Discussed a couple of days ago in the latest "why does Hollywood suck now" subthread and now finally here: GRRM goes into business for himself and criticizes House of the Dragon Season 2. Reddit link with text, in case archive goes down too
He also spoils the Season 3 outline, just to salt the Earth. The talk of the butterfly effect is telling me that this is a man that regrets biting his tongue after Lady Stoneheart & Aegon lol.
It was taken down immediately but I'm shocked he even published it, given his status as producer and how unprofessional it is to reveal season outlines for an ongoing show. HBO had long enough to take him into a darkly lit room and threaten his royalties.
Tanista
2mo ago
Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
And yet we can somehow decide who needs to go into a 4 year degree and tens of thousands in debt when they're seventeen? We're already putting people in essentially extremely expensive and extended apprentice training!
Either we do have some way to tell, in which case we can use it. Or we don't and the huge amounts of support for a system that is not only costly but damaging to fertility (especially for people who don't then even end up with a useful degree, or a degree at all) becomes much more dubious.
Tanista
2mo ago
A society that respects elders has kids naturally and almost subconsciously slow down to meet their speed. My grandmother took care of me and managed it because she knew to let us run sometimes and we knew when to behave.
The bigger problem is that a society full of people who're expected to move for work can count on grandparents less.
That and there was a lot of slack picked up by extended family that Americans may just not be able to depend upon both because of the moving and the small family size.
Tanista
2mo ago
There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).
But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.
A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.
Tanista
2mo ago
We Stargate fans blame it for killing that franchise too, except it was more the network wanting a series that focused more on the melodrama BSG had in its later (arguably worst) seasons than the classic SG technobabble optimism.
Tanista
2mo ago
Reading those articles, they're pretty neutral - or ambivalent - towards those claims.
His office has issued repeated statements in recent weeks and days stressing the importance of maintaining control over the Philadelphi Corridor. “The need for sustained control of the Philadelphi Corridor is a security one… If Israel withdraws, the pressure to prevent its recapture will be enormous, putting our ability to return in significant doubt,” read the most recent one issued on Tuesday.
The remarks drew hostile responses from other ministers, as well as from Netanyahu, according to reports.
“If we give in to Hamas’s demands, like Gallant wants, we’ve lost the war,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted saying.
However, the outlet claimed that Netanyahu also said he was willing to compromise in other areas aside from the Philadelphi Corridor, maintaining that a hostage deal with Hamas was still possible.
Both Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Israel Katz reportedly accused Gallant of creating a dynamic in which Hamas would receive concessions from Israel as a result of murdering hostages.
These all seem like reasonable concerns that aren't really answered in the article.
Of course, how well that works depends on how much the normies trust the expert class
And the expert class being united in a belief that such measures are bad. That can't be taken for granted either.
Those comparisons would be more meaningful if Israelis could just take the suitcase or death deal. Even if we wrote off the ones of European origin, the Mizrahi Jews certainly can't/won't go back "home".
It bodes ill that the Palestinian cause seems to depend on a very narrow equilibrium where Western nations are both decadent and secure enough to just eat a loss or two, given the disanalogies.
It's not worth wondering about for Westerners but I often wonder if Palestinians actually think the Algerian deal is viable. Or if they're just lying for their audience and know deep down that, when it comes to it, Madagascar really isn't an option but they'll burn that bridge when they get to it.
Problem is that we've gone so far down that road people said "fuck it" and now you have spicy social democrats claiming to be socialists now and kids larping as pro-Soviet communists because they follow Hasan Piker on TikTok.
There is no justifiable defense of our capitalistic system on moral grounds,
You can defend it on the grounds that it has generated the greatest amount of wealth in human history, something even socialists grant. And that this is good.
The problem is precisely that it has done this, and it has continued to do so despite some deviations from some purer form of free market capitalism. Quite natural for people to then think "well, just a little more fiddling and we'll have it really fair", especially when the downsides of the previous round of fiddling can be very diffuse, the benefits seemingly clear while inequities remain very visible. Everyone knows how much the CEO of Starbucks makes.
I don't think you have to sell most people on avoiding collectivization or central planning at this point. But this sort of slow slide into an allegedly "fairer" capitalism? Very hard. I think people just naturally distrust the market and are biased towards action.
