EfficientSyllabus
No bio...
User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Most artists (graphic designers) who get paid to do stuff on an everyday basis aren't the next Michelangelo and aren't doing something extremely novel at the forefront of artistic expression. They just design another corporate logo, paint weird Rule 34 images, etc.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
First, I agree there is some value in putting in effort into something. It demonstrates a virtue in the person, the ability to delay gratification, to work towards a purpose. The reason we like this is probably evolutionarily determined, as such people are useful allies in bad times. Admiring people for the effort they put into climbing a mountain etc. is alright, it pushes us to become better and apply effort in smaller scale things. It's a symbolic distillation of our everyday struggles and shortcomings. That's all fine.
What I don't see as virtuous though is the other half of the attitude you show, namely that you want to feel that the stuff around you was done with a lot of human effort. Essentially this is the opposite of striving for efficiency, which we have been doing as humans since time immemorial. It would take more effort to swim to the other shore, but instead we build ships. It would take more effort to walk, but at some point people decided to ride horses instead and then invented cars.
Things that are made in an inefficient way for the purpose of demonstrating extra human effort are luxuries. Probably it would feel nice to be carried around town in a litter but why do that if there are cars? Understandably, it is a way to signal status if you can get many people to do inefficient work for you. Essentially it's a way for you to show that you can boss people around, having amassed (perhaps over generations) enough effort-tokens (presumably through some efficient method, using leverage, not by the sweat of your brow) to do this. It makes one feel important. I, however, think that the enjoyment of other people's senseless labor for showing off one's own status is a vice.
We should continue to use our brainpower to achieve more with less effort. This is not an argument to be lazy, but to work smart and get more done. Putting up artificial constraints makes no sense in general. Now if the constraints allow for the exploration of something interesting, that's another things. For example it could be a way to hone one's wits, eg the limitation of size in demo scene demos etc., to see novel ideas and creative solutions. That's all fine. It's also all fine if the actual hand made product is better. Furniture made of solid wood, designed to fit your rooms is better than the cheap stuff you buy at IKEA. But the reason to want it is that it's better. Also if you want lots of stuff done for you manually, how do you justify that? What makes you think that you deserve the fruits of all that effort? And independent of the answer, can you understand that many people can't afford having so many people jump around to their whim, and for them increases in efficiency can bring more improvement in quality of life?
The difference is that a 15 year old will be 25 in 10 years, but a woman doesn't become a man (in general...). And they'd say the reason that people don't watch women's football is sexism.
It's also interesting how the popularity gap is different in different sports. At least in Hungary, women's handball and water polo are not much less popular than men's. Same with swimming. But for football/soccer the gap is enormous, approx zero care about women's football and men's is hugely popular.
Regarding not the same sport: I wonder if someone would argue that all athletes should earn the same, regardless of sport. So a volleyball player should earn the same as a football player, because they both train equally hard, and the only cause of difference in earnings is some form of bias.
The pope recently went to Canada to apologize to the indigenous people for the treatment of kids in residential schools. I've been meaning to ask about this but this is a good opportunity. Is there any new discovery that prompted that pope visit? Because last time I've read about this stuff I got the impression that, as you say, these graves were just detected from the surface with some radar but there were no excavations, prompting suspicion that these may not actually be mass graves. Has this changed?
As for the question. I think it depends on how seriously you take this "mission". Because you are going against the mainstream here, if you simply don't wear the shirt, people won't be able to wrap their heads around why. Like are you actually so evil that you support the murder of indigenous children? Remember, most people, including teachers, probably know much less about the details and have read up on it much less than you have. Simply rejecting the narrative and symbolism won't change any minds, it just puts you into the "bad person" category in people's minds. If you want people to understand your resistance, make sure that you explain your rationale (this will be good towards ignorant normies, but it may attract the wrath of the already invested activists). If you don't trust yourself to keep calm and explain your reasoning over and over, then it's probably better to just wear it and shut up. Or maybe wear it but explain your reservations about the whole thing at watercooler conversations etc.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
The battle of the sexes is natural, but alliances within the sexes seems less straightforward.
