Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
Elon Musk’s DOGE Uses Police to Seize Independent Nonprofit
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency staffers used police and private security to forcefully take over the U.S. Institute of Peace on Monday.
The USIP, an independent nonprofit founded by Congress, had its president, Greg Moose, and its board fired last week by the Trump administration. The Associated Press reported that DOGE workers on Monday had law enforcement escort them into USIP, which is not located in a federal building, after previously being denied access.
“DOGE just came into the building—they’re inside the building—they’re bringing the F.B.I. and brought a bunch of D.C. police,” USIP lawyer Sophia Lin told The New York Times as she and other staff members were forced out of the building.
Obviously, if you wanted to paint Trump as a dangerous authoritarian fascist, this is exactly the sort of thing you'd point to as Exhibit A. So I'm trying to determine if this is actually as bad as it sounds, what the steelman is here, and the extent to which this may or may not have been under the purview of the executive branch's legitimate authority.
The linked article and their website describe USIP as a "private" nonprofit that was "founded by Congress". Obviously, the government using the police to forcibly seize private property due to political differences is not a good look. Presumably there are legal minutiae here that would determine the extent to which this organization is or is not still subject to the government's authority (is any organization "founded by Congress" subject to federal government control in perpetuity?).
As a side note, the Trump administration seems to REALLY hate US assistance to foreign countries and they're doing their damndest to shut it off. USIP describes itself as an "independent organization dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, denying tens of millions of Americans the chance to get up to $20,000 of their debt erased.
The ruling, which matched expert predictions given the justices’ conservative majority, is a massive blow to borrowers who were promised loan forgiveness by the Biden administration last summer.
The 6-3 majority ruled that at least one of the six states that challenged the loan relief program had the proper legal footing, known as standing, to do so.
The high court said the president didn’t have the authority to cancel such a large amount of consumer debt without authorization from Congress and agreed the program would cause harm to the plaintiffs.
The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system). One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other. The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different. And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high. If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest? The group identity angle is obvious. AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians. Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder. Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics. So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Occasionally we are told that there is an epidemic of "male loneliness" or "male sexlessness" - an increasing number of young men are going long stretches of time with few or no sexual partners. But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?
Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender - the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female. In fact, depending on which estimate you go with, the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically. So why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?
You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale. It's never been harder to imagine actual widespread social unrest occurring in the modern West, given how thoroughly people have been anesthetized with material abundance and cheap entertainment. (This question has been raised a few times recently, about the possibility of the culture war "going hot" over the Trump verdict or the border crisis or whatever - I am of the opinion that no, it won't "go hot", and such a development is essentially unthinkable at this point). Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
“Inquir’st thou not what spirits
Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass
Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin
Were blameless; and if aught they merited,
It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,
The portal to thy faith. If they before
The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;
And among such am I. For these defects,
And for no other evil, we are lost;
Only so far afflicted, that we live
Desiring without hope.”
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.
[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme.
It's not entirely clear what's supposed to be the determining criteria of identity here. Are wokeism and the DR the same because they're both revolutionary, or are they the same because they only differ on who gets the cushy sinecures? At any rate, I'll address both points.
Revolution (defined in the most general sense as rapid dramatic change, as opposed to slow and gradual change) is a tactic, not an ideological principle. You can have adherents of two different ideologies who both agree on the necessity of revolution, and you can have two adherents of the same ideology who disagree on the viability of revolution as a tactic. Although Marxism is typically (and correctly) seen as a revolutionary ideology, there have been notable Marxists who denied the necessity of revolution for Marxism. They instead wanted to achieve communism through a series of gradual reforms using the existing democratic state apparatus. But does that suddenly make them into conservatives? Their tactics are different from typical Marxists, but their core underlying Marxist ideological principles are the same. I doubt that any of the Hlynkaists on this forum would look at the reformist-Marxists and say "ah, a fellow conservative-gradualist! Truly these are my people; they too are lovers of slow, cautious change".
"Tradition above all" is an empty formalism at best, and incoherent at worst. If tradition is your sole overriding source of moral truth, then we just wind up with the old Euthyphro dilemma: what happens when the tradition that you happened to be born into isn't worth defending? What if it's actively malicious? "Support tradition" is a formal principle because it makes no mention of the actual content of that tradition. If you are living in a Nazi or communist (or whatever your own personal avatar of evil is) regime whose roots extend back further than living memory, are conservatives obligated to support the existing "traditional" regime? Perhaps they're allowed to oppose it, but only if they do so in a slow and gradual manner. You can understand why this response might not be appealing to those who are being crushed under the boot of the regime. And at any rate, you can only arrive at the position of opposing the regime in the first place if you have an alternative source of substantive ethical principles that go beyond the formal principles of "support tradition" and "don't change things too fast".
