you are at a trump rally and suddenly the floor is equal rights
“D-drugs!” Trump shouted as the floor became the physical embodiment of an abstract concept. He began to scramble - not because he was afraid of “equal rights,” but because abstract concepts don’t always hold a lot of weight - for higher ground.
“Huh, actually, that’s not actually a bad policy idea. Where did you first hear it?”
“Oh, some Singaporean time travel blog on Tumblr.”
“Singaporean time travel blog?”
“Well it mentions Lee Kwan Yew a bit and the author seems interested in authoritarianism in Asia, so either that or the United States given that it keeps talking about a North American Union.”
“…what?”
“If I might remind you, sir, you ordered that we answer all your questions as honestly as possible.”
This is Rationalist Tumblr man,
answering things way too literally is what we get paid for
and also what we do for fun
(don’t ask who’s paying, it gets way too complicated)
(and that’s not so much a defense as just, “yeah bro the locals are weird”)
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
Who wants to live an unexamined life? Golden handcuffs are still handcuffs
That doesn’t mean you don’t examine things. I don’t know why you immediately jump to “handcuffs” as if the presence of structure makes motion or mobility impossible.
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Politics is just a mask for a lot of complex personal problems, huh
how dare you drag my mother into this discussion of tax policy
…consider: politics is complex personal problems.
a nation is just a very large group of people. democratic politics is the fine art of getting them to come to some kind of consensus about how they want to live. interpersonal mediation on the grand scale. with guns.
That’s all well and good, but most of these people should probably work on their own lives before they turn to Utopian visions of how the world around them should be different. Especially teenagers on Tumblr.
I’m not sure how much this is about me (considering that my typical post is something along the lines of “Actually, having governments and borders and taxes is Good, and polygamy/cousin marriage is Bad”), and certainly I do have my own matters to work on, buuuut…
Much of the Rationalist Sphere on Tumblr and those around it are neurodivergent in some way, and thus have different natural intuitions sometimes, leading to Weird Politics.
Though I guess also there are teenagers. I do try and put on a reasonable face for teenagers when I know they’re watching. It’s important that people that are looked up to model good behavior. (Conservatives kind-of know this but also have too much threat pattern-matching as if to balance out leftists not having enough.)
Sometimes the mask becomes the reality, bbbb, and sometimes with no mask there is no reality. We are social creatures, not solitary ones. Sometimes we need context to be provided for us to be at our best.
Some of the existing problems in society are due to the breakdown in scripts. Not everyone is a social adept that can figure it all out on the fly. The framework provides something to fall back on.
@obiternihili And I lean towards that, and am asking for examples indirectly
The new masculinities are out there being formed right now in the vast chasms of the net, but many are too liquid now and not yet crystalized.
Some are pulling from the future, where gender is more dissolved than it is now, and mixing outwards transgressions with confidence.
Others pull elements from the past without taking the whole thing. Some degree of sexual promiscuity has always been present in human society, but not always with the same rules, social punishments, and social status.
I don’t think new stable equilibria will be fully identifiable for a while.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
In that last line, being male and being a Man™ are different things. You can be male or female and you can be you by having your own goddamn identity and thinking for yourself instead of bullying the sick weak nerdy kid into it for not conforming to some arbitrary set of interests
like I might disagree with bbb on this because being a real man to me is just being an adult. But being a Man™ or even the subset of Men™, the dudebro - is giving up defining my own identity and giving up making maturity, not interests or the way I express myself, the performative element.
dudebro was pretty much always meant to refer the kinds of people we think of as stereotypical frat boys anyways. Dumbasses who don’t give a shit about consent or abuse or anything like that except fucking people ±over. That’s not being a man. That’s being garbage.
And if a lot of women are attracted to abuse, why? And are we sure? Are we sure underlying factors aren’t distorting the really important values?
And like if definitions differ definitions differ. Get over it. The line beginning with “Or” is not actually a point however smugly it’s phrased.
Have you considered that maybe it’s your conception of masculinity which is very narrow and culturally limited, here?
There is more than one way to be masculine and exploring and normalizing new masculinities could be very helpful (and still attractive to cishet women and thus not self-erasing on the long-term). Conceding masculinity to the opposition is a terrible idea.
I fail to see something better that convinces me to change it.
