OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Was this gender month on the Motte? Trans month? Maybe it's just what I was looking at, but it feels like there was a lot of that recently.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
What strikes me looking back at the whole series, actually, is how much every film except Terminator 2 feels profoundly of its time. The Terminator is a 1980s action horror. I watch it and I am back there in the 80s. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is definitely a film of the 2000s, with a lot of early CG effects, trotting out a film star who is just starting to look too old for this, and a lot of military-industrial complex, War-on-Terror paranoia. I have not seen any of the films past 3 (I hear I'm not missing much), but I'd be shocked if anybody remembers Genisys or Dark Fate as anything other than interchangeable, forgettable action films.
Terminator 2, by contrast, feels fresh and timeless every time. Maybe it's because it was one of those seminal films that created the modern action film? It marks the end of the genre I think of as 80s action, creates the 'modern', 90s-and-onwards genre, and because we've spend the last thirty years or so in cultural stagnation, that still feels new?
Maybe it's just that Terminator 2 is really good, but I'm not sure that's it - if nothing else, I like the first film more! But notwithstanding, I think Terminator 2 transcends its origin in a way that The Terminator does not.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
"The future is not set" was part of Reese's message in The Terminator, and the villain's entire plan hinged on the idea that changing the future is possible. I don't think Terminator 2 invented the idea that maybe we can screw destiny, or that The Terminator required an unchangeable timeline.
I nonetheless find The Terminator probably a better movie overall, or at least, one that has a more powerful, emotionally resonant ending that Terminator 2's turn toward the saccharine, but there was at least a little groundwork.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
What's missing here is any reason to think that 'the Jews' are an operative factor. I know that you think they're behind everything, but if all you have to say is "it's clear as day and if you disagree you're irrational", I don't think that's much of a contribution.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I'd suggest that if you have both general and particular reasons to hate something, you are more likely to bring up the particular reasons, if only because the general reasons are more likely to be shared and brought up by others. At any rate, my original statement did not distinguish motives? Of the examples given, the Jewish source hates TikTok because it spreads anti-semitism, the Christian sources hate TikTok because it's addictive and psychologically harmful, and the Islamic source hates TikTok because it promotes immorality and obscenity. These are all different reasons.
I take it as obviously acceptable for a member of a given demographic to be concerned about hatred of that demographic. A Jew can care about anti-Jewish hate, a white person about anti-white hate, a gay person about anti-gay hate, a Hindu about anti-Hindu hate, and so on. Insofar as anti-semitism exists, which it undoubtedly does, it is at as a starting point reasonable for Jews to say, "we don't like this".
Now there is a separate question about what's reasonable in terms of policy response, and I just indicated with the Australian hate speech legislation, I do think Jewish groups at least here have supported unwise policy. I think I am able to say, "I think you are responding badly to a legitimate fear". I don't need to suggest a nefarious motive, or suggest that the thing they're afraid of isn't a problem.
On the specifics of this deal, I think the word 'they' is doing all the work for you there, and allows you to smuggle in scary implications. 'They' didn't offer to buy TikTok. 'They' didn't make an offer for Warner Bros. In neither case was an organisation that can credibly claim to represent Jews involved with the offer. What's the argument here? David Ellison owns too much media? Okay, sure. I'm happy to grant that. But you can't get from a specific person, David Ellison, to the spooky 'they', meaning Jews as a whole. Supposing that shady backroom deals are what resulted in Ellison winning some of these bids (which does not appear to be in evidence, though I grant that Ellison's connections with a famously corrupt and transactional president suggest the worst), even that shows only that a wealthy person has tried to acquire a lot of media.
