tell you what values you should have. The other ideology does, and uses the Atheism as a means to attack the legitimization of the previous ideological power structure.
“Atheism causes atrocities” has the causation backwards.
As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.
Look, the attitude here is “HOW DARE THOSE ATHEISTS BE SO AGAINST RELIGION?”
The OP says “the new atheists are going in the camps first.”
Now, he’ll say he was just memeing or whatever, but the underlying emotion about it, about how anyone could be so against religion, they must be evil, is there.
But the Atheists see religion in ways similar to how a number of people see some forms of Communism - an oppressive ideological machine that uses and discards human beings for its own ends, composed of many interlocking components.
They want to destroy all reverence for religion like some right-wingers want to destroy all reverence for Communism, because each bit sacredness contributes some small measure of power to the aura of uncriticizability that gave religion its power in previous eras.
Many of them see it that way for reasons not so different from why some of those right-wingers hate Communism so much - it was used to excuse or legitimize violence against them.
So as long as that’s happening, you don’t need to have people be tools of the Devil to run around wanting to tear down crosses. Unless, of course, you consider those doing the abuse to be tools of the devil - but then you wouldn’t be sending the Atheists to camps, ne?
And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?
Cross memorials? No. Not a blanket on stone monuments though - no Ten Commandments for courthouses.
Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.
Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.
This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.
Self righteous superiority complex.
“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump
Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?
And people wonder why Atheists are hated.
Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.
You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.
The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.
And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.
“but how will I ever be able to get laid if modern culture frowns upon me getting coworkers drunk and making out with them against their mumbled protestations?? it’s not like my wife is gonna sleep with me lol”
I have not actually worked out how modern culture proposes people are meant to get laid.
I mean, people obviously seem to be doing it, but there appears to be no acceptable strategy.
You ignore the recommendations, and prove how manly you are by taking on the risk anyway, getting shut down viciously if you’re too low-status.
The problem is that any permissible channel will be FLOODED due to the mismatch between the demand for sex from women and demand for sex from men, at least at the noisiest age pools.
Secondly, straight women (generally, on average) do not want to initiate beyond the barest hints, ones that are plausibly deniable if she turns out not to be wanted by that particular guy, leaving her sense of being desirable intact.
What is going to change this is early Transhumanism, as it’s going to alter the sex ratio and potentially result in an increase in bisexuality.
I mean, in practice I used a dating website, which implicitly includes the idea that everyone there for dating is there for dating, and specifies their orientation, so if you don’t have “short/long-term dating” and so on your profile, no fuck for you,
but I don’t necessarily match the patterns of other people, so this may not be actionable advice.
Anyhow, to add on to this, revealing you find someone hot when you’re attempting to extract resources or in a high-stakes …relationship negotiation? …hurts your bargaining position.
At least, you can still get away with pretending that you have to be won over (and showered in all the resources that “winning over”) requires, so long as there are more incoming proposals than outgoing ones, such that the norm is they have to approach you if they find you hot.
As the sex ratio changes, this becomes less and less feasible.
Since I expect a decent-sized chunk of people (3-5%) to “exit” from being male (as we know it) once the technology improves, that throws the bargaining out of whack, as does bisexuality, which means you’re competing with more people for a higher virtual gender ratio… or something. Naturally, once being a sex is more voluntary, what being that sex means changes as well.
“but how will I ever be able to get laid if modern culture frowns upon me getting coworkers drunk and making out with them against their mumbled protestations?? it’s not like my wife is gonna sleep with me lol”
I have not actually worked out how modern culture proposes people are meant to get laid.
I mean, people obviously seem to be doing it, but there appears to be no acceptable strategy.
You ignore the recommendations, and prove how manly you are by taking on the risk anyway, getting shut down viciously if you’re too low-status.
The problem is that any permissible channel will be FLOODED due to the mismatch between the demand for sex from women and demand for sex from men, at least at the noisiest age pools.
Secondly, straight women (generally, on average) do not want to initiate beyond the barest hints, ones that are plausibly deniable if she turns out not to be wanted by that particular guy, leaving her sense of being desirable intact.
What is going to change this is early Transhumanism, as it’s going to alter the sex ratio and potentially result in an increase in bisexuality.
I mean, in practice I used a dating website, which implicitly includes the idea that everyone there for dating is there for dating, and specifies their orientation, so if you don’t have “short/long-term dating” and so on your profile, no fuck for you,
but I don’t necessarily match the patterns of other people, so this may not be actionable advice.
I’m surprised no one has suggested sexual harassment insurance.
It obviously wouldn’t work, since all the accusations for these big figures tend to be suppressed and come out at once, so you can’t use it to preview how likely they are to grab you.
