Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
It cannot be a woman doing everything up to a point, with a suddenly you went to far thing at the end.
Why not? I mean, you may feel "like it’s absolutely on the woman if she doesn’t want sex to make it absolutely perfectly clear with no contradictory signals," but it looks like quite a lot of our society disagrees. (I have a somewhat relevant story about overhearing one side of a cellphone conversation waiting in line at the welfare office which illustrated cultural differences on this topic between modern Western norms and Native Alaskan ones, as well as the human tendency to interpret people's motives through our own cultural lenses.) You say they cannot, and yet many clearly are. There's no requirement for them to follow your "personal rule." If they decide instead that consent can be withdrawn at absolutely any time, for any reason (or none at all), no matter what previous signals, ambiguous or not, she has previously given, then why can't they just enforce such a rule?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
Letting then get away with silencing dissent simply means more and bolder suppression of dissent.
I have really come to dislike this particular framing/phrasing. If someone were to, for example, talk about how the ordinary people of North Korea "let the Kims get away with oppressing them," I imagine most people would see the problem with that. To say that Alice is "letting Bob get away with X" implies that Alice has a meaningful ability to stop Bob from doing X. But that is not always so, and is, IMO, the sort of thing that needs established first. Otherwise, it results in shifting some of the blame for a thing onto those powerless to do anything about it.
So when you talk about "[l]etting the[m] get away with silencing dissent," just who is it that you think has the power to stop "them," but isn't exercising it?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
You want Andrew Tate to go away, give us someone who can say what he says without the boorish personality and background to with it.
Except why would they do that, when the entire point of "the backlash" is to ensure that nobody can "say what he says."? You spoke above about how "young men are stuck between a Scylla and Charybdis when navigating dating culture." Well, if the movers and shakers of our culture want to remove anyone who would teach how to navigate that gap even as they expand the "landmines," and perhaps even eliminate said gap entirely. If they want to make our society one in which young men face a stark binary choice between "completely passive and let women make all the moves" and likely celibacy, and potentially-criminal "sex pest," what's to stop them (in the short term, at least)?
I guess this is just another example of my go to response whenever someone makes a "they can't do that" sort of argument, which is "what can you do about it?"
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
as soon as supply chains recover
Depends on how long that takes. Depending on how bad our infrastructure really is, and the nature of the overall conflict beyond just the nukes themselves, I really do think we could be set so far back that recovery might take centuries — or, if some people are right about depletion of "low-hanging fruit" resources and inability to repeat the Industrial Revolution — might become impossible altogether.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
and simply don't care to listen to them.
Well, why should they listen to the opinions of a mass of inferior peasants, if they "really believe" those opinions are driven by stupidity and racism? If you have power, why not enforce the objectively correct and moral position over the objections of the ignorant and the wicked?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
Can't say I've particularly noticed a trend like this in my area — if anything, we've had restaurants and such closing down in my neighborhood over the past few years, and reduced diversity of products in stores.
But then again, Alaska is very much a special case, being as we're pretty much entirely dependent on outside shipping, and still having supply-chain issues.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
that has been opposed on the West
I think you meant "imposed" here.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming.
And if no such things exist to be found?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
it doesn't help get people on board.
…
you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.
So what? So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses. You don't need to "convince" or "convert" the peasant masses, just find ways to punish them for being ignorant bigots and voting wrong until enough of them eventually vote your way — assuming that, as it seems to be in this case, that you can't just impose your goals through the permanent bureaucracy, courts, academic consensus, or other such powerful institutions more insulated from democratic feedback.
"Democracy" is, and always has been, more of a sham than a reality. Society is always ruled by a small elite, and that elite always ends up getting their way, and the masses are pretty much always just powerless peasants who can do nothing but submit. Why should lords, with their superior breeding and wisdom, bother to listen to the ignorant opinions of dirty, stupid peasants, as opposed to just whipping the low-born curs into compliance?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
That combination pretty much excludes most people who don’t have families that can spend tens of thousands of dollars to bankroll a child chasing that dream.
Or, alternately, you can have families that are already in the business — note how many Hollywood types are related (Angelina Jolie is Jon Voight's daughter, George Clooney and Miguel Ferrer were first cousins, and then there's the Coppola and Barrymore families). So add competition with those "born into it" as another barrier for those trying to "break in."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
No, I don't think institutions are "perfectly stable" — practically the opposite — but that they are indeed "practically invincible" against takeover by human forces. There aren't "literally 0 remaining possibilities," there's one and only one inevitable possibility — that they eventually collapse utterly. But there's a lot of ruin in a nation, the market can remain irrational…, et cetera, et cetera, so I expect them to keep the plates spinning for at least a generation or two. It's why many of the people in circles on the right I interact with have given up on any politics other than "Benedict Option" style 'have a bunch of kids and pass on as much of our values and knowledge to them as we can, in hopes that they'll do the same, and their kids the same, until, eventually after the collapse has finished and the depths of the new dark age are here, our descendants are better prepared for the task of rebuilding.