Every harmony results from some conflict settling at some equilibrium. Men and women have different imperatives, desires, points of view, etc. and these fundental conflicts have to bump up against one another and get settled at some compromise but with some leverage and threat remaining, to keep both parties to hold to their end of the bargain.
Such conflicts even arise between generations and even the most intimate connections like mother and child. Both on a social and a biological level. The embryo already tries to exploit the mother in utero, trying to grab on to as much resources and nutrition as possible, which the mother must defend itself from.
Even one's own cells and body parts are in conflict and this is most apparent in cancer.
Men and women are in a biological arms race too, a lot of deception, signaling, trying to see through all that and more layers of this (with reality providing a grounding through life and death in natural selection, and so an anchor to truth).
But it doesn't follow that members of the same sex are allies in all this. Rather, they just have a different type of competition going on. Especially among males, who are more competitive (that's why they need to be so big). I think the MRA idea of male solidarity is therefore doomed to be low status. A man who needs other men to protect his interests against women is seen as weak. Now women are competitive among themselves too, but typically less openly and overtly and more subtly than men. So the expectation would be that they also shouldn't have too much purely sex-based solidarity to each other in reality, but perhaps more pretension of it at least, than in the case of men.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Of course, the weight of "denier" comes from "Holocaust denier". Then recently people started using "climate change denier" and also "election denier", "vaccine denier" etc. The association with Holocaust denial also makes it easier to argue that these other types of denials should similarly become illegal.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
LARP has a more specific meaning, even in the insult version. A certain Don Quixote-like quality of delusional ly pretending to be something anachronistic, from a different time. Also not fully standing behind the thing with proper skin in the game. Playing a tough guy without backing it up. Now whether this applies to the Azov people, I don't know but accusing them of being unreal, weak, all talk, etc. is a classic insult. It doesn't make those words meaningless.
Heavyweight champions are certainly seen as more important and impressive than featherweight ones. The featherweight champion could any day participate in heavyweight matches but would get his ass whooped. Meanwhile the heavyweight champion is banned from featherweight matches because everyone know he'd massacre those guys.
But yes, weight classes are a good comparison to sex segregation. Another example is age segregation, eg U19, U20, U21... tournaments in football. But also there the main one is the unlimited one and few people follow the U20 World Cup.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced
No, spectators want to see someone being excellent, beat world records, and show the peak of human performance. Because we like to watch greatness. Yes, effort factors into it, determination etc, but nobody gives a damn if all that hard effort didn't result in actually being excellent. All that sort of stuff would just be niceties, participation trophy, consolation prize.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It's a specific Soviet phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
The same sentence stood out for me. What a masterful twist of rhetoric: in the name of protecting agency, I forbid you to speak about this thing! I can only imagine that it's somehow embarrassing (or can be framed so) for the bluecheck left.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
And if a rabbit farmer Pole moves to the US presumably his kid will also feel like a generic white dude in California or wherever.
people with black skin seem to feel some sort of absurdist kinsmanship with other people of their skin color
Is it so? I heard that recent African immigrant communities in the US often don't feel much kinsmanship with African Americans (descendants of slaves).
Also by white/whitey they don't tend to mean Poles, but people descended from colonizer nations and empires, who are mostly Western Europeans (by ancestry).
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Looks like a version of the scientific method / empiricism. A scientific theory is good if it leads to accurate predictions on the outcomes of future experiments or events.
But to say that this is also the only useful measure of intelligence seems dubious. For example solving math problems or following complex argumentation, and rhetorically convincing other people are also marks of intelligence and they don't require making geopolitical predictions. You can be a highly intelligent theologian who knows the ins and outs of the trinity and all the heretical versions of it and this still demonstrates intelligence, even though the subject matter has no predictive value about physical reality.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Ok but the point is still that the fuss was about the "you can't protect your people" part and that this might happen again and the symbolism of destroying the tallest towers, which also symbolize the US leading the western world or even the globe regarding economic matters etc.
