Tanista
11hr ago
I think Deneen just doesn't trust liberal promises. He is quite clear that he thinks liberalism is imperialistic and responds to weaknesses or contradictions in its own ideology or society by demanding more power towards itself and its imperatives. The standard for "freedom" is continually pushed back in ways that increase the power of the state.
The anecdote serves his purposes quite well in illustrating all these tendencies.
It's actually a criticism of his book raised by others: this doesn't really augur well for a Benedictine solution, which he gestures towards.
Tanista
12hr ago
3 is too general. It's "Therefore we should expect men to continue to do so". My issue is that an inherent lack of in group preference alone can't explain it since past men figured out how to coordinate here.
Tanista
12hr ago
Not organize promote the interests of all men as a whole. But to protect against something all men have a reason to protect against.
Tanista
13hr ago
I think that because historically male led societies have been brutal to disfavored or enemy men but have general taboos against adultery, presumably cause men don't care if some man dies in a jail cell but care if they might get cucked.
As for child support cucking other men...yes, that would be great. But you can also be called for child support too AFAIK.
As for the Haredi, they're a much larger percentage of Israel's electorate than any conceivable US comparison.
And this is actually a positive scenario. We have a relatively clean cut solution.
Sometimes science doesn't save us from ourselves and instead the thorny, indissoluble problem remains but most people can simply not contemplate going backwards and instead we either try out never more speculative (and dangerous) social solutions or cope that this is actually all to the good and you're a bad person for wondering actually. Or everyone knows something is deeply off but the best that can be done is talking about it on a panel show and pretending that means having agency.
Tanista
13hr ago
Even with a low in group preference you would think that men would organize jointly on matters that impact all men, like with the evolutionary disadvantage men have when it comes to ensuring paternity.
And, well, this is what they did historically. What we call patriarchy is mostly just a way of managing this problem.
I don't think it can be explained purely by low in group favoritism for that reason.
How can a modern liberal woman who goes to grad school and has 2 or 3 children compete with a Haredi or Amish woman who marries at 18 and has 6-10 children?
Convert their kids. Some people already have the illiberal instincts to justify this.
[Per Patrick Deneen]We were discussing the practice of Rumspringa—literally, “running around”—a mandatory time of separation of young adults from the community during which they partake of the offerings of modern liberal society. The period of separation lasts usually about a year, at the end of which the young person must choose between the two worlds. An overwhelming number, approaching 90 percent, choose to return to be baptized and to accept norms and strictures of their community that forbid further enjoyment of the pleasure of liberal society. Some of my former colleagues took this as a sign that these young people were in fact not “choosing” as free individuals. One said, “We will have to consider ways of freeing them.” Perfect liberal consent requires perfectly liberated individuals, and the evidence that Amish youth were responding to the pull of family, community, and tradition marked them as unfree.
I'm sure the state can do plenty of things to try to suppress fertility. We've arguably mastered that trick by accident.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
I'm beginning to think the specific argument isn't the thing and this is the ultimate point. You have a bunch of neurotic ideologues (and, to be fair, people who outright earn a living from adulterating everything with politics) and their victory is forcing you to be as neurotic as they are about it. I'm sure they'd say it was consciousness raising or something but that's what it seems like to me.
In theory you could have just played a game about a child and thought nothing else about it. Instead, you've been forced to do woke philosophy to figure out what the hell drives this stuff.
Unreasonable demands actually work better here. There's always something. The more ridiculous it is the more sensitive you become about everything because everything can be "problematized" and the little woke-model living rent-free in your brain knows that more anodyne things yield more points when problematized.
This struck me during the Snape debacle: people, antiwoke people, were pre-outraged on essentially woke grounds (are we gonna watch some white jocks beat up a black kid??). What better victory than to loom so large in your opponent's mind that they can't escape your ideology and are in a permanent defensive crouch?
There's no winning this once it starts.
Yeah, I'm inclined to believe that the progressive victory was going to happen anyway because it did everywhere else. If anything Gamergate is just sort of the backlash from people who sense something is moving but can't really stop it.
"Go woke, go broke" is probably overrated but gaming seems to be one of the places where it regularly happens, for the same reasons it happens at the top end of the film industry.
Isn't Ireland benefiting from being vastly smaller and from being a low tax location for foreign corporations?
Tanista
4d ago
Dawkins of all fucking people evoking Muslim women while he lectured about how this woman was over-reacting because she was white Westerner was too richly ironic.
Why? The New Atheist position was sincerely paternalistic and progressive. Religion is bad because it oppresses women and once you make that judgment you'd need to be a Motte-style contrarian to not think Muslim women have it worse.
Tanista
7d ago
Yeah, that's a pretty hard sell given that manifestly it is considered a problem in the community and even rich blacks line up behind Democrats as a result.
Tanista
8d ago
As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it.
Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?
The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.
It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?
Tanista
8d ago
Same for the weird relationship with the Sublime
The Sublime seems to resolve most of your complaints it seems to me.
It's a process any collective group can go through that takes them to a realm where it's proven nothing can die nor get bored (in fact, realspace is so boring in comparison most people never return) and there's endless discovery and growth.