Except that I expect the regime to increasingly resemble a star entering it's red giant days, expanding and engulfing more and more around it as it dies, consuming more and more civilizational "seed corn" to prop itself up. Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again. That there's nothing in the future to look forward to, only irreversible decline into a Dark Age that only ends with humanity's eventual extinction.
(Of course, I've encountered some people on the far-right who think this is a great outcome, because 1500s technology and economies cannot support much Progressivism, and therefore giving up for all time things like electricity, running water, medicine that works, having less than 90% of your population engaged in back-breaking farm labor, etc. is a small price to pay to "own the libs" forever, but I don't agree with them.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
I don't own a smartphone, only an old LG flip-phone, on a limited, subsidized "Obamaphone" plan.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.
And then another generation or so after that, the old "conservatives" will be valiantly-but-futilely trying to conserve the outcomes of that successful Yes against the next big move leftward. Cthulhu may swim slowly…
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
Not just conservatives, the entire Right, and, for that matter, probably most of the non-Progressive left. And not just "generally outclassed," but so totally, utterly outclassed that we've already been defeated totally. There is no fighting back, there is no meaningfully resisting, there is only inevitable doom.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
7mo ago
If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties
I remember once watching a rerun of an episode of Dragnet — which ran back in the 50s — with a couple of proto-hippy California college students calling Joe Friday a "fascist pig."
A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.
Or how many notables among their remaining opposition can be subjected to sufficient negative consequences as to make others among the opposition switch sides out of fear of the same — "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey" and such.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Does it? The hypocritical (and nihilistic) interpretation, "I'm suffering and risking my life recklessly because I don't care about it, but I'd really like to find a partner who does care about me", seems like the generous one here. "Love someone who doesn't love himself" can be a bigger ask than "love someone fugly or" etc, but it's at least still a reasonable thing that can happen. Love is magic.
Is it not hypocritical to ask someone else to voluntarily subject herself to serious suffering, if you are not willing to voluntarily subject yourself to comparable suffering in turn?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity.
Sure you can, if your intellectual basis is "oppressor-oppressed dynamics." Just argue that in the Holocaust, Germany was the oppressor and Jews the oppressed, but here, Jews are the oppressor and Palestinians the oppressed; that the relative position is the moral factor. That the point of comparison for "calling for the death of Jews" now isn't "calling for the death of Jews" then, but "calling for the death of Nazis" then, because both are calling for violence against "the oppressor" in the name of defending "the oppressed." (I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it.")
I don't agree with this view and its "more oppressed than thou" hierarchy, but at can, at least sometimes, be a consistent one.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
While this might be a coherent world view, it is not a stable one.
If followed strictly, it would lead to the oppressed classes rising up and becoming the new rulers in a constant cycle of upheaval. (Mao came closest to stating this as an explicit goal).
Interestingly, I encountered a point somewhat like this in a podcast discussion of the current AI debates, arguing that of the major competing views today, the oppressors-and-oppressed DEI worldview is the one that most calls for automation. Specifically, that providing properly equitable compensation for inequities that doesn't overcompensate and produce these cycles and metaphorical pendulum-swings; and which doesn't oversimplify, but instead is sufficiently granular and "intersectional," requires vastly superhuman computational ability and a lack of human partiality and self-interest that would be best met by something like AGI. That perhaps the most stable end-goal for this system is The Computer going "today, this person suffered three microaggressions of severity X, and will receive three micro-transfers of size Y in equitable compensation" across all individuals in society, continuously. Fully Automated DEI Communism.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
I don't know what on earth makes you think you are disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship now.
…
I cannot even fathom how you arrived at the conclusion that the desire to be in a romantic relationship is only legitimate conditional on having achieved XYZ, and is otherwise disgusting or hypocritical.
…
please tell me, in plain language, why you think the fact that you want to be in a romantic relationship makes you a disgusting hypocrite.
I believe Skookum does so here:
Like, the basic premise of the Hock cashes out to "if you're an unattractive person/dude, whether it's because fugly or autistic or physically disabled or whatever, your partners are probably gonna find you disgusting. So you're asking for an awful lot there from your partner, arguably for no good goddamn reason. You kind of suck and are hypocritical if you're not down to freely choose to suffer like a motherfucker for no good reason - you're asking the same of your partner."
