multiheaded1793:

raggedjackscarlet:

Ever since I saw the film The Warriors, I haven’t been able to shake the idea that gang culture– even real world gang culture, Casa Nostra and the Yakuza and all that shit– is essentially a LARP with insanely high stakes.

I was amused to read that the Mafia revived an old custom of hand-kissing because they all liked The Godfather so much. No, really.

“Fake it ‘til you make it” taken to its logical conclusion.

Also, I’m pretty sure an awful lot of people are essentially LARPing their way through life, usually just with lower stakes and less interesting aesthetics. Parents who feel it’s more important to keep up the appearance of caring than to actually do the substance; environmental activists who are willing to sacrifice everything for their cause as long as “sacrifice everything” doesn’t mean cutting their hair and putting on a suit; politicians who sacrifice the interests of group X by doing stuff that’s only seemingly pro-X; feminists who do feminism-associated things without regard for the consequences; ineffective altruists; the entire Motherfucking Theresa business/scam; a lot of cis people’s genders; etc. Even in surprisingly high places one will find people who got there by simply playing the role.

Then there’s those of us who play on the meta level and consciously seek the role of the munchkin…

comparativelysuperlative:

socialjusticemunchkin:

multiheaded1793:

tooth-and-nails:

argumate:

last time this only got 8 notes!

This is actually my biggest criticism of feminism and paradoxically it gets me labeled as an anti feminist.

I’m… a radical feminist deep down (if frequently more in the breach…) but people seem to think that “radical” just means “loud”.

I’m not a radical person, I just support radical ideas.

I should write the specifics into a post of their own, but basically most of the issues with feminism are issues with inconsistently and insufficiently applied feminism; so yes, it needs to go a lot further, including but not limited to, going further recursively.

I agree with this. In particular, I would like to see feminism go very far away.

Say, Mars by 2035, Galilean moons by 2050, maybe we can throw in a Venus flyby somewhere in there….

Non-feminists take the Earth, feminists get to keep the rest of the Solar System? Sounds like a damn good deal to me.

shlevy:

Misread of the night: competing access nerds

Misheard misread of the night: competing excess nerds

ilzolende:

nathanielbuildsatesseract:

ilzolende:

nathanielbuildsatesseract:

One of the things I mean when I say that I’m an environmentalist is that I have an innate preference for the world as we were born into it, for the flora and fauna that are here now. Respecting that means not trying to change it in major ways. Likewise, I believe that human beings are not in need of radical overhaul, improvement, or augmentation. As we are now constituted, we are plenty good enough.

Uh…you sure about that?

Maybe he is for his purposes, but some of us have a desire to live more than a century, as well as severe acne, a chance of being a carrier of colorblindness, nearsightedness, and a family history of being short and overweight.

There’s also the little issue of the human reproductive system being a total piece of shit

Yes, yes it is. Screw Azathoth.

Things promethea literally doesn’t understand: this kind of people. Sometimes I wonder if they have actually ever inhabited a real physical human body and brain. Other times I’m really frightened that all evidence points to “yes” and that means we have cishumanists walking among us, and most significantly voting on whether we are allowed to do things they disapprove of (usually: “no way in hell, but we’ll throw you in there just for daring to attempt it”).

multiheaded1793:

tooth-and-nails:

argumate:

last time this only got 8 notes!

This is actually my biggest criticism of feminism and paradoxically it gets me labeled as an anti feminist.

I’m… a radical feminist deep down (if frequently more in the breach…) but people seem to think that “radical” just means “loud”.

I’m not a radical person, I just support radical ideas.

I should write the specifics into a post of their own, but basically most of the issues with feminism are issues with inconsistently and insufficiently applied feminism; so yes, it needs to go a lot further, including but not limited to, going further recursively.

gothiccharmschool:

Okay, THIS is a brilliant question. 

endecision:

theunitofcaring:

I’m a lazy person.

What I mean by this is that I do not do my homework; I miss deadlines at work because I’d rather play games than do the work; I have projects I’m excited about but instead of starting them I scroll aimlessly through tumblr. I have occasionally failed to turn in important assignments because I didn’t do them because I didn’t feel like it.

My whole life I’ve thought of this like a personality trait. I can’t do things unless they’re interesting because I’m lazy. I tend to get in trouble with jobs and at school because I’m lazy. I hated the personality trait, I wanted to change it, I aspired rather desperately to be a hard-working person and caused myself a great deal of pain trying to imitate one, but I was still thinking of it as some sort of fundamental tendency, some sort of fact about me.

Keep reading

This post reminds me of how, from the inside, sleep paralysis feels exactly like “I’m too lazy to move and I could if I tried harder”. And then I wake up and it’s like, no, I was literally paralyzed.

Yes. So much to both of these. I call the general insight behind it “clockwork people”; instead of magical free-will machines people are essentially deterministic patterns that are only able to respond in certain ways. Thus, it’s useless to assign blame and praise for the fictions of vice and virtue and things are simply about understanding and using the patterns to achieve the desired outcomes. I may still get emotionally-angry at something and have a low-level desire to assign blame but that’s just another manifestation of the same pattern and nothing more. It results in a weird mix of tranquility and frustration at the understanding that one’s options in any situation are limited and even the options one can select from those are limited by the same things, and thus it’s kind-of-like-okay to achieve suboptimal outcomes as a result but simultaneously it’s like “imagine if you could somehow unlock ‘free will’ for yourself; it would be like an IRL godmode or at least noclip and the only thing that’s keeping such superhuman powers out of reach are just the bounds of flesh and bone and the laws governing neurons and it’s so close but so far away”.