Concept: A setting in which Moe Monstergirls and Handsome Manpires exist simultaneously next to terrifying abominations and soul-burning inhuman demons hiding in human shells that would ordinarily be used as subversions of the Paranormal Romance Genre versions of the creatures.
And that’s what happens when you constantly politicise and over-analyse trans characters, you make a political minefield around the topic that ultimately makes it safer for creators to exclude trans characters than risk implementing them in a way that results in unpredictable controversy and death threats.
Same goes for all of the types of characters who lack “representation”. Stop politicising their existence and more creative types will be comfortable including them.
i still think it’s darkly hilarious that so many men heard women say ‘i want a man that’s sensitive’ and heard it as ‘i, a man, should be extremely sensitive about my feelings and desires, that is what women want, they want to be kept constantly walking on eggshells around my hairtrigger emotional state,’ instead of ‘ohhh women want partners who are sensitive to THEIR feelings and desires’.
like. this isn’t that hard. practice emotional reciprocity with women. listen to and sympathize with them. it will make your life way better than just demanding that people constantly cater to you and then not giving anyone anything back.
Blogger Shocked to Discover That When Told “Do Something Different,” Gender Whose Traditional Role Includes Relationship-Inwards Sensitivity to Women, Outwards Stone-Faced Stoicism, Actually Does Something Different
Like, “pay attention to my girlfriend’s emotions, be sensitive to my girlfriend’s emotions, but otherwise be a stone-faced, indestructible rock golem of strength” is the expectation.
And when straight women who are upset about things like in your post say they want a “sensitive guy,” it’s phrased in ways like “I want a guy who knows it’s okay to cry.”
Like, that pretty clearly means in touch with his own emotions.
Straight guys expect that if they are emotional in ways other than validating the emotions of their girlfriends, women will break up with them.
You tagged this “bangs pots and pans in a masculine manner” so I’m going to assume you’re male. You should really know better than this, if you’re not just doing rah rah performative wokeness.
Walking on eggshells is never fun, but I always get the sense from these conversations that it’s always “how dare women have to walk on eggshells? What, lots of straight men already had to walk on eggshells? Who cares about them??”
And in turn, I can’t see it anything other than yet another gender war munition that men should just ignore.
Concept: Guerrilla anti-marketing campaign by Socialists consisting of advertising things people already own to them using Big Data, with the goal of increasing life satisfaction, but more importantly undermining corporate power, the Capitalist life script, and Consumerism.
With businesses as well as employers as well as landowners, large entities are better at ruthlessly maximising profit and also are better at responding to regulations. Whereas small entities often go for something other than maximising profit, and if it’s “being decent”, great, but then for some reason sometimes it’s “being pointlessly petty and cruel”. So you get a situation where large entities are often worse on average in very specific ways, but the very very worst and most unfathomable are the small ones.
Watching the alt-right pile on any lefty accused of sex crimes is always a refreshing reminder of just how little they really care about due process and witch hunts.
The rationalists I respect are the ones who at least seem to give the tiniest bit of a fuck about consistency in this regard.
It’s really about undermining the credibility of their opposition. While they also make troll posts for this purpose, it’s important to remember that any immoral behavior risks empowering whoever one’s opposition are, since a true failure bottoms out at the truth instead of an empty hole in the air, so once it’s out there, it’s got more teeth than mere doubt.
So the right-wing has shifted pretty visibly into clearly being the
no-fun police right now (like literally, they are mad at pretty much
everything fun right now, including Star Wars, Star Trek, and the NFL),
and I think this gives the left an opportunity to show that while we are
critical of media for its more problematic or pernicious aspects, we
aren’t critical of the people that enjoy the media just for enjoying it.
Like we have to admit that general fun is the most widespread form of
resistance to capitalism, and we should embrace that shit. I think that some of the 2014-2016 rise in right-wing bullshittery was due to the left coming across as the “no-fun” people, and that was wholly undeserved, and I think the shoe has firmly landed on the other foot at this point. Which gives us an opportunity to show that that idea was always bullshit. We embrace fun as fucking praxis.
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary
Eh, I don’t think that you can sell me on bad tofu and shitty music as fun, essentially with no fast cars, makeup, cool clothes, fun media, or personal hygiene. I mean, I guess the weed is “fun” if that’s your thing, but the fucking Libertarians have weed too, and weed’s not my thing anyway.
If you check the op’s blog with the Internet Archive’s Chronoglow browser, it’s deactivated by August 3rd, 2021 after they got harassed off the site for liking an indie game where one of the developers was friends with a man whose wife was the cousin of someone who was once in the same room as JonTron.
nothing usually happens to these guys. weinstein is different. many many people are coming forward, others are openly condemning him. but, and this is key, he lost really important things - his position, his many professional affiliations
if the culture flips so that the value of speaking up significantly outweighs the value of staying quiet then the changes could be drastic and amusing