TVTropes has multiple tropes ("And Now You Must Marry Me," "I Have You Now, My Pretty" "Scarpia Ultimatum, etc." full of examples across centuries of stories about the suffering of women submitting to the attentions of a man to whom she's not attracted — or even just under the threat of such. How is it not at least somewhat hypocritical, how does it not speak of entitlement, to expect a woman to voluntarily submit to such misery, and not be willing to voluntarily submit oneself to a comparable level of suffering? If not "the Hock," what can match the ordeal a woman undergoes, being in a romantic relationship with someone she finds repellent?
unlike you, who's so uniquely loathsome and contemptible that he ought to be euthanized unless he can Prove his Worth by etc.. To which all I can say is - bullshit.
What about that is bullshit, and what is your evidentiary basis for saying so?
As somewhat similar, from back in 2017 on SSC:
Kevin C. says:
…
I recall once reading, if not here then somewhere in the “rationalsphere”, someone, as an idle proposal, putting forth that with regards to this dynamic, one might consider comparison to domesticated livestock, and how we handle those males who aren’t in the minority that will be doing the breeding. That rather than leave large numbers of individuals tormented by a drive they cannot fulfill, we, as a mercy, take steps to remove or ameleorate the drive.
…
vV_Vv says:
…
It’s not too hard to imagine a not-so-distant future where any boy who isn’t a hyper-masculine Chad from a young age will be pushed, possibly with the help of hormones and surgical scalpels, to live his life as some sort of “queer” identity which does not involve having sex with women. And if the statistics are to be believed, we know that many of these men will eventually end up “taking the exit” anyway.
And further on the livestock analogy, when it comes to chickens — as opposed to cattle, sheep, etc. — the solution is indeed the culling of most male chicks.
So why not at least offer some sort of analogous "relief" for those human males facing a similar life of suffering under such unmet drives? Why not respect the self-determination of individuals to address such an irremediable condition by providing them assistance in attaining a dignified exit from an undignified existence?
And on what grounds do you say that the likes of Skookum aren't "ought to be euthanized"?
I'd point out that in most "primitive" cultures, girls become women — full adult members of the community — automatically at menarche, while boys have to "earn" their manhood through rites of initiation — difficult, usually painful rites. And it was indeed possible to fail said initiations.
I recall once reading a thread on Tumblr talking about how the prevalence of "third genders" wasn't nearly the support for modern transgender and nonbinary identities that some like to argue it is, by going into depth on the Polynesian example, laying out the details and pointing out that the closest modern counterpart isn't "trans-woman" or "non-binary," but a formalized, institutionalized version of "prison bitch." And that often, many who ended up in such roles were indeed those boys who failed to "become men" — that these societies did indeed have a "gender binary," just that instead of "man" and "woman," it's "man" and "non-man," with some biological males falling into the latter category by failure to earn membership in the former.
Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are precious, men are expendable. Women attain full personhood, membership in the tribe, the concern of others, automatically. Males have to earn the privilege of being a person, through their deeds and contribution to the tribe, to women and children. We must earn the care and compassion of society — and those who fail don't matter; those who fail are expendable, disposable. So, in times of modern plenty, and when women have more options outside of marriage and "settling," why not dispose of at least the worst of disposable males, or at least assist them in disposing of themselves?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit.
Just an anecdotal aside, but my mom's handwriting has always been pretty terrible (and now that she's in her 60s, it's approaching illegibility).
Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?
That's been my, admittedly limited, experience. For that matter, I think it was when I reached 5th grade (1992-1993) that they stopped teaching us handwriting in school and had us start submitting all reports (and generally anything not a "fill-in-the-blank" worksheet) as typed up on computer and printed out. With modern electronic communications, do they even do the "print out a physical copy on paper" step anymore?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
This relates to something I've seen referred to as "generational loss of hypocrisy." The first "generation" who put out some bit of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric may not really believe it, nor live by it. They might quietly carve out unprincipled exceptions for themselves in practice, or acknowledge the performativity of it all in private among themselves.
But if, when "in public," they keep preaching the message consistently, for long enough, then at least some of the next "generation" who absorb it will end up taking it seriously.
There's someone I've interacted with a bit online who, since at least a few years ago, repeatedly raised the issue of the extreme nature and implications of much of academic "decolonization" discourse, especially the bits about being "unconcerned with settler futurity." The common rejoinder to these was always that nobody actually takes any of that stuff literally, or would ever actually follow through to the terrible-yet-logical conclusions implied…
…and yet, now we are seeing that, no, quite a few people do indeed take all that seriously.
A cult leader may have been a conman who made it all up as a grift, but if the group manages to persist long enough after his death, it will probably end up made of true believers.