Then there’s the unending hunger for agency, the things that bring one closer to this impossible dream and there’s something quite exquisite in the pain of loss when one knows that something that does it is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because it has exponentially increasing downsides or limited use in any specific amount of time and thus the powers are right there, and one can taste the apotheosis every now and then but most of the time it’s just that much out of reach.

TL;DR: “We’re all puppets, but I can see the strings.”

(Then Doctor Manhattan was promptly ruined by something trivially ridiculous because Moore isn’t intelligent enough to consistently and credibly model someone on that level. Intelligence, upwards and outwards of oneself seems like a pretty hard limit, and trying to pass as that from below/beside may seem believable to ones on one’s own, but is transparently cargo-cultish to ones on the other level. In fact, exactly like awareness of sleep paralysis functions. There are no coincidences.)

multiheaded1793:

socialjusticemunchkin:

multiheaded1793:

an-animal-imagined-by-poe:

Can anyone explain to me why all the candidates (on both sides) are so obsessed with preserving American manufacturing jobs? Even if that ship hadn’t sailed decades ago (there’s only so much one can do to reverse globalization and technological progress), factory work is dangerous and soul-crushing and has all kinds of environmental effects. I’m not saying I have a better solution here (except probably service sector growth is going to be key), but I can’t believe this is the thing we want to preserve. 

Increased redistribution is obviously important. And that’s step one. But I don’t think it’s a complete solution - there’s always going to be a significant subset of the population who derive a lot of self-worth from supporting themselves and their families. But the fact that the economy is shifting drastically should be an opportunity to create ways to do that that don’t suck. 

Workerist ideology is a thing. And it ain’t unfounded or completely deluded.

The thing is, manufacturing workers had, in the glory days of the labour movement, won certain (cultural, identity) etc things that most service industries’ workers had never conquered because of their relatively weaker bargaining positions and greater coordination difficulties.

People want dignity. People want pride. People want to feel like they have a position of power, that they are not easily crushed. The real solution would be for the service sector to advance, to become less associated with humiliation and disrespect, of course - but you really, really can’t blame people for the cultural nostalgia. Most everyone who’s been poor and humiliated can understand the allure.

Russia never had independent unions, but heavy manufacturing industry workers also had power, importance and the same kind of class pride here, a sense of social stability and respect that is the opposite of “class mobility” ideology. And it was a good deal for them. Something everyone ought to have.

The dignity of the working class is important. It makes for a stark difference in individual and community well-being. Most liberals and libertarians seemingly cannot understand this. Reactionary/nostalgic socialist idealization of the 20th century is not the answer, but it’s important to retake that ground - for everyone this time, not just the chosen (and white, male etc) labor aristocrat elite.

Right now, nobody really seems to alieve in the dignity of service work. That is a major fucking problem. It’s why Uber doesn’t even bother to inform customers that drivers are deactivated at 4,6. Service work is normalized as a position of utter powerlessness.

The service industry lacks dignity because people perceive their situations accurately. They’re pawns of a system they can’t win in, forced to alienate their labour in exchange for survival on others’ terms, their livelihoods subject to decisions far away by political powers and corporate towers. They have no alternative, no power to bargain with, and their chance to tell bad customers to fuck off is determined by the whims of their employers, many of whom are quite whimsical indeed.

Now if there only was something that could prove to these people, in pure material terms instead of political gestures we all know to be vacuous and filled with the same stuff as the silently despairing servicariat’s souls, that yes, you deserve to exist independent of the surplus value someone else can extract from you; that you are more than an inconveniently embodied and thus materially needy servitude to someone more lucky; that you may negotiate your own terms and genuinely reject work which you do not consent to; that it’s your inalienable birthright as a human being to be entitled to a livelihood.

In other news, what’s basically the finnish grey tribe caucus is publishing a draft proposal which basically summarizes as “We could totally afford to give people an unconditional $1000 a month, look upon our calculations ye mighty and despair!” while the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party is pushing for something like $1200 (the details tend to be more vague but the spirit is the same).

Yes, this is so. And yes, basic income in even one country would be great…

…but I frankly don’t believe in it succeeding now. Seems way, way too good to be true. I don’t know why, but it just breaks disbelief. 

I feel like someone at the top, at least someone invested in the current state of the service sector, is going to catch on that this spells outright social revolution, and do their best to crush it.

That’s what they said about the 8-hour day. That’s what they said about ending the war on drugs. That’s what they said about every substantial reform ever. Is it guaranteed to happen? Hell no. Is it reasonable that it nonetheless might have a decent chance at succeeding somewhere and catching on, given its inherent advantages and the current momentum it’s enjoying? Yes.

multiheaded1793:

an-animal-imagined-by-poe:

Can anyone explain to me why all the candidates (on both sides) are so obsessed with preserving American manufacturing jobs? Even if that ship hadn’t sailed decades ago (there’s only so much one can do to reverse globalization and technological progress), factory work is dangerous and soul-crushing and has all kinds of environmental effects. I’m not saying I have a better solution here (except probably service sector growth is going to be key), but I can’t believe this is the thing we want to preserve. 