As for the assertion that wokeism and the DR only differ on "who gets the cushy sinecures"; this is simply incorrect. They have multiple substantive policy disagreements on LGBT rights, traditional gender roles, immigration, foreign policy, etc.
Hlynkaism to me represents a concerning abdication of reflection and nuance, in favor of a self-assured "I know what's what, these radical Marxist-Islamo-fascists can't pull a fast one on me" attitude. This is emblematic of much that is wrong with contemporary (and historical as well) political discourse. The principle goal of philosophical reflection is to undermine the foundation of this self-assuredness. Actually, you don't know what's what. Your enemies might know things that you don't; their positions might be more complicated and nuanced than you originally thought. Undoubtedly the realm of political discourse would become more productive, or at least more pleasant, if this attitude of epistemic humility were to become more widespread.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
You know, we were just talking a few posts downthread about how the "experts" are willing to blatantly lie in order to advance their ideological agenda.
We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse, the rise of fascist dictators, the end of civilization, and in general all manner of untold horrors.
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons. Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
More on Trump's tariffs.
I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:
Trump's ICE thugs raided a roofing company in Washington State to arrest three dozen people.
I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.
MAGA.
To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Finally something that explicitly ties AI into the culture war: Why I HATE A.I. Art - by Vaush
This AI art thing. Some people love it, some people hate it. I hate it.
I endorse pretty much all of the points he makes in this video. I do recommend watching the whole thing all the way through, if you have time.
I went into this curious to see exactly what types of arguments he would make, as I've been interested in the relationship between AI progress and the left/right divide. His arguments fall into roughly two groups.
First is the "material impact" arguments - that this will be bad for artists, that you're using their copyrighted work without their permission, that it's not fair to have a machine steal someone's personal style that they worked for years to develop, etc. I certainly feel the force of these arguments, but it's also easy for AI advocates to dismiss them with a simple "cry about it". Jobs getting displaced by technology is nothing new. We can't expect society to defend artists' jobs forever, if they are indeed capable of being easily automated. Critics of AI art need to provide more substantial arguments about why AI art is bad in itself, rather than simply pointing out that it's bad for artists' incomes. Which Vaush does make an attempt at.
The second group of arguments could perhaps be called "deontological arguments" as they go beyond the first-person experiential states of producers and consumers of AI art, and the direct material harm or benefit caused by AI. The main concern here is that we're headed for a future where all media and all human interaction is generated by AI simulations, which would be a hellish dystopia. We don't want things to just feel good - we want to know that there's another conscious entity on the other end of the line.
It's interesting to me how strongly attuned Vaush is to the "spiritual" dimension of this issue, which I would not have expected from an avowed leftist. It's clearly something that bothers him on an emotional level. He goes so far as to say:
If you don't see stuff like this [AI art] as a problem, I think you're a psychopath.
and, what was the real money shot for me:
It's deeply alienating, and if you disagree, you cannot call yourself a Marxist. I'm drawing a line.
Now, on the one hand, "leftism" and "Marxism" are absolutely massive intellectual traditions with a lot of nuance and disagreement, and I certainly don't expect all leftists to hold the same views on everything. On the other hand, I really do think that what we're seeing now with AI content generation is a natural consequence of the leftist impulse, which has always been focused on the ceaseless improvement and elevation of man in his ascent towards godhood. What do you think "fully automated luxury gay space communism" is supposed to mean? It really does mean fully automated. If everyone is to be a god unto themselves, untrammeled by external constraints, then that also means they have the right to shirk human relationships and form relationships with their AI buddies instead (and also flood the universe with petabytes of AI-generated art). At some point, there seems to be a tension between progress on the one hand and traditional authenticity on the other.
It was especially amusing when he said:
This must be how conservatives feel when they talk about "bugmen".
I guess everyone becomes a reactionary at some point - the only thing that differs is how far you have to push them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
It is easy to forget or sideline the executive orders of the previous week: bans on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and discourse as well as “gender ideology” in all federally funded programing, as new obscenities flood the news cycle. Threats of deportation to international students who engage in legitimate protest; expansionist designs on Panama and Greenland and proposals to take over the total and forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza from their land are announced in quick succession. [...]
The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.
The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. [emphasis mine]
In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?
[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.
People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.
[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
There seems to be a small movement by Republican lawmakers to put legal pressure on the excesses of woke universities.
The STEM Scott writes about several bills up for consideration in the Texas state senate:
This week, the Texas Senate will take up SB 18, a bill to ban the granting of tenure at all public universities in Texas, including UT Austin and Texas A&M. (Those of us who have tenure would retain it, for what little that’s worth.) [...]