I was asking why he himself thinks that he's disgusting for merely wanting to be in a relationship.
I don't recall him ever saying that he's disgusting for wanting a relationship, only that he's hypocritical for wanting a relationship while being disgusting (because ugly, awkward, etc.).
it would be very surprising indeed if literally every woman in the entire world would be disgusted by Skookum as he currently exists.
I'm reminded here of the They Might Be Giants song "Ana Ng," which explores the underlying horror of the "one true soulmate" concept via the singer wondering what if his "soulmate" is a woman living on the other side of the world whom he will certainly never meet.
The relevant set isn't "every woman in the entire world," it's the set of single women likely to be in a position for Skookum to ask out, which is at least a few orders of magnitude smaller.
And why would you find it surprising with this smaller set? I mean, I get there are broad cultural narratives about "someone for everyone" and "plenty of fish in the sea," but as far as I can tell, that's all they are — unsupported cultural narratives, absorbed and perpetuated mostly unquestioned. And while I wouldn't assume a consensus in these parts around the evidentiary value of pure cultural consensus, I wouldn't expect most here to rate it particularly high.
I was asking why he himself thinks that he's disgusting for merely wanting to be in a relationship.
Not to speak for Skookum, but that's not how I read his arguments; the "disgusting" part isn't due to "merely wanting to be in a relationship," it's prior to that.
If he thinks that he's disgusting because he wants a relationship even though he hasn't "earned the right" to want one by proving his masculinity
Again not speaking for Skookum, but it seems to me that you're continuing to misread him, and getting things backwards — his "disgustingness" is not an effect but a cause. It's not that he's disgusting for "wanting a relationship" without having "proved his masculinity," it's that because he is exceptionally disgusting that he has to "prove his masculinity," or else be a hypocrite for refusing to suffer as much as a woman would suffer from a relationship with someone as disgusting as him.
well, that implies that the vast majority of modern men are disgusting, as most of us haven't fought in a war or gone hiking in Alaska or etc..
That would be the implication of what you've said, but, again, that's not what I read him as saying. It's not "men who don't do this are disgusting," it's "those men (number not specified) who are disgusting need to do this, to 'offset' the suffering they expect others to endure by tolerating their repulsive presence."
If Skookum literally believes that any man who wants to be in a relationship without having proved his masculinity is "disgusting" and "hypocritical", I wish he would just come out and say "I am disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship, and so are most of you"
And, again, I'd say the reason he doesn't "just come out and say" that latter is because he's not arguing the former. It's not "disgusting and hypocritical for wanting a relationship," it's "hypocritical for wanting a relationship when disgusting." Again, the "disgusting" part is prior to the "desire" part, not an effect of it.
To summarize my interpretation here:
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Being in a relationship with a man she find unattractive causes a woman suffering.
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Some men are so unattractive and unlovable that practically any relationship he'll ever have with a woman will fall under (1). Therefore,
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When one of this (quite possibly small) set of men desires a relationship with a woman, he is thus desiring that she voluntary choose said suffering; and
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Asking someone to voluntarily choose to suffer for you benefit is hypocritical and entitled if you are not willing to similarly voluntarily choose to undergo comparable suffering.
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He is a member of this (again, quite possibly small) set.
Note, this is not the argument that you've been attributing to him. It does not imply that most men fall into this "repulsive, unloveable" set, nor that one falls into this set because one hasn't undergone the Hock, or whatever, merely that this applies to the (again, number not specified) men who do.
And I get that you seem to disagree with (2) and/or (5). But can you at least follow the argument?
Any criteria of "the worst of the disposable males" which includes him would probably include you.
Indeed it would, and should. I've been telling people for years that my ideal society would almost certainly have me executed.
Edit — Addendum: All that said, I'd still prefer he doesn't do his suicidal stunt in the state I live in, because it doesn't matter how much he repeats "don't look for me," if he goes missing, the state will send out people to find him (or his corpse), which will cost money, when we have a crappy economy and serious budget woes. (Hence my "why not just put people like us out of our misery?" take.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6mo ago
Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.
Why? After all, given how often we're told how easy that task is to accomplish "if you really want it," then consider how much must be terribly, utterly wrong with those of us who consistently fail at it? So why spare any concern for such contemptible, defective losers. Who do we think we are, to think we're entitled to the spare thoughts of others, rather than deserving only their contempt for being so contemptible?
By this, do you mean that vague idea about air-dropping people into the middle of the Alaskan wilderness and seeing who makes it back to civilization alive?
If so, as an Alaskan, I'm asking you to please reconsider. We do not need more outsiders coming in and freezing to death, getting themselves eaten by bears, starting a forest fire, et cetera.
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