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
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.
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.
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.
I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.
The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?
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.
I don’t get why being a prostitute is a bad thing.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.
Bruh. Come on.
If Bud Light put out a commercial that featured only white people and leftists boycotted them and the VP of marketing got fired, we'd all agree that was a cancellation.
Modern gender theory is nonsense.
Men are men, women are women, don’t make it complicated.
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.
Because NovelAI was discovered to have illegally copied open source code in their leaked repositories, an error that was admittedly quickly reverted by their devs
So when they copy open source code without having the proper rights to do so, it's a problem, but when they copy art on the other hand...
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
This seems like the first criteria that you'd want to relax.
I don't actually understand why other men care so much about body count. I mean, I can understand it on an intellectual level, but not on a visceral level. Perhaps that's just a side effect of my general pattern of sexual deviancy. I also have no instinctive revulsion towards incest between consenting adults, for example, although many other people swear to me that they most assuredly do.
"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.
The fact that anyone takes "For Bee" seriously is completely wild to me.
The best analogy I can think of is that it's like if a dad is going through his tween daughter's text messages, and he comes across one that says "Sally isn't allowed in our secret club because we don't like her". And instead of brushing it off with a "bleh, kids can be so mean", he instead becomes deeply concerned with what will become of Sally if she is denied the prestigious honors of being part of the secret club. Like, obviously being in the secret club is the most important predictor of life success, right? What can we do to rectify this injustice? Can we get the school involved? He forgets that he's supposed to be an adult on the outside looking in, and instead he becomes completely absorbed in the (obviously childish and ultimately unimportant) narrative.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so. It's almost a tautology. Humanity will not go extinct; but if it does, it'll be because it deserved to, and there won't have been anything you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way.
Also:
I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race.
This is undoubtedly the sort of comforting thing that one might like to believe, because it is tantamount to saying that there are no real conflicts to deal with, only pseudo-conflicts. But it is of course false. Racial/ethnic conflicts are real; they are based in material reality, and they have real effects on people. The alleged "conflict" between men and women is a purely symbolic construct, a postmodern creation of cyberspace. Women have neither the ability nor the desire to sustain an actual, physical conflict against men for any length of time. And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.
I encourage you to travel to Palestine and tell people that the real divide is not between Muslims and Jews, but between men and women, and see what kinds of responses you get.
Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.
STEM gave us:
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Nuclear weapons
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Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
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Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
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AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.
So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose. And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it. Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.
Why make it a gendered thing? Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity. Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture? Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison? Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience). So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.
If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat. If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.
by sending expectations for middle aged women to the moon without doing anything to change the reality on the ground modern Western culture claims for itself another victim.
I don't get where this meme comes from. The idea that "women" as a group have "high expectations".
Plenty of absolute loser men manage to get laid and get married all the time. No money, unstable employment, obese, criminal record. They still find a way. Nondescript men too, men who are average and unremarkable in every respect. I've seen instances of every type of case. Clearly, the women that these men are dating don't have high expectations, at least not in the way that's typically thought of on this forum.
Perhaps men need to reexamine their own expectations? If every woman you're interested in is, in turn, only interested in millionaire VCs, what does that say about you?
Inb4 “low effort post ban”
One of the reasons this rule exists, especially for breaking news stories, is precisely because the story may be evolving rapidly and we don’t have all the facts yet. Limited/incomplete information is not conducive to producing the sort of high quality analysis that we want to cultivate here. Also the story might just turn out to be a total nothingburger that doesn’t even warrant a top level post. Kinda like the last Israeli missile attack on Iran.
Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists?
No. That's not it.
I'm not, typically, a moralist. I hate cancel culture; I hate people who act like they can judge others. I roll my eyes equally at leftists who work themselves into knots over sexism and racism, and trads who gnash their teeth at the withering away of the values of yesteryear. Whatever happened, I ask, to freedom? Isn't anyone going to stand up for freedom? Freedom, the most protean of all ideals, against the dreary weave of thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots: the freedom to dare and dream, the freedom to be true to what is one's ownmost, no matter how idiosyncratic, no matter how questionable or uncanny.
