faceh
3hr ago
Man I don't think there's much moral judgment going on.
Aesthetic, yes. Maybe a bit of psychological, but unless you're Jewish I doubt there's much inherent moral judgment towards people making minor changes to their own bodies.
I kinda just wish it wasn't as popular among otherwise attractive single women as it apparently is.
faceh
13hr ago
It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.
Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.
But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.
This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.
Not quite.
Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.
In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.
There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.
When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.
yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.
Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.
And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?
I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.
Also, add in that there is research indicating they can lead to health issues.
faceh
1d ago
i.e. people who got them unwillingly.
I'd say soldiers and sailors who were putting their life on the line and thus could never really be sure if they'd make it back to respectable society would also get a pass, although that also kind of falls in my "symbolic of something meaningful" exception.
Oh, and its worth mentioning how it seems like now full sleeves are kind of the default for Cops, Soldiers, even firemen these days. Like its functionally part of the 'uniform'!
I'm going to go a step further, for controversy's sake, and say that close to zero tattoos truly look good in practice.
Human skin is just not a great medium for artistic expression. The ones that are hyperdetailed kind of look okay if you look from the right angle, but get up too close and they tend to betray imperfections and from further away they all look like jumbles of random shapes and generally don't look like intentional art pieces.
The ones I might grant as appealing tend to be simple designs or patterns that emphasize the underlying physical features. But most people don't have good taste, and someone willing to permanently mark their body is probably even less likely to have good taste about it.
And time ticks by a few years, colors fade, clean lines get washed out, skin deforms and wrinkles and whatever trendy design you had falls from popularity (mileage may vary by how you care for them).
I make some exceptions for tattoos that genuinely symbolize something meaningful or important in the person's life. It is actually interesting to see a unique tattoo, ask about it, and get an actual story about its significance! That serves a 'useful' social purpose. But then, the signalling value is not in the aesthetics of the tattoo itself!
faceh
1d ago
Yes, but drill it in a little deeper, the demonstrated ability to wreak havoc on your enemies is catnip for women since in the ancestral environment that was a major signal for genetic fitness, that you would produce strong children and could protect them to adulthood.
That's why I don't quite think that its a failure of risk-aversion (I mean, after the first time he hits her, sure), since on an evolutionary level, there'd be a larger risk to pairing with a guy who was physically incapable of defending you.
But it is bonkers that once they feel attraction the prefrontal cortex isn't able to project the longer term consequences of pursuing the guy. Not just that he might beat her, but that he's got no real prospects for building wealth or raising a family in a stable environment. This is so fucking primal that you see fashion Heiresses getting knocked up by sexy felons and a literal Rothschild leaving her husband to date a rapper.
And yeah, there are counter stories about wealthy men blowing up their lives and leaving faithful women to pursue or marry a stripper or even literal prostitute. No doubt. But far as I can tell that's never socially celebrated or sanctioned or really excused.
I think about this video constantly ever since I first saw it.
The stated admission (that I do not think is a joke!) that even a literal villain who slaughtered her people can instantly win her over by... pointing a sword at her throat.
faceh
1d ago
I don't think the 'true' upper class ever really started wearing tattoos, is the thing.
Celebrities, athletes, maybe some actors, but rarely anyone with real 'power.'
I would defy you to find any tattoo worn by an actual human being that actually signals "I am a higher class than you."
I just did a cursory google search and I can tentatively say that ZERO billionaire business magnates have a single tattoo. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, not even Palmer Luckey. Wait, Jensen Huang apparently has one, but I can only find the one photo and he clearly states he won't get another.
Not even Steve Jobs back in the day had one.
And these are guys that could hire the literal best artists alive to create absolute masterworks for them. And, goes without saying, couldn't easily be fired for getting one.
faceh
1d ago
On the flip side there's the principal-agent problem.
If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.
Maybe there needs to be an overseer-advocate role whose sole job is to audit the other overseers and ensure they're at least complying with best practices.
But this adds extra complexity and expense to this system.
So one really hopes that in the aggregate the added costs of supervising the supervisors and auditing the expenses and otherwise ensuring that the wards are being treated adequately well are actually producing more value than just leaving those folks to their own devices to be exploited.
