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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
@the-grey-tribe
“ Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas...

@the-grey-tribe

Please remind me to not give @mitigatedchaos any formal power if I ever become King of The World or something. Maybe I can bestow a purely ceremonial title like First Lady of The Republic of Cascadia or Vice Antipope. Grand Ideas should be kept in their ivory towers where they belong.

@argumate

I dreamt I was a superhero could fly etc. but I kept getting captured and killed by gangsters so I got irritated and started pushing a drug decriminalisation slash harm reduction program to destroy their business and I got so bored I woke up so I guess they won this round

shtpost art the mitigated exhibition augmented reality break discography intensifies the rationalists
kissingerandpals-deactivated201
kissingerandpals

Politics is just a mask for a lot of complex personal problems, huh

argumate

how dare you drag my mother into this discussion of tax policy

earlgraytay

…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.

kissingerandpals

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.)

the rationalists
blackblocberniebros
argumate

dudebro is just a terrible word for any kind of progressive purpose given that it entirely concedes masculinity to the opposition.

blackblocberniebros

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.

mitigatedchaos

…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?

blackblocberniebros

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.

blackblocberniebros

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.

Source: argumate gender politics the rationalists
slartibartfastibast
profitmaximiser

What happens if you take a bunch of socially inept, above average intelligence, and mentally ill people and have them try to do stuff together? Sounds like a disaster. Well…

slartibartfastibast

“there was that bizarre scandal last year in which someone was accidentally impregnated and then decided not to abort the child, going against what had previously been agreed upon, and proceeded to shamelessly solicit donations from the rationalist community to support her child”

EXCUSE ME DON’T YOU MEAN *HIS* CHILD YOU PROBLEMATIC PIECE OF SHIT OMFG

mitigatedchaos

Leaving aside the whole trans issue, and that suicide baiting at the end is the opposite of charity the commenter claims to have…

I think the issue here is that while institutions like religion supply important guidance by relationship norms like using monogamous marriage as a basis for family formation, the weird supernatural stuff that holds it all together is pretty obviously false, and at other times it really is out of date or punishes harmless groups (e.g., the gays).

Now, we could fall back from the religion to the nation, but nations aren’t particles, they’re waves, so they don’t look real at contrarian depth N = 1. (Whereas I’ve been a sort of double contrarian since high school.)

From that, we could fall back to intuition, but lots of people that claim to be “intuitive” are stupid, manipulative, or trying to justify bullsht. So the Rationalists push that out as well.

And thus people try to fall back to just reason instead, but there are holes in that related, in part, to insufficient information gathering and processing capabilities that brains normally deal with by aggressive summarization and other things, plus still having biases even if you try to remove them.

On the other hand, Rationalists also have less aversion to forbidden shadowspeech, which means some things that are true but forbidden can actually come up in their spaces (as well as things which are false but forbidden).

Source: profitmaximiser transphobia cw suicide baiting cw the rationalists
blackblocberniebros

I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.

ranma-official

Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.

Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.

what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable

we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them

blackblocberniebros

I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.

mitigatedchaos

So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.

And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.

Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?

Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?

blackblocberniebros

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?

I’m saying let children vote.

classmeoutsidehowbowdah

This person seems anything but rational. I’d say start with giving working minors the right to vote because they pay an income tax

mitigatedchaos

“Rationalists” is more of an anthropological label, and one I don’t claim for myself, in part because most of them believe in Open Borders or something similar, but I’m an unironic Nationalist.

Anyhow, I give a more direct/accessible and serious reply later in the thread. 

Although the irony that what I said is less impenetrable than certain philosophers or schools is not lost on me.  I can provide a close reading if you’d like.

Oh, and I’m not actually a time-travelling supervillain.  My blog description does convey real information about my positions, but it isn’t literal.

Source: blackblocberniebros politics the rationalists
argumate
argumate

Hypothesis: the glaring flaws in rationalist ideas that people jump on (a fascist shared house!) are only there to hide the more insidious flaws that are actually far more damaging in retrospect (you can’t build a reliable system if you have components that aren’t 100% reliable, redundancy and fail-over isn’t a thing, relationship drama can be eliminated by agreeing on rules in advance and if necessary inventing new words, object-level critique can be dismissed with meta-level rebuttals, meta-level critique can be dismissed with object-level rebuttals, etc.)

mitigatedchaos

It turned out that Rationalists were only interested in polyamory in order to obtain passive failover relationships configured as redundant arrays of inexpensive drama.

shtpost the rationalists