But it sounds like you’re widening the definition past the point of coherence, in which case we’re in the same camp but different labels.
I’m not widening it past coherence.
There are multiple paths which are congruent with the male gendered trait cluster and are compatible with cishet sexuality. Dudebroism in its original meaning and not a generic misandrist or outgroup insult is only one of them. We can take the same colors and paint a different image.
It only appears incoherent if you already pre-define masculinity as only the “dudebro” version, which is a terrible idea if your goal is better men that are willing to work with your movement.
Of course, men themselves will have to build these new identities mostly. Feminism cannot do so for them. But you don’t want them to think Feminism is incompatible with them being masculine. Remember the post I was responding to said masculinity was seen to be only of sins and just fine to let the opposition monopolize.
dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.
I think we’re more than prepared to concede masculinity to the opposition. What redeeming qualities does it have? Everything I’ve seen masculinity be is aggression, envy, or pride, all of which are, uh, mortal sins.
…are you joking?
Or have you just already defined masculinity as everything you hate?
If it turns out that a significant number of straight women actually like masculine men and haven’t been brainwashed into it, what is your plan?
How can a male build a healthy self-identity if to be male is nothing more than to be a flawed woman?
I don’t think people should build self-identities as men or women. I think they’re stifling. The notion that because I was born with a penis I should want to cultivate A traits and not B traits is silly to me. Let boys play with dolls if they want and let girls play with trucks if they want. Let men be tender, let women be slobs. None of this should mean they’re not doing a good job at being a complete person.
These conversations always get so abstract so tell me what you think masculinity and femininity are and I’ll explain what I dislike.
Masculinity and Femininity are a partially socially-constructed, partially biological phenomenon.
Essentially, gendered trait distribution resembles two overlapping bell curves, controlled by hormonal levels at key points in development, along with genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors.
Pre-natal testosterone levels - in females, not just males - track with later toy preferences for mechanical/systems toys vs social ones. While the effects of sex hormones are not simple, they are very much not a placebo.
Society then layers its gender roles on top of this, driven in part by previous economies and incentives that may no longer exist. Often it exaggerates, or essentializes, and so for this reason people go “well dresses are obviously not biological and not all people like the assigned roles, therefore male and female are exactly the same and all apparent differences are caused by societal brainwashing.”
So we might think of masculine/feminine as the axis of opposition for gendered traits. (Intelligence does not appear to be one of these traits, as the center point seems to be the same.) Alternatively, we might think of it as the center points of the respective bell curves.
It’s important to remember, however, that the masculine woman and the feminine man are both legitimate, as well as various other mixes on more than one trait. Humans are complicated and biology is quite noisy and also complicated. But the clustering is still real.
The issue with your plan is that cishets seem to actually want someone who differs on the gender axes from them in that masc/femme way in terms of their attraction (which they don’t consciously control), and the idea that we’ll abolish gender and not have them identify as the labeled gender clumps associated with their respective sexes (cishets in specific) in the name of some modern idea of liberation… well I’m confident that won’t work out very well.
What I’m saying is that the very idea of masculinity and femininity will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man.
I don’t care if it just so happens that most men will prefer one thing and most women will prefer another thing, I don’t think we should try to cram people into holes so there’s some kind of sameness.
But if you even put masculinity and femininity up on the pedestal as goals for men and women should aspire to, that will inherently invalidate the masculine woman and feminine man. The ideas themselves should be annihilated, the idea that people born into certain different types of bodies SHOULD want certain different things. If, later, of their own free will, they do naturally end up mostly wanting those things, that’s no skin off my ass.
There should be no gender roles whatsoever. Everyone should be told they can be whatever kind of person they want to be and do whatever things they wanna do.
The existence of straights as a category does not invalidate the existence of gays, and it’s possible to prepare people for the default of being straight, which we’re talking 90%+ probability here, while still saying “yeah also you could be gay, which is okay too, here is some information about gays”.
As such I don’t think it invalidates the femme/masc for there to be masc/femme, and if you don’t do a default and just abolish all the roles and scripts and so on instead, what you’re going to find is not a paradise of liberation, but a bunch of confused people struggling with introspection over their preferences,
like Rationalists wondering why their sex drives aren’t ‘logical’ after hitting a wall of personal experience.