Especially since no one wants to hear that their subsidized X is part of the distortion causing problems or, even worse, they're just not as productive as they think they are. "Skill issue, gg no re" doesn't really work as an argument.
Which Israel can't do. So the reluctance there at least makes sense.
The fatal problem with the radicalization thesis imo is that it's all well and good for America, but not everyone can go home and stop radicalizing people.
A lot of Biden's decisions seem to treat this as an issue of balancing domestic messaging, without considering if parties other than US citizens are seeing and/or being emboldened by the ambivalence.
Edit: "America's" to "Biden's"
Frankly I can’t understand why any westerner thinks this is a good deal - unless they don’t actually know the details of the deal and just assume it’s some form of reasonable.
Lots of Westerners are:
- Convinced Israel is in the wrong overall so all the onus is on them when it comes to ending the conflict.
- Suffering from some GWOT-hangup where insurgents can't be beaten and fighting them makes everything worse.
- Bad at game theory. You know those "they're just stealing baby formula for their kids", criminal justice reform types? Now imagine they've been seeing videos of dead children forever.
This is fair, which is why I have tried to reserve some judgment. I don't like LibsOfTikTok style nutpicking, finding the very worst and most deranged examples of trans people and blasting them as examples of what "trans people" are like. Graham Linehan does the same thing - for all that I sympathize with a lot of his grievances, "Here's a trans person who committed a crime" is like 90% of his output at this point.
This becomes much more sympathetic when the media is actively trying to mislead via the headlines of the "Brighton woman guilty of flashing genitals" variety.
It's unfortunate that we have to depend on Twitter-deranged people for counter-messaging but it really shouldn't be allowed to stand imo.
Tanista
2mo ago
in stark contrast to the modern understanding of the divine, which is philosophizing for the theologian and assertions (with maybe some music) for the congregant
Because all other gods are dead. Yahweh's deeds were his resume in a competitive market. But the market has shifted.
The choice now is one God of varying flavors or the No-God. Everyone arguing for the former takes divine potency as fact so the debate is on other lines (whether God is moral, which God is coherent). The No-God simply puts forward a rival theory to divine potency. You have to start with philosophical argument and assertions to even make room for God.
I suppose the more naive and unpoisoned by modernity a religious community is , the more we should expect unabashed glorying in God's potency. Some people do still think hurricanes are just a form of divine moralizing so...
It's very odd for him to publicly criticize his own baby.
He's complained before about the inability of Hollywood writers to avoid changing what they're adapting just to "make it their own" and no doubt GoT soured him a bit. So I'm not shocked that he has opinions about HOTD. It is odd, but mainly because he's a producer.
Wondering if someone from HBO is calling desperately.
They gambled billions on the idea that a bunch of LGBT activists knew what the female audience wanted, and they lost.
I should look up how many major feminist figures are lesbians cause I have seen this claim before: that feminism is skewed by lesbian attitudes. But it isn't even just LGBT activists. Someone like Rachel Zegler is, AFAIK, straight. And yet she disdains the classic Snow White story's romantic elements because what's important is that Snow White becomes a real leader.
Well, for most people, the actual point of most stories is not to become a king or queen since they won't, the romance is the most real thing in the story. Zegler, on the other hand, can hope to reach those heights.
They're making movies for themselves, not the audience.
The cancellation of The Acolyte really brought this to a head, with the press and the actress herself going out of their way to blame "a torrent of alt-right bigotry" blah blah blah, and people just weren't having it.
Half-white, affluent actress using the plight of dead underclass blacks to whine about racists not liking her show was too much even for normies.
Even if we ignore the poetry of the cosmos, poetry and metaphor are the primary (if not exclusive?) way of talking about God in ancient Judaism and Christianity
Sure. I guess I'm just asking to what degree sometimes "poetry and metaphor" are just what a God does. If you start from the idea of an omnipotent god then it has to be metaphor, just chosen to convince. If you start from a polytheistic world that collapsed into monotheism gods really did do the things they were said to do . Baal really did ride clouds.
I guess to me it's more of a two-stage process. This:
they understand death, so God keeps one from the grave; or maybe they understand a certain social archetype, and so God “awoke as from sleep, like a strong man shouting because of wine”.
Happens first to the polytheistic gods. Each of these things gets a god. Baal is potent because rain is important and he's rain. So worship Baal (he really will make it rain). This gets absorbed by Yahweh, then it collapses from both metaphor and fact into purely metaphor. Because once Yahweh is omniscient and omnipotent he can make it rain, but doesn't really ride clouds or stride across the floor of heaven with his feet.