The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities, and SB 16, which would require the firing of any professor if they “compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.”
Florida is considering a similar bill, HB 999, that would place restrictions on DEI-related initiatives and majors at public universities. Already the effects are being felt at SLACs like the New College:
We have seven or eight tenure-track candidates coming up for tenure this year. Everyone has a positive recommendation for tenure. The next step is supposed to be the Board of Trustees, which in April will approve or deny tenure. Traditionally, the Board of Trustees just rubber-stamps the tenure based on the recommendations that are made. Now, recently, President Corcoran has met with the president of our union to recommend that the candidates withdraw their files before it’s too late. My interpretation is that Corcoran suspects there’s probably a non-negligible proportion of the trustees who want to make an example out of those people and deny them tenure. The trustees as a whole, Corcoran and DeSantis want to turn our institution into something different. And in order to do that, they need to hire new faculty. The best way for them to hire new faculty is to get rid of the faculty who they can fire without breaching contract. So that means firing the tenure-track faculty. [...]
The most likely thing to happen is that they’re going to impose some changes on the curriculum. It’s not clear exactly what form and with what faculty input, but they’re getting rid of gender studies and critical race theory—they have said that publicly many times. The law, HB 999, is hopelessly vague. There’s so many things that could fall under the umbrella of gender studies and critical race theory, and we don’t know what programs, classes or parts of a given syllabus are likely to be illegal if it passes. We don’t know if that will mean we will have to submit our syllabi to the provost or the president or the board, or what authority they will have.
I'm in a bit of an odd place with regards to these issues. I don't fit neatly onto the woke "how dare you attack our most hallowed and sacred institutions!" side, nor the anti-woke "stop teaching this pinko commie crap to our kids!" side.
I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed! I want to help you get the word out! I think our public life really should play host to a diversity of viewpoints. I think the university should be a hothouse of strange and controversial ideas. By all means, keep teaching CRT and women's studies and black studies and whatever else you want. I know that leftists don't extend the same courtesy to me, but that doesn't invalidate the fundamental point that I should extend that courtesy to them. Even just beyond extending formal charity to my political outgroup, I actually enjoy a lot of this type of scholarship and I find value in it, I like Marxist literary criticism and the obscurantist mid-20th century French guys and German phenomenology and all the rest of it, and I think it should continue to be taught and studied on its own merits, even if I don't necessarily agree with the politics.
But! It really is hard sometimes. When things like this happen, when a book chapter that was, by all accounts, a completely anodyne explication of the official party ideology, whose only crime was that it didn't go far enough in advocating the abolition of all gendered pronouns, is met with public humiliation and a tarnishing of the reputation of the author... it does make my blood boil and it's hard to maintain my principles. It makes me want to go "ok, yeah screw it, ban all liberal arts programs at universities, I don't care, whatever, I just want these people to lose." I'm on their side on a lot of the key object-level issues and I still want them to lose! That's why I constantly feel like I'm of two minds on these questions.
In spite of all the problems with the modern university, I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism. The university as it stands now leaves a lot to be desired. But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.
NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.
Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) urged the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to address the release of unsafe AI models that do not moderate content made on their platforms, specifically the Stable Diffusion model released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Stable Diffusion allows users to generate unfiltered imagery of a violent or sexual nature, depicting real people. It has already been used to create photos of violently beaten Asian women and pornography depicting real people.
I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.
I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.
Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.
For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.
Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.
It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.
TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.
*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.
The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites. Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes. He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.
The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte. It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:
"Several months ago my office received a protected disclosure from Eglin Air Force Base indicating that there was a UAP incident that required my attention. We asked to see any of the evidence that had been taken by flight crew in this endeavor, and to observe any radar signature, as well as to meet with the flight crew. Initially we were not afforded access [...] eventually we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries, and I'm somewhat informed on the matter, having served on the Armed Services committee for seven years."
Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:
Interviewer: "From the videos you have seen, from the stories you have heard from people up in the sky, if that footage, if those videos come to light, publicly for the American people to see, what do you think people's reaction would be to it?"
Burchett: "I hope they're angry. That this government, both parties, have hid this from them."
When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be. I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities. Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway. If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.
At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing. He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves? And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves. Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.
Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet. If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen. Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.
The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not. Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks. Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly. But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves. If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other. But even this argument is not particularly convincing. If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".
Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems. I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute? Why does it seem like they're clamping down harder over time? Even pornhub can't take credit cards anymore, they only accept ACH transfers and crypto.
Porn (in the very broadest sense of the term) is one of the only authentically countercultural genres of art today, as evidenced by the severe institutional restrictions it faces. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:
English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.
In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.
It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.
[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”
Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.
The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).
I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.
I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.
Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.
Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.
At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.
The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.