But freedom has a limit; it is, after all, only one ideal among many, one concept among many, no matter how charming of a concept it may be. I can't actually bring myself to get upset if someone gets canceled over AI art. That's how high the stakes are for me - my other "principles" turn to dust in the face of this reality. This makes me a hypocrite; but so what? If I contradict myself, then very well, I contradict myself. Some instincts are too powerful to be ignored.
I think most people have a limit like this - the limit beyond which talk of "freedom" reveals itself to be a hollow game, a luxury to be reserved for more genteel times, a mirage that dissipates when it is confronted with something of genuine weight and seriousness. AI art is that limit for me; other people will have their own, and I will try not to judge them for it, even when I find their beliefs to be incomprehensible. For the individuals who truly have (or at least claim to have) no limit, no possible limit to freedom, we might rightly view them with suspicion. Attempting to subsist on a spiritual diet consisting of nothing but the NAP alone is the veganism of the soul; it is lacking a certain red-blooded vitality, there is something missing. There can be no great love without great hatred.
I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
The fact that you are so perplexed by the response is, indeed, part of the frustration.
It is my belief that after the AI takeover, there will be increasingly less human-to-human interaction.
This is a major concern, yes.
One of the worst possible outcomes of ASI/singularity would be everyone plugging into their own private simulated worlds. Yudkowskian doom at the hands of the paperclip maximizers may be preferable. I'm undecided.
who would you rather spend time with: an AI who will do whatever you want and be whatever you want, anytime, or a grumpy human on her own schedule who wants to complain about someone who said "hi" to her without her consent?
Freedom is boring, not to mention aesthetically milquetoast, if not outright ugly in some cases. I have always been opposed to trends towards greater freedom and democratization in the arts - open world video games, audience participation in performance art and installations, and of course AI painting and photo editing recently - I find it all quite distasteful.
Is Tolstoy applicable here? Free men are all alike in their freedom; but to each unfree man we may bestow a most uniquely and ornately crafted set of shackles.
@Folamh3 made the following claim:
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang. [...] I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we're profoundly ashamed of [...]
to which I objected, briefly. @twodigits expressed interest in a more detailed and thorough rebuttal. I said that I didn't want to compress it to a list of bullet points; but I realized upon further reflection that there was probably nothing shorter than a small book that could do full justice to this topic. I started to prepare an abridged version of my argument to post here, but even the abridged version broke 10k characters by the time I was finished with the introduction. So, you're getting the bullet point version. I'm happy to further expand on any of the points raised here, if people are interested.
Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror. The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject - and sex is traumatic, uncanny, and unsettling in a particularly aesthetically interesting way; it is simultaneously both a natural and necessary act, and also the center of our strictest ethical prohibitions and most ferocious spiritual crises. I don't think that every artistic work that has pornographic content necessarily has high value, or even any value at all; undoubtedly, the majority do not. I only think that pornographic content isn't disqualifying when evaluating a work's artistic merit. That a work contains graphic sex is, in a vacuum, as informative as saying that the work contains depictions of landscapes or sunsets.
It has been remarked repeatedly in the psychoanalytic (Freudian) tradition that there is an intrinsic link between art and trauma. Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror:
I have sought in this book to demonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its power, is based. By suggesting that literature is its privileged signifier, I wish to point out that, far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems to have it, this kind of literature, or even literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power, "the great darkness" (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continual compromising: "Literature and Evil" (Georges Bataille). Hence also its being seen as taking the place of the sacred, which, to the extent that it has left us without leaving us alone, calls forth the quacks from all four corners of perversion. Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word. [pg. 208]
McGowan and Engley on their Why Theory podcast, a podcast which analyzes both classical philosophy and contemporary culture from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, put it perhaps more poignantly and directly in their episode on psychoanalytic aesthetics:
The art object doesn't give me something... it takes away something. I think that's the absolute psychoanalytic premise. You look for the great work of art by looking for those works that take away something from us. [62:48]
I think this is such a lovely formulation, one that strikes me as almost self-evidently true. Existence is suffering, and the greatest works of art reconcile us to that fact; and in some sense it really is just that simple.