As far as I'm aware Jewish criticism of TikTok has frequently featured anti-semitism as a theme, but I don't view it as particularly sinister for Jews to be worried about anti-semitism. I think every group is allowed to be worried about people hating them. In this regard as far as I can tell there is no particular difference between Jews and other groups that are often hated on social media. It's true that the Christian and Islamic responses focus more on TikTok and social media being psychologically harmful in a general sense, and personally I think those responses are better. I think the Christians and the Muslims have one up on the Jews in this particular case. (I think the specific Pakistani fatwa against TikTok has a misaimed criticism, and overall I think the Christian responses are the best and most nuanced - but then, I am a Christian, so I may well be biased.)
I should also clarify that I'm not saying that Jewish groups are necessarily right in terms of policy direction - for instance, recently in Australia, Jewish organisations have been strongly in support of new hate speech laws after Bondi, whereas other religious and secular groups have, in my opinion correctly, raised concerns that these laws are rushed and will not help.
But I suppose my position is that insofar as there is lots of anti-semitism on TikTok, I think it is understandable and non-conspiratorial that Jews dislike this and want something to be done about it. I think there is a meaningful difference between that and positing backroom deals or conspiracies among Jewish elites to acquire TikTok.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
It actually doesn't seem like that at all, it literally seems like Israeli agents acquiring property to make sure American Media is pro-Israel and pro-Jewish.
The word 'seems' is doing all the work here.
Does it seem like that? I believe it seems like that to you. But when you spill the milk, it seems to you like it was the dastardly Jews making the handle slippery.
Thus in this case, some Jewish organisations hate TikTok. Okay. But Christian organisations also hate TikTok. Muslim organisations hate TikTok. Secular groups hate TikTok. I hate TikTok. If you cherry-pick everything involving a Jew and then strategically ignore the rest (or assume the rest to have been conned into it by those ever-so-sneaky Jews), it is possible to curate the illusion that Jews are the sole movers of public policy. The ADL hates TikTok too? Get in line.
The common ingredient here isn't Jews so much as it is you. The seeming is in your head, not in the world.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Does it have to be a coding problem? I understand that there are time and financial constraints that prevent you from trying a lot of what is being requested, but I also understand @iprayiam3's criticism that it looks like you're cherry picking for something you thing the LLM can do.
This was largely my response. The claims the AI-believer crowd make about AI go far, far beyond coding. Coding by itself is a single, relatively niche field. AI could displace all the coders and if you don't work in software development yourself, would you notice?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, AI can code as well or better than the best human coders.
As an AI skeptic, I am not particularly moved by this, and I don't think this gets you anywhere near AGI.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Certainly if I think about the way I've encountered some of this, there's, albeit usually in inchoate form, a desperate attraction to or craving for the feminine, and a sense that the masculine is ugly, violent, repulsive, brutish, or otherwise undesirable. The confused, sensitive young boy knows that he does not want to be his image of 'a man', which is probably a heavily jock- or pop-culture-inspired vision of a brute, and that he is attracted to things that are soft, gentle, and female-coded. But he cannot exist in a predominantly female space as a man, because he has come to see masculinity as, by its mere existence, a kind of violence or degradation upon that space. He wants the innocent and feminine, but sees himself as something that cannot coexist with that. He probably also has a Scott-like terror of engaging with women, of expressing male heterosexual desire, and so on. His picture of femininity and of women's lives is highly idealised - he's not actually hanging out with or spending much time with girls, and therefore does not know what they are really like. But he knows the glittering facade, and he wants it.
The result is a drive to purge himself of masculine traits, to expurgate the taint by any means possible, in the hope that through reinventing himself (possibly with chemical or surgical assistance, at the higher end), he can get himself out of this cursed category, and enter the idealised female one. This is how I interpret some of the drama you sometimes get around women's spaces, or businesses or services for women - there's a kind of trans woman who needs to constantly press into those spaces, for the sake of constant affirmation that, yes, he really has left masculinity behind entirely. The deeper you are into the process of transition or feminisation, the more important it is that every last sign of acceptance be validated, every last scrap of the male be rooted out and denied.