It wasn't particularly about just those 3000 people individually. The smuggled implication in saying "a 9/11 a week" is that somehow there should have been somewhat similar levels of concern each week as there was due to the OG 9/11, and that clearly doesn't follow.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Maybe examine the source of your anxiety and the assumptions behind them. Tribal feelings are probably natural/ingrained but what the tribe is is cultural. For some reason you learned to associate tribe with skin color/race. If a bunch of Bulgarians moved into your neighborhood and stayed in their circles, cooked and ate Bulgarian food, spoke Bulgarian on the street, etc. would you feel less anxious because they are white? How about Arabs who are white-passing? I guess it isn't exactly about skin color, but level of cultural integration and connectedness to other parts of society as opposed to people living in culturally segregated parallel societies. Or perhaps about the level of education among the different groups. (But if it really is about race, I would say you've become - perhaps unconsciously - racist.)
There's nothing wrong with wishing for a united, high-trust community in your town or city as opposed to splintered ethnic or racial tribes being in conflict with each other. But how would you feel about the future if it consisted of people of various racial and ethnic background living together, regularly interacting and sharing a base culture, attaining similar levels of education etc.?
You could also examine your beliefs about some sharp separation between white and non-white people, which is quite nonsense on a global view (but may be a good simplification in certain times and places, like the US some decades ago when most people were either descended from European immigrants or African slaves). White people are not "the same", the culture and people of the Nordics are quite different from the Mediterraneans, Slavic nations are different from the French or the English. The Greeks are pretty similar to Cypriots and Turks, who are not that dissimilar from people of the Levant and so on all the way. My point with this is two-fold, all whites are not that close to you as you may seem to think (eg I as a Hungarian don't feel more connected to a Spaniard than to a secular Iranian simply based on skin tone) and that non-whites aren't some homogeneous bunch either.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
seeing a 9/11 a week
This is a misleading unit of measuring death tolls. 9/11's significance was mainly not in the number of dead victims, but the symbolism and terror instilled in a nation, a felling of invincibility evaporating. Imagine the alternative history where they fly into the statue of liberty instead or the WTC but at night and only 300 people die. It would still be a pretty similarly big deal.
Also widely practiced for exactly that reason in socialist/communist countries. Used to be mandatory in socialist Hungary too.
Furthermore, "uniforms: yes or no" isn't the main dividing line, but what the uniform's goal is, what it expresses and represents. The classic conservative (aristocratic etc.) uniforms would express one's social standing and position in the social hierarchy. The leftist, communist uniforms had the opposite goal, to erase those old class markers and make everyone look like an equal comrade.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Absolutely no idea what this means
They mean to say that kids, presumably, learn those shapes in a transformation invariant way, just like they would for other things. For example, a dog is a dog whether it faces towards the left or the right. But p isn't p if it faces the other way, then it's a q, which is its own separate thing. For real objects out there we have some mental 3d representation that we can mentally rotate (if we are shape rotators) and manipulate. But the same strategy doesn't work the same way for letters.
This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.
Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"
I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.
The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Circumcision in the religious context is an initiation ritual, it's a mark of belonging to community. Initiations often contain an element of sacrifice. This can be derided as mere exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy or a way to trap people, (eg when the mafia requires that you commit a crime to enter the org, so they can be sure you won't go to the police as you'd also implicate yourself), but it can also be seen more charitably as a test of commitment, a filter for serious loyalty etc.
Circumcision can be seen as a symbolicized, minimized form of child sacrifice. Now you don't sacrifice your firstborn (who would be your main inheritor), you simply ritualistically chop a bit off of your kids most valuable part, the one that will continue your genetic lineage. It's symbolic but sort of indicates your willingness to sacrifice for the community and that you have skin in the game.
Why secular and Christian Americans do it is more complicated and circumcised people come up with a jumble of nonsense post hoc reasons. It's almost as worthless to ask them as asking single women how to be successful in dating as a man. Tons of mental stopsigns involved.
I would assume it's probably some sort of judaizing Protestant Christian influence originally.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.
Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?
To show off. Jesus didn't say "yo, here's a loaf of bread, it's only one, so it's very valuable, make sure to hoard it". He instead multiplied the loaves of bread and the fish to feed the crowd. Sharing is good. If you have a reliable way to copy something, you should do it. Same way I think about file sharing, free software etc.
More options
Context Copy link