Increased redistribution is obviously important. And that’s step one. But I don’t think it’s a complete solution - there’s always going to be a significant subset of the population who derive a lot of self-worth from supporting themselves and their families. But the fact that the economy is shifting drastically should be an opportunity to create ways to do that that don’t suck. 

Workerist ideology is a thing. And it ain’t unfounded or completely deluded.

The thing is, manufacturing workers had, in the glory days of the labour movement, won certain (cultural, identity) etc things that most service industries’ workers had never conquered because of their relatively weaker bargaining positions and greater coordination difficulties.

People want dignity. People want pride. People want to feel like they have a position of power, that they are not easily crushed. The real solution would be for the service sector to advance, to become less associated with humiliation and disrespect, of course - but you really, really can’t blame people for the cultural nostalgia. Most everyone who’s been poor and humiliated can understand the allure.

Russia never had independent unions, but heavy manufacturing industry workers also had power, importance and the same kind of class pride here, a sense of social stability and respect that is the opposite of “class mobility” ideology. And it was a good deal for them. Something everyone ought to have.

The dignity of the working class is important. It makes for a stark difference in individual and community well-being. Most liberals and libertarians seemingly cannot understand this. Reactionary/nostalgic socialist idealization of the 20th century is not the answer, but it’s important to retake that ground - for everyone this time, not just the chosen (and white, male etc) labor aristocrat elite.

Right now, nobody really seems to alieve in the dignity of service work. That is a major fucking problem. It’s why Uber doesn’t even bother to inform customers that drivers are deactivated at 4,6. Service work is normalized as a position of utter powerlessness.

The service industry lacks dignity because people perceive their situations accurately. They’re pawns of a system they can’t win in, forced to alienate their labour in exchange for survival on others’ terms, their livelihoods subject to decisions far away by political powers and corporate towers. They have no alternative, no power to bargain with, and their chance to tell bad customers to fuck off is determined by the whims of their employers, many of whom are quite whimsical indeed.

Now if there only was something that could prove to these people, in pure material terms instead of political gestures we all know to be vacuous and filled with the same stuff as the silently despairing servicariat’s souls, that yes, you deserve to exist independent of the surplus value someone else can extract from you; that you are more than an inconveniently embodied and thus materially needy servitude to someone more lucky; that you may negotiate your own terms and genuinely reject work which you do not consent to; that it’s your inalienable birthright as a human being to be entitled to a livelihood.

In other news, what’s basically the finnish grey tribe caucus is publishing a draft proposal which basically summarizes as “We could totally afford to give people an unconditional $1000 a month, look upon our calculations ye mighty and despair!” while the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party is pushing for something like $1200 (the details tend to be more vague but the spirit is the same).

theunitofcaring:

so there’s this article arguing that feminists ought to focus some energy and effort on interventions in developing countries, as small allocations of resources can do a lot to improve the lives of women (and fight gender inequality) there, and that it’s a shortcoming of current feminist praxis that those problems are neglected in favor of attention-grabbing but much less tractable ones that mostly affect wealthy women.

the first response:

The author does not seem to understand the point of feminism. The reason that “tractable and important problems affecting poor women in poor countries” are not on the feminist agenda, is that they generally affect men to a similar degree. <…> Feminism is not simply about harm suffered by women, it about harm caused by an oppressive relationship of men to women. So feminists don’t protest against earthquakes, which kill thousands of women every year, because there is nothing gender-specific in an earthquake. Pornography, on the other hand, is very strongly gender-specific: most of it depicts women, in a way that feminists consider to be a harm, and it is largely made by men, for the benefit of men

The response is some of the deepest bullshit I’ve seen in quite some time. Even working from the assumption that feminism means reducing inequality instead of harm, material improvement in poor people’s situations tends to be really good at resulting in such effects. Also, #notmyfeminism on the pornography argument; it’s nowhere near that simple, especially when access to porn seems to be pretty good in reducing many harms feminists care about.

Also, Paul sounds like a person who’s male with a quite high probability. A male person is using intersectionality to argue that feminists shouldn’t focus on people with a lot of intersecting oppressions and instead do all kinds of wrong-headed stuff that’s way less effective and focuses on women with fewer intersecting oppressions. That’s about as fractally wrong as one can get and I can’t even

multiheaded1793:

pirozhok-s-kapustoj:

multiheaded1793:

obiternihili:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annegret_Kramp-Karrenbauer

this lady sounds made up to me

I tried to read that article but my eyes keep glazing over every single word. It’s like some kinda illuminati trick or something.

why?

I don’t know! It seems like… not information!

My guess would be that it’s a bullshit filter. It prevents one’s brain from wasting neurons by absorbing completely irrelevant “information” that is found on CVs etc. and apparently this wikipedia article is close enough to those that it activates there as well. Noticing it on myself as well.

multiheaded1793:

nothingismoral:

bluesette:

isaacsapphire:

fierceawakening:

isaacsapphire:

So, does tumblr believe in character and character flaws? Because I get the impression that eg. “laziness” is called “executive dysfunction” and viewed as a disability, or there is always some disability that’s the reason why people don’t put effort into work/social stuff/school/working out/whatever and that it’s horribly unfair and wrong that you get fired or flunk or lose friends if you just sit on your butt and do nothing.