I can see why institutionalization was a popular solution for this in decades past. If you can put the wards all in one place and lock them in, it takes relatively few supervisors to manage them all, and in theory if you can check in on the conditions regularly and make sure there's no wanton abuses.
In practice, the people most drawn to these jobs would, in many cases, be the most likely to want to commit some kind of abuse.
faceh
2d ago
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
That's the one. Its a class thing AND you've also filtered out crazies.
I worked as a public defender specifically on a domestic violence docket for about six months. EVERY single horror story you can think of, both in terms of loved ones beating on each other (not just spouses, mind!) and false accusations ruining lives are true, and indeed are happening daily.
Yet... I know of literally nobody in my personal circle of immediate friends and family who has had to deal with that situation.
The level of dysfunction required for someone to actually physically beat someone they care about, or to falsely accuse someone of same, is actually QUITE high. But, there's the bottom, lets call it quartile of the population in terms of impulse control who will absolutely pass that threshold at times.
So if you're drawing most of your social circle from the top two quartiles, with some dipping into the third quartile, then by sheer selection effects, you probably won't know anybody who actually ended up arrested and in court for DV-related reasons.
And be happy for that, in Florida at least the Court system is NOT optimized for helping ensure domestic tranquility, it is there to throw down barriers and inflict punishments and it is very heavy-handed when applying both, so it is a very unpleasant system to interact with whether or not you're guilty of what you've been accused of.
faceh
2d ago
Might I make a suggestion:
Far be it from me to criticize the economics of an action film, but yeah, there genuinely CANNOT be enough contract killings needed in this world to justify the number of assassins that populate New York.
I can imagine that intergang warfare flares up from time to time which requires hiring on more talent, but if most of them have enough downtime to just hang out in the city, and need money badly enough to go after the most feared killer alive, there must not be much else going on between gang wars.
And it would nice to portray an assassin who sees the contract to take out John, looks at the monetary amount, shakes his head, and goes back to his crosswords b/c screw that.
My headcanon is that "The Table" gets involved in international politics by taking contracts from nation-states to kill elites/politicians/businessmen in other countries and this is where most of the money in the assassin economy comes from, and the main reason they maintain such strict procedures and rules, so that various governments 'trust' them to keep things orderly and in exchange, tolerate their existence rather than declare war on them.
There's literally nothing shown in the movies to corroborate this, of course.
That visceral sense of fear, the impression that John was going up against competent foes and beating them through sheer skill? Gone.
I mean, being fair, at this point a competent foe would have a small army of snipers watching out for John. And might just fire a grenade launcher at him if he shows up (it almost worked the first time they tried it). So there has to be some kind of suspension of disbelief or unspoken code for the fights to unfold the way they do.
I do really find it annoying that the first movie basically made him an ultra-capable one-man-army in a relatively grounded criminal underworld, but as that criminal underworld was expanded, it became WAY less grounded. And so did John's capabilities.
By the third it is implied that "The Table" functionally runs the world?
I dunno. I like the smaller scale ideas like the Continental being a sacred space where ceasefire is enforced, high class gun and clothing stores in major cities that specialize in outfitting assassins, and the local cops being clued in/on the payroll, which helps explain why they don't interfere when stuff pops off.
Basically, the very concept of John Wick works best in a world where criminals/crime syndicates have a heavily enforced honor code, but are also constantly fighting with each other and stay completely in the shadows, vs. going balls to the wall in a busy street. Simple fridge logic: why the fuck don't the bystanders in cars just STOP when they see a shootout occurring? Also applies to people who keep dancing in a nightclub while men are being slaughtered with axes all around.
Anyway yeah. I will defend the series pretty heavily, but it now operates almost entirely on "rule of cool."
faceh
2d ago
I thought it was dumb as hell, but everyone around me and everyone online said that it was awesome.
Well, there's the whole problem expressed by OP in a nutshell.
Writing doesn't have to be 'good' if people are that easily impressed and don't think about it too hard.
Fixed the link.
It's this one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDWKRFSZlCM&t=64
This scene in the Mario Movie has NO REASON TO EXIST, they don't resolve anything, it lasts less than 2 minutes, there's no real danger, and they just solve the problem without even thinking about it, and get back to the storyline. Literally the next scene leads into the final showdown.