The psalm that hypes up God as shepherd isn’t the psalm that hypes up God as vanquisher of foes
We should expect this if God is gradually eating porfolios. El is the old benevolent "Father of Years", Baal is the vigorous god, the "rider of clouds" who trampled the Yam the sea. They weren't assimilated simultaneously or uniformly.
Being a potent and compelling thing worthy of worship is what it means to be a god. You dump all those stories into one pot cause you don't want to deal with anyone else's god, you get a mess with the only common element being potency.
Tanista
2mo ago
they will spend paragraphs about how God “stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea”. Why the incessant poetry?
Maybe it wasn't just poetry? There's reason to believe that people at the time really did believe that the sky was a dome. And battle with the sea was a common trope for deities.
But that kind of makes your point I suppose; the language used to describe God was aimed at convincing people in that milieu so naturally the cultural touchstones of the time would be used, even if they're also subverted at times (Leviathan is the mere pet of the God of the Book of Job, not an equal foe of the sort ANE gods fought for cosmic dominance).
God is the combination and crescendo of potent / persuasive felt language
I like to think of monotheism as an argument that just got out of hand.
The Biblical authors wanted to center Israel around the worship of one God and one Temple so they did what others in the region did and made him a national God and dissed other gods constantly.
When that didn't work they just kept doubling down and making God more powerful and having him absorb more and more of the portfolios of other gods to eliminate the competition. Gods are explained in terms of phenomena people care about (like fertility and rain, there's a reason Baal was popular) but it's more that Yahweh just kept cannibalizing existing gods and metaphors than they made those up for him. Which is why he's discussed in so many contradictory ways.
The Israelites eventually found that the most stable equilibrium was denying even the existence of all other gods by positing a maximal, singular God that unified all those portfolios instead of just calling them wussies.
But the elements that were persuasive in their original milieu are still there, despite any theological awkwardness they may produce.
and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men.
- Why did "small" sneak its way in here? Is this an established thing with people who suffer from GD?
- This argument always runs into the "what about the twinks?" question. What about a feminine gay man? They should risk rape unless they get marked as a GD haver?
- Why are whatever solutions we use to prevent rape for all men not good enough? And, if not, why shouldn't they be improved for all men instead of letting some men secede?
- I don't actually know that we can know that these men "wouldn't hurt a fly". We separate men from women precisely because we can't know or we'd use this screening method to have mixed-but-peaceful prisons. Mental illness doesn't make men harmless, especially to women who are weaker and less aggressive. There's an argument that they could be less violent than the median male inmate and yet still be violent enough to change female prisons negatively for female inmates.
I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.
I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.
I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.
Tanista
2mo ago
That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes
The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.
It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.
The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.
Tanista
2mo ago
Speaking of hotfixes:
The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did.
I used to take this for granted too but then you look at something like student loans where women hold more debt and take longer to pay it off and student loan forgiveness is argued for specifically as a salve for women and I wonder.
Although women make up more than half of the college educated labor force, per the Pew Research Center, women still face barriers to paying off their loans due to the gender wage gap, a lack of generational wealth and gender norms placed on women.
If all of these jobs better fit a woman's temperament why can't they just pay their loans?
Male roles may have been liquidated by modernity but not necessarily just because the inevitable march of technology making lifting things and whacking people less useful. The modern liberal state may have given us a little push.
I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman.
Strawman or the bailey?
If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?
Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses).
If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.
Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.
"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.
Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens
As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.
My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.
There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.
As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.
So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.
Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).
Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.
There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.
Yes. Status and achievement. Which is useful for...acquiring and providing for a family. Men have these drives because sitting around is probably a less successful strategy towards those goals.
There's a reason one of the benefits of jihad is a bevy of heavenly hotties. There's a reason the "cliche" male action movie involves bravery and/or violence followed by being rewarded by a
objectifiedlove interest. There's a reason many societies become less stable and men engage in more risk-seeking behavior when the number of available partners are low.Most people don't get whatever sort of grand satisfaction from their job elite feminists think all women are being denied by being reduced to mothers and partners. It's a toll to secure status, life and family. Men do certain difficult jobs because it's just a niche they in particular can slide into to pay their way.
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