And, I understand that chronic pain and depression are real. I understand that some people have some legit reasons. But… I’ve known people who did game the system or con their loved ones into taking care of them when they were capable of taking care of themselves, just… why do work when you can play on the internet all day?

Most of the time the… malingers? They are from better off families who can afford to support them or hire lawyers to navigate the system. Not that I haven’t watched people quit jobs because it was too much work for no improvement over the dole… that sorta makes sense though.

I mean, OTOH, I don’t see anybody running around and saying it’s abelist to ascribe anger issues or most forms of “abusiveness” to character flaws rather than “poor thing can’t help it” causes.

You see that some with personality disorders and relationships though; people making excuses for abusers and saying it’s abelist and mean to cut them off.

I see this too, and I feel uncomfortable as all hell with it.

Because… From an understanding the person standpoint, it matters whether they’re a jerk or just having executive function trouble.

From an I need those reports standpoint, it doesn’t. From a hey if you want multiple partners and want me to feel cared for I NEED to know I’m someplace on your schedule, even if your schedule is a greatly haphazard thing, it doesn’t.

I feel like Tumblr starts in a good place when it says “failure is human; don’t shatter yourself over it.” But tumblr goes so far about that.

I get the vibe from Tumblr sometimes that if you’re not failing at anything and everything, you’re NT, and that means you’re an insufferable perfection-bot who isn’t actually human.

I find this inspiring, but a lot of people seem to find it horrifyingly harsh and it just makes them cry and be “triggered.” I’m not sure if the problem is me or them or what: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/

Tumblr ends up with a kind of “Oreo” like sense of “success is betrayal of the community” thing. Its not a bad thing to not struggle to feed yourself and clean up after ffs.

I don’t know, as someone who used to be very “lazy” and is now the polar opposite of that (I regularly get people asking me how I find the energy to work as much as I do), I have a lot of sympathy for people who can’t manage it. Tumblr attributes it to brain problems, but I’d frame it more in terms of bad life circumstances and opportunities. 

I don’t buy into the idea of character flaws on a large scale - when you have a big group of people who all have the same problem, there’s something systemic going on. Notice that the vast majority of these people are in university. For me, working on a liberal arts degree with no clear job or life path at the end made me completely give up. I saw it in my classmates too.

I think it’s rare for people to want to do nothing all of the time. There are probably some people who genuinely enjoy it, but for the vast majority of people, doing nothing causes depression. Once you start failing on the basics of running your life, it’s hard to claw your way back. You start finding ways to justify it - like calling it executive dysfunction

I don’t buy into Tumblr’s approach of “it’s your brain!!” since I think that leads people to avoid looking at their life on a material level and how it isn’t working. Calling it a disability encourages you to feel powerless to change it. But I also don’t think the bootstraps method works. You can only work really hard when you’re in a place where you have something worth working at.

Calling it a disability encourages you to feel powerless to change it. 

I don’t know, calling it a disability can get you to finally stop feeling powerless to chance your “choices” (that somehow magically keep being some of the worst, most unpleasant choices for you despite presumably being able to change them at any point). The realization that there is a material reason you keep doing the same destructive thing over and over, as opposed to being the result of “free will” that you have long been seeing doesn’t work as advertised, can prompt you to look for external ways of changing your behavior instead of waiting for your Inner Spirit to shine through. But what’s more, such a realization can get you to stop blaming yourself and accepting that you deserve the pain you’re enduring right now due to being a consequence of your choices. That is a HUGE load off your shoulders that may have weighed you down far more than helped you act. 

“It’s your brain”/”you are disabled” can turn an incomprehensible phenomenon seemingly both your fault and out of your control into a physiological phenomenon subject to clear laws.

You can only work really hard when you’re in a place where you have something worth working at.

“It’s your brain”/”you are disabled” can turn an incomprehensible phenomenon seemingly both your fault and out of your control into a physiological phenomenon subject to clear laws.

^ yes to both of this

^ seconding just because those two are really important and obscenely relevant. I’ve seen the change from “no long-term prospects” to “immediately actionable plans to a credibly better future” first-hand and it’s ridiculously huge; almost enough to make one seem like a completely different person.

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

lizardywizard:

I think I’ve managed to pin down my particular anxiety with eye contact to “I don’t know what looks natural, so if I try to make eye contact it’ll only look worse/creepier than avoiding it completely”.

Last night it came upon me that I shouldn’t just operate on this theory without checking if it’s true. So, people who actually do the eye contact thing/notice faces: which reads as worse to you, awkward eye contact (which might include staring for too long), or no eye contact at all?

I have the exact same problem. Anyone want to help us out?

From someone who notices faces:  awkward.  definitely awkward.  If you’re really good at face watching, try to time your glances away so they match the other person’s saccades, b/c then eye contact seems seamless and normal.

Depends on the context, I would say. My default assumption with people I interact with might operate so that awkward signals “I’m trying to pass as neurotypical because it’s instrumental for my goals, and I haven’t perfected it YGM” while avoidance signals “I’m uncomfortable with the strange customs of this foreign species, please be aware of it and accommodate”.