A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
When I was quite young, I adopted the stereotypical pretentious reddit fedora mentality - other people are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd, I'm smarter than them, I'm an independent thinker, etc. As I got a little older I softened on that. I thought, well that's not really fair, people generally do try their best and everyone has a reason for acting the way they do, I shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that I'm all that different from them.
But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd. Covid was empirical proof of that. The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do". Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore. How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Granted, people have always believed dumb things throughout history. Mass psychosis has existed for as long as we've had mass society. So, taking a broad enough view, Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age. At least communism required a commitment on your part; it demanded that you have skin in the game for the long haul. Now the political flow of society can be turned on or off like a faucet, they can direct people over here one day and over there the next, running everyone ragged because they're deathly afraid of not getting enough likes on their TikToks from The Right People or whatever the hell it is that kids worry about these days.
With each passing year, reality does more and more to chip away at my faith in the inherent nobility of the human spirit. I'm bitter about it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?
I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.
Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.
Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".
This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):
Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.
We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.
[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.
Focusing in on some specific examples:
Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.
I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.
I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
I very likely wrote some of the posts on /ic/ you’re referring to.
My mental model of the developers/proponents of AI art (and AI in general) is that they believe that they’re genuinely making the world a better place, at least by the measure of their own terminal values. I just happen to sharply disagree with them.
Obviously, posts written on 4chan to blow off steam and commiserate with people in your own camp do not always reflect the nuance and complexity of one’s actual views.
EDIT: Well, since I just brought up the subject of having nuanced views, I should acknowledge that I don’t think the motives of AI developers are entirely pure-hearted in all cases. If you read the /sdg/ and /hdg/ threads, hardly a thread goes by without someone saying “fuck artists” or “it’s over for artcels”. There’s clearly some amount of resentment there for people who possessed a skill that they wanted, but were not able to obtain for whatever reason. As for a broader UN/WEF conspiracy to reduce the global population by replacing workers with automation - obviously I don’t have any concrete evidence of an intentional conspiracy, but I do fear that a future like that is possible, even if no one is consciously intending to bring it about.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Vibe check on whether current AI architectures are plateauing?
Recently a few insiders have started backing away from the apocalyptic singularity talk, e.g. Francois Chollet saying that LLMs are an offramp on the path to AGI.
OpenAI's CTO recently said "the AI models that OpenAI have in their labs are not much more advanced than those which are publicly available". She tries to spin this as a positive thing - the average person off the street is able to use the same cutting-edge tech that's being used in our top research labs! But this is obviously a concerning thing to say to the optimists who have been convinced that "AGI has been achieved internally" for a while now. Of course, you can interpret this statement as not including GPT-5, because it doesn't exist yet - and once GPT-5 is finished training, they will have a model that's significantly more advanced than anything currently available. So we'll have to wait and see.
Based on posts at /r/stablediffusion, the newest version of Stable Diffusion 3 appears to be a regression in many ways. Perhaps the model has latent potential that will be unlocked by community finetunes, but if we were experiencing exponential progress, you would expect the models to get better, not worse.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
And as a tactical choice it is itself a ideological commitment. It’s not merely ‘rapid change’- it requires an acceptance of top down impositions, rationalism, the idea of de novo societal shifts implemented by a vanguard party. I reject all of that ideologically.
You are right to point out that the distinction between tactics and principles is not as clean as I made it out to be. But I'm skeptical that recourse to revolution is always indicative of the deep ideological commitments that you portray it as having. Whatever it may entail ideologically, I don't think it's a good criteria for cleaving the global ideological space at the joints.
The American Revolution was, by most accounts, based on the principles of classical liberalism; principles that I imagine Hlynka and his fellow travelers would endorse wholeheartedly. Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution? Does it have to be denounced? Were the founding fathers necessarily committed to a certain "top down rationalist" view of human nature that true Red Tribers would have to reject?
Or consider the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which instituted an Islamic theocracy. They certainly claim to be following a conservative tradition of some kind; it might not be your preferred tradition, but it's a tradition. Are they too committed to an Enlightenment rationalist view of human nature? Does Islamic theocracy share a deep philosophical affinity with Marxist communism that has hitherto gone unnoticed? And the American Revolution too?
The most reasonable conclusion, on my view, is not that revolutions are a result of people having a deep ideological commitment to the idea of a top down rationally organized society. Revolutions are a result of people wanting power, and having the means and opportunity to seize it. This is universal to left and right, old and new.
I agree with much of the DR that gays are perverts who shouldn’t be allowed near kids, that women shouldn’t vote, etc. But my reasoning and therefore implementation of these ideas is very different.
Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I'm just curious.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
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No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
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Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
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Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."
Just some scattered thoughts.
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
...
It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.
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