There's a lot of personal variation in this, but I do thus see, in my experience, a kind of performative misandry that you sometimes get in toxic trans spaces. (This is, it's fair to say, entirely AGP as a phenomenon.) It doesn't always present very strongly - sometimes just in the form of casual jokes about how male things are gross - but sometimes it does a lot more. I usually try to be charitable, on the basis that someone who has spent years and a great deal of effort trying to appear less male is not going to be a big fan of male-looking things, and it doesn't need to mean any actual malice towards men, but I've come to think there's a bit more to it than that. Masculinity is the problem, in this world.
To me one of the ways around this or out of this has to be via promoting a positive model of masculinity, but there are a few issues here. Firstly, it can't be just a dudebro model, so to speak. These boys already know they don't like that. There have to be ways to be strongly masculine and capable that are nonetheless in some way sensitive, courteous, intellectual, compassionate, and so on. Those are good traits and they need to take on appealingly masculine forms. Secondly, it has to be approved of by women. Female approval does matter. Now this probably isn't as hard as it actually sounds, because most real women do like men, but remember that the boys in this position don't have much contact with actual women; and also the media is a very unhelpful distorting factor here. But regardless, it must be something that women like.
Unfortunately, put like that it's obvious what the failure-state is - it's feminist messaging about 'good men', the kind that feels corporate and sanitised and frankly just wussy. It's that Gillette ad that everyone hated. So perhaps to this we should add a third requirement: it should be something that men themselves like. It has to appeal to men. If it feels like being lectured by an HR lady, it won't have any traction.
Recently I read an essay by Oliver Traldi about the portrayal of masculinity, and female sexual desire, in films, and in particular about the role of the 'monster'. It's fair to say that the monster, the compelling, sexually charismatic brute, is something that the sensitive boy flees from. I cannot blame him for that; I don't want to be the monster either. But there is nonetheless something in many women that thrills to imagine just a bit of the monster. Just a bit. Is reconciling those desires the problem? That the attractive, desirable man is supposed to combine two impossible things, firstly the polite, obliging, non-threateningly capable man who does everything a woman wants, and secondly, the powerful, dominating, or ravishing man, who makes the woman feel like the object of this compellingly rough desire? I'm a bit skeptical here because I think it might be rolling together the diverse desires of many women together into a single uber-woman, and then acting confused when they turn out to be contradictory, but even so, I am very struck by his conclusion:
A very different kind of film, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, features the thought-provoking line: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” And why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa?
Maybe so. And if so, then I feel like what's going on with plenty of boys - certainly something that was going on with myself, though fortunately I never took the trans path (thank heavens I grew up before trans was a thing among teenagers!) - is that they struggle to find a way to unite their desire for the feminine with their identity as the masculine. Maybe they need a bit of what Eneasz Brodski talks about - liking and valuing the feminine, as the feminine, yet without seeking to become the feminine.
Maybe we need more honest-to-goodness complementarianism, that Robert-Jordan-esque understanding that the male and the female need each other, that they complete and enhance each other, and recognising and even loving that difference is the only way forward.
But maybe I'm just a cranky ageing Christian romantic. Who knows?
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This does track, rather frustratingly, with my experience. I like meeting people and talking to people, and I like women, obviously, but I do not like the experience that we have packaged together and called 'dating'.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Not every instance of labour feels life-affirming, obviously, but I think I would stand by the idea that some level of physical accomplishment is affirming. We're embodied creatures, and doing things with our bodies feels good.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I do increasingly notice it in these kinds of, for lack of a better term, autistic, socially inept, geek-intellectual kinds of spaces. That's a demographic that naturally tends to inhabit a kind of fantasy world of the imagination, and online it is easier and easier to disconnect from a sense of one's own physical body. Reinventing yourself as an imagined cute girl - pretending to be the thing you want - seems easy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, though it is a helpful reminder that, as FiveHourMarathon says and I've commented also, the grass always seems greener on the other side.