Avoidance makes one less threatening if one has that kind of a problem (at least for me; my limbic system prefers people who are big and have testosterone-dominant endocrine systems to err on the side of avoidance and that’s blatantly unfair but until I get bodymods to equalize physical disparities my lizard brain is going to keep being a lizard brain) but otherwise I’d probably recommend that people favor awkward with people who don’t understand; especially if one has any confidence in their ability to learn the rules of natural-seeming eye contact consciously and thus become better at it over time.

Obviously, individual situation matters; if awkward is too stressful it would be perfectly rational to ration it only for the most important situations.

Then again, anything I say about social interaction should be taken with a 200-gram sodium chloride monocrystal because edge cases etc.

ozymandias271:

ilzolende:

http://ilzolende.neocities.org/mezzolexia.html

Please support this fine and entirely real organization.

original post

I am unironically in support of this organization

please somebody cure mesolexia so everyone will STOP BEING SO FRUSTRATINGLY SLOW

Yes! The mesolexia activists may say it’s just a normal variance in human abilities but they’re ignoring those of us who desperately do want a cure for ourselves (tbh not sure if fully mesolexic myself but definitely on the spectrum). Remember, they are the privileged ones who don’t suffer from their mesability and generalize it upon everyone, impairing our chances at getting our individual needs and desires met!

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

Mum: Finding hair-dresser that can do braids shouldn’t have to be hard work … send out plea on yr blog and see what yr fan-dom can find ( :

Me: My fandom which has, as far as I can tell, 0 black people?

Me: (I swear this was unintentional)

Mum: yes, but this would be a treasure hunt … who has black friends?  or who can acquire black friends fast enough to help Alison with her braids? ( :

Mum: or at the very least acquire information about black people … …

Mum: You’d be helping them broaden their cultural horizons … .

Me: I am putting this conversation on Tumblr.

Mum: oh yr wicked!

Me: Winner gets to add me to their (probably tiny, but growing!) pool of black friends 

Hey, I kind of know (we’re working in the same conspiracy together, never met her IRL though because I’m an internet ghost to a lot of people) like one black person who I think has the relevant kind of hair (and who probably knows where to find someone who can braid… so the upper bound for the distance within a suitable black friend-of-a-friend can be found is less than 9000km! Not very helpful but intersectional feminism is actually really useful sometimes. (now that I think of it I could like seriously try to leverage some connections to find someone who’s actually in the right hemisphere at least…)

@sinesalvatorem: I got a personal recommendation from someone suggesting that this place is not only actually in the right hemisphere and even the right region but also “the owners of the salon are two Eritrean women who are renowned in the area for braiding (esp Sesen)”. Does this count as winning?

sonatagreen:

For those of us who identify as villains, there are two kinds of stories, which I might call Luna stories and Lilith stories.

Luna stories are about the hero realizing that she’s in the wrong. Ozy talks about the ethical principle that you might be the baddies[1]. A Luna story is about self-doubt, and re-examining one’s assumptions, and redemption.

In a Luna story, something initially seems good, and then turns out to be evil.

Lilith stories are about the hero realizing that others are in the wrong. She’s taught a certain system of morality, either by a well-meaning society or by devious abusers, and gradually comes to see through it and recognize its flaws. She casts off what she has been taught about good and evil, and fashions for herself a truer and stronger morality in its place. She makes choices that result in her being called a villain, but we can see that she is a hero in truth.

In a Lilith story, something initially seems evil, and then turns out to be good.

Both of these stories are necessary.

The distinction can sometimes be blurry. But we always must have both.

1. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/the-enemy-control-ray/

fireandwonder:

You know what I want to see more of in sci fi? Aliens who deviate from their species’ “norm.”

Like, queer aliens, but queer in alien terms; like, aliens whose typical family unit is a trio comprised of three different gendersexes, but sometimes aliens will form trios that only have two different gendersexes, and they still produce viable offspring, but only of the two parent gendersexes, and that carries a social stigma because each gendersex is supposed to play a separate role in the family unit. 

Aliens for whom it is the norm to change gendersex upon reaching a certain age, but sometimes (possibly due to a genetic anomaly) it doesn’t happen, so those aliens either a) continue to present as a juvenile gender despite being a stage 2 adult, b) present as a stage 2 adult despite their physical characteristics, or c) undergo medical procedures to change their body artificially, though the technology in that area is still imperfect.

Or disabled aliens who have prosthetic tails/fins/wings/tentacles/etc. Aquatic aliens who can’t hold their breath for an accepted amount of time and so have to carry around atmosphere tanks. Aliens with degenerative conditions that are slowly losing their infrared vision. Aliens who lack their species trademark color-changing camouflage skin. Aliens who are allergic to common foods on their own planets and are frustrated that interplanetary restaurants don’t take that into account when listing which menu items are “safe” for which species.

Neurodivergent aliens who are not connected to the hivemind, who do their best to blend in and guess what they are supposed to be doing, but who are cast out when they are discovered, only to have their numbers build up enough that they are able to build a society on their own using communication aids such as verbal or manual language. 