Further justification for this premise is given by framing it as an anti-capitalist gesture (again quoting from the same episode):
[The great work of art] takes away from us the dream of success, so there's a way in which the great work of art, psychoanalytically understood, is inherently anti-capitalist. Because it does not allow us to believe in the promise of accumulation. Its whole point is you have to keep going [emphasis mine - this is what distinguishes the psychoanalytic theory of art from mere nihilism or defeatism] - but even if you win, even if you get it, what you're getting is nothing. [50:00]
Now, I'm significantly more friendly to capitalism as a literal economic system than, well, than basically everyone else who's into weirdo continental philosophy. So unlike most of the intended audience for this work, I don't think that merely saying that something is anti-capitalist makes it ipso facto good. But if "capitalism" is treated here as a synecdoche for utilitarianism, then I can definitely get behind the sentiment being expressed. Art is the domain where we refuse to be governed by utilitarian logic; it's wasteful, irrational, even to the point of being actively detrimental; but that's what makes it beautiful.
Funny enough, in this same episode, there's a section which is very relevant to a post that @Baila wrote some time back - at 44:30 it is flatly stated that a canon of the great works of psychoanalytic art would simply be "the works that induce the most amount of psychic trauma". Eisenman has company! Of course, a purely literal reading of this claim is hard to defend from objections: if the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art? Obviously some additional nuance has to be added, but I still think the claim is gesturing at something importantly true. I would perhaps invoke something like the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean: everything in the right amount, at the right time, in its proper place. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing; you have to have the right amount of the good thing, and no more. I think we can imagine too, a "proper amount" of suffering. Not too little, and not too much, but rather exactly as much as is called for.
If this premise about the link between art and trauma is accepted, does anything more even need to be said in defense of sexuality as legitimate artistic content? Plainly, there is something traumatic, unsettling, "shameful" about depictions of sexuality; otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly controlled, and the claim I'm responding to would never have been made in the first place and I would not be writing this post. "No, don't go there, that's too far" - well, it's precisely an artist's job to go to such places. Nonetheless, I think some further elaboration is possible.
In many ways, sexuality is the artistic subject par excellence, because sex makes everyone see like an artist does; they see what is concealed from ordinary sight, they see the act as more than it really is. The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects. There is something intrinsically spiritual about it, something intrinsically excessive - "here, no, here you have to stop; this is different." In an ironic way, the censorship of sexualized art is itself already a recapitulation of the fundamental artistic act; the distinguishing of an object against all reason, an act of resolute commitment, the creation of a value. Why, exactly, would anyone get so dreadfully upset about pixels on a screen, numbers on a hard drive, light entering the retina? But you know it's not just pixels on a screen; you see it as something more. It is precisely this "something more" that art makes us confront.
In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan spoke on the origin of the incest taboo:
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifer and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws, which are regulated by a system of exchanges that he defines as elementary structures – this is the case to the extent that guidance is given concerning the choice of a proper partner or, in other words, order is introduced into marriage, which produces a new dimension alongside that of heredity. But even when Lévi-Strauss explains all that, and spends a lot of time discussing incest in order to show what makes its prohibition necessary, he does not go beyond suggesting why the father does not marry a daughter – because the daughters must be exchanged. But why doesn’t a son sleep with his mother? There is something mysterious there.
He, of course, dismisses justifications based on the supposedly dangerous biological effects of inbreeding. He proves that, far from producing results involving the resurgence of a recessive gene that risks introducing degenerative effects, a form of endogamy is commonly used in all fields of breeding of domestic animals, so as to improve a strain, whether animal or vegetable. The law only operates in the realm of culture. And the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son / mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasizes.
If everything else around it may find a justification, this central point nevertheless remains. If one reads Lévi-Strauss’s text closely, one can see that it is the most enigmatic and the most stubborn point separating nature from culture.
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from. This was empirically vindicated by Haidt's work on moral reasoning - people persisted in their moral judgements even when all of their discursive justifications had been disarmed. Only the intrinsic, transcendent horror of the act remained. But it is precisely this transcendent horror that is the domain of art.
Anyway. I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something. I just think that, as I said in the beginning, the fact that a work contains graphic sexual content should not be an intrinsic mark against it. Every work has to be evaluated holistically, in its full context. I don't really accept a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" types of artistic content in the first place, but even if I did, I would think that sexuality was very much on the legitimate side, for all the reasons aforementioned.
Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?
Plainly not.
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".
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.
Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum. I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics. It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.
It essentially removes the market forces that push people away from poor decisions.
That's basically the raison d'être of leftism.
I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.
Sad in what sense?
I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.
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Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.
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