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass. Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming. Some level of fantasy is healthy, but the kind of obsessive, body-negating, self-fleeing fantasy that you get in these demographics is poison.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Quillette did a series talking about, among other things, social contagion among boys. I agree that there's a lot of heavily sexualised, fetishised social contagion, but with younger boys there's also the anime-influenced variant, which, though sometimes about sex, is also sometimes a longing for a kind of 'soft' world full of coddling and gentleness.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
My impression was that radical feminists don't particularly care about HSTS individuals. Radical feminists are concerned with women and their experiences, so male homosexuality is not really on their radar.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
What occasioned this reflection?
For what it's worth for me, I'm not wholly convinced of the Blanchard typology, if presented as something like a law of nature, but just extensionally I find it has the ring of truth. The two basic categories he lays out - I think of them, perhaps a bit crassly, as the more-gay-than-gay camp, and the heterosexual camp, that is, the one so obsessed with/attracted to women that they want to become one - can be roughly applied to trans women that I've known. It may not be wholly perfect, but it feels close enough that I hear Blanchard's descriptions and think, "Yeah, I've seen people like that" and "Oh, just like this other person I know".
OliveTapenade
9d ago
A lot of Paul's letters need to be read in the context of the audience he was writing to, and as far as I can tell, it seems as though some of Paul's early audiences literally believed the world was about to end, and therefore had concluded some combination of 1) ordinary morality does not apply any more, and 2) we don't need to plan or work for the future. There is no point to either if the world is about to end.
Paul, at least in his early letters, probably believes that the world is about to end as well. (cf. 1 Cor 7:26, "in view of the impending crisis".) However, he spends a long time trying to shut down the people who have concluded that therefore nothing matters and they can do what they like. 1 Cor 6:12-20 and 1 Cor 10:23-33 seem to be arguing with the hedonists, who think that because the Law has ceased to apply they can do anything they like. 2 Thess 3:6-15 seems to be arguing with the layabouts - people who sponged off the community's charity, probably thinking that there is no reason to lay foundations for a future that will never arrive. We can also see that part of the context is Paul's defense of his own ministry - he himself lived off charity, as a wandering teacher hosted by different communities of believers, and it sounds as if some might have accused Paul himself of taking advantage of his hosts. So in 3:7 he argues that he himself was not idle, and that he would never countenance idleness.
Compare also the Didache, which requires, in chapters 12 and 13, that groups of believers offcer charity and assistance to other believers who come to stay with them. But it puts some limitations on this:
But receive everyone who comes in the name of the Lord, and prove and know him afterward; for you shall have understanding right and left. If he who comes is a wayfarer, assist him as far as you are able; but he shall not remain with you more than two or three days, if need be. But if he wants to stay with you, and is an artisan, let him work and eat. But if he has no trade, according to your understanding, see to it that, as a Christian, he shall not live with you idle. But if he wills not to do, he is a Christ-monger. Watch that you keep away from such.
You must welcome and assist believers for a few days, but only a few days, lest they take advantage of you. Believers who want to stay longer must work to support themselves and the community.
I think this is all pretty common sense, as an attempt to balance a strong imperative towards charity and hospitality along with a desire to not be taken advantage of.
If we want to draw a lesson from that for today's politics, I think the principles are obvious and hard to argue with. Provide some charity and assistance for the needy. Require everybody to work as far as they are reasonably able. Do not let yourself be taken advantage of by those who seek to live in idleness.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
3:10, not 2:10.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
It is hilarious to me that five separate people chimed in to explain 'fetch'. I was the third, and when I wrote mine, the first two were invisible, and indeed we post mere minutes apart.
Has fetch happened after all?
OliveTapenade
10d ago
What is the classical sense?
I suppose my feeling is that all political labels are inevitably somewhat vague, and refer to clusters of people who associate together for particular causes, and therefore whose borders tend to be blurry and mutable. This means that definitions tend to be provisional and mutable. I can point to, say, Kirk's ten principles and say "a conservative is someone who agrees with most of these" - maybe to preserve a little wiggle room, you need to hold at least seven out of ten to formally count as 'a conservative'? But it's always going to be a bit wobbly.