Aliens who are just different in small ways, like generally all three eyes are different colors, except that rare genetic quirks sometimes cause two or even all three to be the same color. Aliens born with five fingers instead of four. Aliens who are more coordinated with their prehensile toes than with their hands, which is inconvenient when most products are designed to be used with hands, but they manage. Aliens born with vestigial wings instead of just residual bone nubs. Aliens born without horns or tusks or spines.

and okay, so I’m basically arguing for more diverse representation of aliens, but like, if our default mode of thinking is to assume that all members of a species are a certain way, then what does that say about how we view our own species? that only ones who follow certain norms qualify as “human”?

or whatever maybe i just think that thinking about this sort of stuff is cool.

tsutsifrutsi:

(Required reading: Siderea on Class)

It’s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern “bay-area rationalist techno-libertarian” culture (i.e. Scott Alexander’s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie “entrepreneurial” class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:

• seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics—in est, in terms of strategy;
• breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
• the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
• thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. “the only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption”, or “the only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD”;
• the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around—an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
• an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and “fixed” transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a “supersoldier.” (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
• the ideal of Heinlein’s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps—not quite a Nietzschean übermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the “competent man” are mostly irrelevant—it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
• the drawing of a sharp division between “officer-quality” and “enlisted-quality” people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the “competent man”, and then—having gained the knowledge to do so—the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
• for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do “amateur” work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the “rich SV engineer who wants to automate something” crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being “told how to do their job” by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
• the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn’t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently “bad” that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their “proper” class, the one that fits them—but sees the “officer-quality” people who are in some other class as being in the “wrong” class, and assumes they will feel much better when “rescued” by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel “rescued” when they enter a STEM program in university.)

Remember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.

If you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn’t realize you were in.

Sounds very pattern-matchable and The One Which Watches The Watchers is demanding controls to calibrate for confirmation bias: my prior is for the “STEM class” to be pattern-matchable to quite a lot of the classical classes in exactly the same way. Heck, I’m even pattern-matching it into the land-owning aristocrats of pre-industrial times.

slatestarscratchpad:

Okay, we’re having too many collisions here, so here’s the updated Official Rationalist Tumblr Argument Schedule. Please remember to stick to the schedule unless you’ve applied for special dispensation.

January: Is MIRI Effective?

February: Are We Bad People For Tolerating @severnayazemlya ?

March: Intelligence Explosion

April: Torture Vs. Dust Specks

May: Has Social Justice Gone Too Far? Or Possibly Not Far Enough?

June: Is IQ Real?

July: Utilitarianism-Related Grab Bag

August: Conservatives: Terrible People, Or Terrible People But We Shouldn’t Say So Explicitly And Should Pretend To Like Them?

September: Quantum Physics

October: Is Less Wrong A Cult?

November: N  E  O  T  E  N  Y

December: IDK, Probably Moldbug Or Something

macaroon22:

alexander hamilton: what are some things you want more people to know about you?
aaron burr, sir: when was the last time you met someone who changed your life?
my shot: talk about something you’re determined to accomplish before you die.
the story of tonight: talk about some of the best times you’ve had with friends.
the schuyler sisters: do you have any siblings? if so, what are they like?
farmer refuted: do you ever send letters in the mail?
you’ll be back: when was the last time you were dumped?
right hand man: who do you look up to most?
a winter’s ball: what was the last party you went to like?
helpless: when was the last time you had a crush that really hit you hard?
satisfied: what has been the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make?
the story of tonight reprise: do you have any friends who are married?
wait for it: what’s something you’re really longing for?
stay alive: have you ever had any near-death experiences?
ten duel commandments: have you ever been in a physical fight with anyone?
meet me inside: talk about a time you got in big trouble with an authority figure
that would be enough: do you prefer an eventful or a peaceful life?
guns and ships: who is your greatest partner in crime?
history has its eyes on you: talk about the best teacher you’ve ever had
yorktown: talk about a time you struggled but came out on top
what comes next?: are you anxious about the future?
dear theodosia: what’s one nice thing you wish you could say to someone right now?
non-stop: talk about something you’re talented at, or even just something you can do very quickly and efficiently
what’d i miss: do you suffer from fomo (fear of missing out)?
cabinet battle #1: do you enjoy debating or arguing with people?
take a break: if you could run anywhere for a getaway, where would you go and who would you take with you?
say no to this: what’s your biggest guilty pleasure?
the room where it happens: talk about a group you would love to be a part of, whether it’s an official group or a group of people
schuyler defeated: how do you feel about changing yourself and your image in order to succeed?
cabinet battle #2: are you a person that helps yourself, or others first?
washington on your side: who is the most important or influential person you’ve ever been friends with?
one last time: do you have a hard time quitting things or saying goodbye?
i know him: do you enjoy talking smack?
the adams administration: talk about a time you’ve clashed with authority
we know: do you enjoy gossip?
hurricane: what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever managed to make it through in life?
the reynolds pamphlet: do you prefer keeping secrets, or being an open book?
burn: talk about a time you’ve felt betrayed
blow us all away: can you hold yourself back when you hear people speaking badly about someone you like/love?
stay alive reprise: have you ever lost anyone?
it’s quiet uptown: where do you like to go to think or brood?
the election of 1800: do you think it’s important to vote?
your obedient servant: how do you feel about passive-aggression?
best of wives and best of women: do you prefer sleeping alone or with someone else?
the world was wide enough: talk about a time you had to make a decision and ultimately made the wrong one
who lives, who dies, who tells your story: how do you want to be remembered when you’re gone?