It's more democratic than realspace since non-Minds can have it and apparently all sapient races can achieve it.
Tanista
8d ago
If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia?
It's a dystopia because of the "oppressive" downside, Culture Minds are not oppressive, just superior.
Tanista
15d ago
They also went after Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz for being anti-Islamic extremists/racists (they eventually settled this with an apology).
Harris I can get even if I wouldn't defend it. He dared to defend Charles Murray after all.
The Nawaz one was just particularly grating . Reminded me of a lot of leftists who don't actually know or care about Islam but feel justified in taking a stance on it based on how it fits their own domestic political battles (this is actually my charitable take: the alternative is that they got taken in by anti-reform Muslims). Absolute no sense of care in how they use their supposed expertise.
My take is a different one. 3k people killed in 9/11 is bad, sure, but his real success was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan. Not only did the Taliban kill another 3k US and allied troops during 'Enduring Freedom', they spent more than 150 billion dollars on it.
At the risk of sounding callous, this was totally survivable.
If all Osama Bin Laden had to show for his actions is a displaced (temporarily or otherwise) Taliban and a bullet in his face it wouldn't have gone down as badly. It might even have been accepted as the cost of having an empire.
The damage domestically was due to the neocons deciding to overdraw on the opportunity he gave them in Iraq by lying.
This is simply not cost-effective when the marginal price of a QALY in US healthcare is on the order of 100k$.
I'd take this seriously if it was a response to a hurricane. Given human adversaries who can respond to your math I think it's not a good idea to tell shoplifters so long as they stay under $X they're good.
It might be more expensive and "pointless" in a sensible world but you're just going to have to ruin some lives here.
Nor are jihadists motivated by fear of retaliation, Bin Laden himself was (I think) a minor Saudi noble who could have happily lived without having to work a single day in his life, but instead spent it hiding in caves doing Jihad.
They may, however, be motivated by weakness. Osama saw the US pull out of Somalia in one of its fits of humanitarianism over a relatively small human cost. This is not the sort of message you want to send to a person like that and the organization he leads.
Tanista
17d ago
- The Shield, which is a better version of Breaking Bad (which imo got way too enamored with its lead for such a moralistic show). This is not to say that it was fun. I found it an incredibly stressful watch but the show had basically made tension its trademark circa Season 6 and never stopped so it was true to form.
- Succession also knew to wrap itself up instead of overstaying (it was on the brink) in a way that feels true to the plot.
- The Good Place expanded as far as it could go, had maybe one additional twist on the premise and then ended well.
Suppose instead, after first going viral, Mr. Beast had decided that "looks are the most important factor in achieving positive social outcomes" and doubled down on that, rather than his 'stunt' focused avenue. Would he have ended up with better social outcomes? No.
On the flipside, Liver King's hard-earned clout immediately evaporated when he broke kayfabe and admitted it was all based on a contradiction and he was full of shit.
MrBeast's gimmick is basically inviting you to watch a Youtube nerd recreate Fear Factor with some additional consumerism for that fantasy element. So long as he can find some new wrinkle in that formula (or new people) he can get attention. Not sure it's the same for people like Clavicular.
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model?
Ban social media.
I don't see another way to square the reaction to the recent articles about female radicalization (where most people seem to think the internet/ideology caused an unjustified reaction) with this post (where we seem to take it for granted that men are reacting to some objective fact about their circumstances). The internet is the common factor. We can't control when people feel oppressed but you theoretically could ban the internet and stop them being subject to memeplexes that push people towards self-victimization.
Of course, a lot of us don't consider this feasible or wise in practice.
Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
No, they all seem crazy.
Seriously, who is the best adjusted streamer? It seems to select for the most dramatic. Going down the list of streamers I know something about:
- Destiny, of all the recent left-wing influencers probably one of the best political streamers because he's autistic enough to read sources and then disagree if he thinks it something doesn't make sense (which let him get shockingly far in recent Israel discourse with "experts" like Finkelstein) but has an incurable addiction to crazy white women that inevitably destroys whatever career he's built up since his last relapse. May have also blown Fuentes.
- Fuentes, may or may not have been blown by Destiny.
- Hasan Piker, the least masculine masculine role model who has drama continually. Honestly, you might as well put Ezra Klein on TRT and he'd do a better job of it.
- Clav, overdosed on stream.
- Johnny Somali, ran into Korean justice because he was stupid.
- Vitaly, ran into Philippines justice because he was stupid.
- IShowSpeed...okay, he seems pretty cool. I only see him doing a) implausibly athletic things or b) visiting various countries and actually being well-received cause he's not going to do some bullshit.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary.
Bin Laden's attempts to harm Americans overseas were "annoying". His attempt to harm America on 9/11 and get its attention was simply "successful". He made it clear that he had no intention of just being another annoying nemesis nestled in the Outer Rim.
Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
Something can be necessary and not an existential matter. Nations that have the wherewithal and are expected to respond to aggression globally can only be so circumspect.
Packing up and leaving other inconvenient battles may have been what emboldened Bin Laden in the first place.
That could be it.
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