I think you also need to clearly distinguish between American and other conservatives here. In the United States, conservatism generally means some sort of adherence to the principles of the founding, or the American Revolution, and because the American foundation is paradigmatically liberal, that means that American conservatism is a form of liberalism. This is not necessarily the case in other countries.
For me, I find it most useful to define conservatism in terms of an overall disposition or posture. In general, I think, that somebody whose overall politics are marked by a sense of deference to tradition or obligation to the past, and a preference for organically evolved systems over top-down plans, and who is moderately opposed to change (that is, small incremental changes, or changes to respond to specific identifiable problems, may be good; large-scale reforms are usually bad), would qualify as a conservative in the broad sense.
But this does mean that, for instance, there are people whose names loom large in the right-wing political canon that I would not consider conservative. Re-litigating Trump is boring, so let me take another example - I don't think Ronald Reagan was a conservative. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a conservative. They were both, in a sense, progressive leaders, in that what they had was an organised theory for how society ought to work that they tried to impose via top-down reform, and for which they claimed a popular mandate. That is how progressivism works. Reagan and Thatcher both clearly belonged to the right-wing coalition in their countries, but it seems odd, to me, to call them 'conservatives'.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
We're all pedantic nerds here, come on.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I don't make a claim about the fall of the Roman Empire.
My take on the full meme - strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men - is mostly just that it's stupid.
That is, taken at face value it is obviously false. Even if you operationalise strong/weak men and good/hard times sufficiently as to apply it to specific historical situations, it fails to bear out predictively. If you try to use it to predict the rise and fall of particular civilisations - say, Chinese or Indian dynasties - it's just not accurate enough.
You can try to nuance the meme enough to make it useful, but it's all epicycles and retroactive interpretation. If an empire fell, per the meme it must have been full of 'weak men', and if one rose or enjoyed good times, it must have been 'strong men', and if you shift around your definitions of strength and weakness enough you can sort of retrofit it into any given situation, but the same definitions usually won't apply to other situations. Alternatively you can retreat into generalities, but these are useless and without insight. It's good when people have a sense of civic duty, or are prepared to endure hardship? It's bad when elites are feckless and irresponsible? That's not particularly insightful.
I do think that decadence is a useful concept and one that we can validly talk about. I also think that it makes sense to talk about common factors that contribute to the downfall of a civilisation, and I think that things like moral or civic character, popular legitimacy or faith in a system/ideal, or irresponsibility or waste on the part of elites, are probably among those factors. I broadly think that asabiyyah is real and important, though I don't endorse Ibn Khaldun's entire theory surrounding it. Anyway, I think it is both meaningful and true to say, for instance, "the United States as of 2026 is decadent".
But I see no need to defend the weak men/hard times meme to establish all that. It's just an oversimplifying, unhelpful internet meme. It's dumb. That's all I really have to say about it.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I didn't read the prior thread, unfortunately, but I'm surprised to see this whole summary without any mention of Douthat's The Decadent Society. Douthat's been the foremost person articulating a criticism of Western or American decadence at the moment, I would have thought, and his definition of decadence is something more like an absence of creative ambition or drive. His short definition is a combination of "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development".
Thus for him, a decadent society may still be rich, productive, or militarily powerful, but it lacks drive. It lacks a goal or ambition beyond merely continuing on in its current state. In that sense he thinks that a society can be decadent long-term, even on the scale of centuries. With this approach in mind, military weakness can be a sign of decadence, but is not guaranteed to be, and for that matter military strength can be an enabler of decadence. It is possible to be militarily decadent, if one is powerful, devoted to maintaining a strong military and warrior ethos, and yet nonetheless in a kind of cultural stasis.