I suspect ask memes might be a good way to get into the knowing-people-a-bit-better thing, something that’s definitely relevant to my interests.

nostalgebraist:

multiheaded1793:

earthboundricochet:

osberend:

obiternihili:

ozymandias271:

a lot of SJ is weirdly soft on privileged people. like “oh, cis people have to do a continual process of unlearning transphobia overcoming the social conditioning of an entire society! it is so difficult!” no, actually, not being a transphobe is not that hard, it’s just that a lot of cis people don’t do it

i think this is the first time i’ve seen you criticise sj for not being stereotypical sj enough

MOAR STALINZ PLZ!

The hardest thing about not being a transphobe is that I am a trans person myself and still am 100% confused about why certain things/people are being called transphobic.

If even I, a Smol Oppressed Tran, am confused about What Makes Something Transphobic in a fair number of cases, how exactly is Clueless Average CisJoe supposed to tell?

I’m 100% this too

And moreover I have some beliefs/ideas that help describe my trans experience and the experience of some of the people I know, but are VERY LOUDLY AND AGGRESSIVELY denounced as “gross” and “transphobic” by a vast, representative swathe of the internet ~trans community~.

Fuck that.

The way I personally conceive of these things, the OP and the last two reblogs are not necessarily opposed?

Like, I think there is this tension between versions of SJ that tell privileged people to “just listen to marginalized people” and versions that tell them “unlearn your privileges, educate yourself, level up in non-oppressiveness”

I favor the former versions, because they can deal gracefully with the fact that marginalized people don’t actually agree about everything, and because the latter often turns into this never-ending Mundum-like injunction to become more and more “aware,” which leads privileged people to develop very specific beliefs about these issues and connect these beliefs to their self-worth (”I understand these complexities, so I’m possibly not a piece of shit”), and then get angry if and when these models don’t fit reality (”if your experience doesn’t fit my headcanon, then maybe I am a piece of shit”)

I’m not trying to say the problems mentioned by the last two posters are all the fault of cis people – not that I would know – but I do think the spread of these very complex, restrictive, difficult-to-understand versions of concepts is related to some people’s need for an ever-ascending scale of ways to be more “aware.”

deusvulture:

Beyond the dreams of Daedalus, beneath a darkling sky
The god of Carthage weeps to think that man was made to die
For clay can pump the irons of a torment yet unnamed
But fate cannot enslave the heart that dust and ash have claimed

So, save the soul of Sysiphus, as Sartre dared not to wish
And let the mettle of mankind be manifest in this
Unleash the deathless power of the children of the stars—
But do not think the only god that wills this thing is ours

ilzolende:

theungrumpablegrinch:

drethelin:

academicianzex:

It seems kinda odd to me that I haven’t heard anything about world federalism or unification from rationalists.  Given the concern about solving coordination problems and preventing existential risk it seems like a perfect fit.  The thing that makes me most pessimistic about solving X-risk problems is our history of dealing with near X-risk; we basically blundered through the cold war and survived out of luck, and climate change efforts are irrevocably hampered by international coordination efforts.  Going forward, the lack of an international body with regulatory powers makes AI X-risk much more scary to me.  It’s going to be a difficult enough problem to solve without China or the US creating an AI without taking the proper safety precautions because they’re in a race with each other, or with some seasteading genius cracking the code.

I guess it’s just not popular because the solution seems insoluble?  I certainly used to think about it a lot in my more idealistic younger days.  AI X-risk you can create MIRI, and if you’re good enough plausibly you make a difference.  You can even lobby national governments for space settlement, or whatever.  But world federalism is all or nothing, and much more likely to be nothing because you’re weird anyway.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m way out on the far end of rationalists into politics.  Still, I think it’s odd that I’ve never even heard the concept here in rationalist-land.

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”

Problem is intractable, likely to corrupt those who work on it, does not assure a good outcome, requires incredible resource investment if a tractable approach is found.

And the optics are horrible.

I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.

@sinesalvatorem @sdhs-rationalist?

[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as well]

World federalism is such an ugly idea. Its proponents strike me as exactly the kind of naive utopians deathspiraling around democracy I want to stay as far away from as possible, and its actual realization would be way more likely to be just a scaled-up version of the EU and the US federal government, possibly doing some useful coordination stuff while simultaneously enabling absolutely horrible conformity pressures with its political power, subject to democratic distortion of incentives.

I don’t think a world federation would be in any way able to limit itself to x-risks (and in fact x-risks would probably be on the agenda only way after all the bullshit), and instead would act as some kind of a mostly unfriendly singleton. Just looking at the things we have now makes me scream in horror internally at the thought of having more of the same, except there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We have drug laws, we have corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies, we have regulatory capture, we have morally backwards and intellectually bankrupt groups looting and bossing around people who could do way better than that if they were allowed to, and worst of all there’s no simple answer to all of that.

It’s obvious that the Bay Area is horribly dragged down by being subject to a government Alabama has any influence in and the excesses of each (one tending positive, another negative) are dramatically tempered by the influence of the other. The scary part is that it’s not obvious that having them go their separate ways would be a net positive because a lot of innocent people live in Alabama and having the federal government limit the abyssal depths their polity could otherwise plunge into might actually be worth the way it restricts the heights other places could reach. Everywhere I look it’s the same story; the enlightened areas altruistically trying to drag the backwards ones kicking and screaming into at least yesterday if not the proper present, even if their own situation suffers. The Obviously Correct way to do things would be to let the Bay Area influence Alabama, but not vice versa, and letting Iceland boss around Poland without the latter having a say in the former’s affairs but there’s just no way to ever make that happen.

In the absence of magical one-way unfairness of exactly the right kind all the remaining options are horrible; naive pro-secessionism sounds alluring until one remembers that the US literally fought a war within itself to stop one part of it from doing nasty and nonconsensual things to some of its population and is still wrangling with versions of those exact same issues to this day (and other very similar ones), but the only viable solution allows that one part to try to do nasty and nonconsensual things to the other parts’ population as well, and the world is just not ready (if it ever will be) for the level of individual liberation that would allow such horrors to be eradicated with a consistent meta-level rule without opening the door to different horrors.

And horrors there would be. I don’t believe for a second that actually existing world federalism could end up as the one type I just might find bearable (a global minarchy that’s basically x-risk management along with the UN’s most fundamental human rights treaties enforced with actual muscle behind them, and stopping people who try to start wars, and erring on the side of caution on these because even the most fundamental human rights treaties are prone to having glaring flaws, and then using that as an excuse to erode nation-state sovereignty enabling individual liberation) but instead there’s talk of all sorts of scary things. There’s world democracy, democracy for this, democracy for that, democracy for everything, economic democracy etc. which is basically the political equivalent of seeing a big and really impressive spaceship having some really important part of it held together with duct tape because nobody found anything better for the job, and thinking “you know what would make this spaceship even better? making it totally out of duct tape!”.

Democracy is to politics what duct tape is to engineering; something that’s occasionally really useful for patching things over with but never ever a terminal value and anyone who tells you otherwise should never be responsible for designing or maintaining anything important. Unfortunately, these world federalists seem to be exactly that kind of people. I suspect it’s some kind of a psychological thing. A certain kind of person who’s fundamentally agreeable to the majority might easily fall prey to the idea that the things that are wrong in the world are all the result of a minority imposing its will on the majority, but I’m minoritarian enough to recognize that the majority is actually really fucking scary and hostile and would destroy me the instant it had the opportunity to do so and is in fact constantly trying to make it happen even right now, and giving it any more power to do so is the exact last thing I want.

In fact, I’m pretty sure something like that is behind my desire to get really rich not-just-for-EA-purposes; in the unfair world we have now I could at least buy myself some degree of freedom, impunity and existential security when I’m definitely not guaranteed such things anywhere near to the same degree majority-agreeable people are, and anything that tries to take that opportunity away or even diminish it a little bit must be opposed at all costs unless it seriously gives me those things some other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a lot of strongly libertarian people were fundamentally weird and at least partially driven by a fear of the mob, and thus anyone who seriously wants to address economic inequality should address that thing as well, instead of just spouting the standard socialdemocratic jantelaw rhetoric that comes off as “we’re coming for not just your money but your lives and fundamental aspects of your identities as well”.

In the absence of such credible guarantees, a world federation would probably start accumulating unnecessary powers in exact the same ways national governments have done, and do all kinds of evil stuff like banning GMOs altogether, regulating sex work, crabbucketing economies, creating more market distortions for crony capitalists to capture and enforcing all kinds of oppressive shared sensibilities of dominant groups. It’s bad enough when the Swedish model of suppressing sex and drugs can be lobbied for internationally, and it would be even worse if they could just vote for it and enforce it everywhere. The vast majority of the global population is not WEIRD bonobo rationalists and even the present degree of subjecting the latter to the rule of the former is unbearable. At least now it’s possible (if rich and resourceful enough) to move somewhere else if the rule of one polity becomes too overbearing, but unifying a strong global government would make it all too likely to turn it into an unescapable situation.

This not the peace you had in mind? The one you waited for?
There is no land beyond this law, there is no place to go

(But it’s not like the standard opponents of world federalism are any better, national sovereignty is just as ugly and disgusting and oppressive with the way it always seems to repeat the same pattern of forcing extremely different cultures under the control of each other; prosperous cosmopolitan urban enlightened libertines really shouldn’t have to share polity with reactionary rural xenophobic conservatives who mostly mooch off the previous ones’ money while hypocritically espousing economic rightism themselves, but nation-states love to put boundaries in silly locations. It would be way better for places like Stockholm and Amsterdam to be together and separated from their spatially neighboring but culturally worlds-apart regions; nations are far less of a natural joint in reality than whatever-it-is that’s underlying the difference that seems to be popping up everywhere in extremely replicable ways. And the Bay Area should be independent even from the ‘better-than-most-but-still-not-the-bay-area’ places just to make sure its special nature stays as untarnished and incorruptible as possible.)

ilzolende:

another-normal-anomaly:

ilzolende:

nonternary:

Proponents of evidence-based medicine claim that some things are better than other things. You know who else claimed that some things are better than other things?

Which Incredibly Tortured Definition of Fascism Describes You? Take This Quiz to Find Out!

Very disappointed that your post doesn’t link to a quiz. B+, good shitpost but not excellent.

I don’t know how to write non-static websites yet, sorry. Also, I don’t actually know enough well-defined terrible definitions of fascism.

This sounds like something to work on. I can totally see how I’d code the innards of the quiz (in fact I kind of want to do it Just Because, for programming exercise) but not how to turn it into a website (…yet! growth mindset!).

Damn, I could totally hack some codecademy Ruby lesson into this quiz instead. Just need to figure out the terrible definitions and the questions.