I find this a more useful, well-rounded concept of decadence than one that just seems like it's based on a vague mental image of wealthy Romans getting drunk and having orgies while the barbarians ravage the frontiers. That may be an uncharitable description, but I think something roughly in that area is what the "weak men make hard times" meme is gesturing at.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
It's very contextual, I think? In Australia you would ask "who did you vote for?", but the answer to that question would be "Labor" or "Liberals" or "Greens", not a specific person's name. I think the general understanding is that you vote for a party, not a person. Because it's a party, I also think it tends to be less revealing? One of the differences I notice in American politics is that voters emotionally associate with the person at the top of the ticket more. Voting for Trump has a stronger association with Trump as a personality. Character and personality do matter here, and I think Peter Dutton's bad personal brand and off-putting manner hurt the Coalition at the last election, but they seem to matter less. Americans, if you'll pardon the uncharitable way of putting this, are a bit more personality-cult-ish around their leaders than we are.
This isn't an interrogation so I'm happy to disclose that in my life I've voted for both major parties. In fact I've usually preferenced a minor party first - Australia has compulsory preferential voting, so I always have to list every candidate in order of preference, but in practice usually the only question that matters is whether I put Labor or Liberals higher. The answer to that is that sometimes I've put Labor higher and sometimes I've put the Liberals higher. I am not particularly consistent. I suppose in American terms that would make me an independent or a swing voter? One thing I do like about the American system is that you can split your ticket. If I had been in the US, well, it would probably depend on the state, but I could easily imagine, say, voting Harris for president but voting straight Republican in the legislature, because I think Harris was marginally less unfit for the presidency than Trump, but I oppose much of Harris' policy agenda and would like her to be constrained and ineffective in office. But it sounds like in a case like that the only thing most people would care about is the vote for president.
To my local case, I work in a religious context, so the social questions come up more. Most intitutional pressures are progressive and the church organisation we're associated with has leadership that signals very progressive, but the people who actually go to church, and the people who are likely to choose to work for a Christian organisation, tend more conservative. So there is often a gap between the messaging from above and what people think on the ground. So I interpret a lot of those questions as employees trying to suss out where I fall on the spectrum. Much as in the US, sexual morality is one of the clearest ways to sort tell which side of the aisle one falls on theologically.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
It might, but my feeling is that if a conversation has gotten to the point where someone is, in an inquisitorial manner, demanding to know who I voted for, it's already gotten awkward. When they ask "Who did you vote for?", it's already probably beyond salvaging.
I don't make it an absolute rule, though, particularly because what someone means by the question is often highly contextual. Personally I don't think I've ever had anyone ask me "who did you vote for?" (I suspect that question is more powerful in America?), but several times I have had somebody ask me a different kind of political shibboleth question, the most common being, "What do you think of gay marriage?" That's one where sometimes I will hide behind professionalism (I work in a religious field; I say something about how I need to offer care to everyone and it's not about what I think), but sometimes I do answer honestly. Usually in those latter cases it's because the context is working for an organisation that's officially progressive on social issues, but which has a lot of employees with more conservative views, and I can tell that the person is trying to look for sympathy. Often that question means that the person asking opposes it, and is nervously hoping to find an ally, or even just understanding, in me. So in that case I might lean in and say, "Okay, I'll tell you a secret. I voted no to gay marriage."
There are a few other questions like that. In general I think the key is just figuring out why the person is asking you this. If it's coming from a place of empathy or vulnerability, I'm more likely to answer.
But if it's coming from a place of inquisition - if the person is trying to discover whether I'm a wrongthinker - then I think that's not worth answering. Other people are not entitled to know my political views.
It is a continuing source of interest to me just how much gay issues have won completely. I still have plenty of reservations, and you can still find a handful of cranky religious conservatives saying "now it's time to overturn Obergefell", but the right as a whole just seem to have stopped caring, and in fact "trans is bad because it endangers gays" has become a sometimes run into there.
The defining social issue of the time when I was growing up has been completely abandoned.
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