The whole movie feels like this.
faceh
3d ago
Thats the one addition I simply cannot defend. If he can tuck his head behind the suit and be instantly bulletproof (regardless of the weapons being used against him) then whats the risk?
faceh
3d ago
Hitchcock and, later, Spielberg and James Cameron were my main thoughts on directors that could pull all three off.
Indiana Jones (the first 3) is the series the comes to mind as the paragon of balanced action-characters-plot, mixed to perfection.
Sadly plot also requires you to pay attention and the dirty secret is that many viewers regardless of age range don’t want to sit through a whole movie and pay attention the whole time.
Also likely true.
Teens and even many adults probably need some new stimuli every couple minutes if they're going to keep eyes on the screen. Remembering a subtle setup or vital piece of exposition that comes to a head in the 3rd act requires that they actually noticed it when it happened.
I'd guess that's why the Minecraft movie made so much money, just constant flood of stimulus after stimulus, don't need to care about any particular one, it won't come into play later.
To say nothing of the Super Mario Bros. movie, which I saw in theaters with friends, and the entire time I couldn't help myself thinking "okay, WHY do the blocks float and why are there random powerups hidden in them to give you special abilities? WHY does Kong society have an arena for gladiatorial combat? Why do they have dozens of go-karts, and why the hell does this rainbow road exist in the first place?"
I don't ask these questions about the video games! But the movie has the conceit of a plot... but I've literally never seen a plot that was more based on "something happens to move us to the next scene" and the movie just lacks any real connective tissue. Actually, the Deadpool and Wolverine Movie, which I also saw in theaters was also kind of like that. Probably the laziest setup for a 'final showdown' I've ever seen.
rewrites can destroy plot very easily via death by a thousand cuts. Great plot takes discipline!
Also solid point. Even a little bit of executive meddling can upset the delicately constructed but perfectly balanced plotline you established, and the the end product just seems like a mess. Much easier to disrupt a good plot than to build it.
faceh
3d ago
My maximum charitable take is that they're just giving audiences the thing they've shown they want.
I model most movies along three axes for what justifies said movie's existence and creates the appeal to the audience.
They can be plot driven; They can be action driven; They can be character driven.
Or often, some combination of all 3.
Character driven means we get engaged with a unique/interesting character, who is put into certain situations, has a certain arc, and comes out changed in some way. The plot doesn't have to make sense, we're mostly just focused on seeing the character's reaction to what's happening, how they interact with other characters, and the lessons they learn by the end. Writing needs to be good, but mostly in terms of dialogue, giving the character(s) a recognizable voice and appropriately comedic or dramatic lines.
Action driven, we're there to see a spectacle, the plot is mostly there to set up scenarios for the action, and if the action is sensational enough the audience doesn't notice or forgives plot holes or crappy writing. You write your character some pithy one-liners and give enough of a skeleton of a plot to move things along. Choreography matters a lot more here.
Plot driven, though... we're there for an interesting story. Entertaining events, surprising twists, revelations, and a satisfying conclusion are mandatory. If the twist doesn't land, if there's noticeable holes in the plot, if there's too many boring scenes, it fails. If your audience is watching because they're "invested in the plot" and REALLY want to see where it goes, you have to make it work the entire time, and pay off effectively. In this case, the writing pretty much HAS to be solid, minimal/no plot holes, AND you have to keep your characters acting consistently.
What Hollywood appears to have noticed is that general audiences mostly prefer character and action driven vehicles... and care very little about purely plot-driven ones, where the story, not the characters, is the central draw.
I'd blame it on Marvel, to some extent. People show up to watch Thor or Iron Man or Starlord get into crazy shenanigans, with a big, splashy action fight scene at the climax to justify the cost of the ticket.
If you give them their beloved characters, and give them a pulse-pounding action sequence or two, most audiences will give it a thumbs up. They won't analyze the plot threads or question the film's logic or pick apart character motivations too much. So why bother giving them a tight, logical, completely unique story?
And its much, much easier to write stories for such films, where you don't have to make the plots completely coherent, just make your audience 'have fun' and you're golden.
So I think plot just falls by the wayside, and Hollywood optimizes for putting well-liked characters on screen and making up crazy scenarios to put them in, motivation or logical sense be damned.
faceh
3d ago
Right. But I'm pointing out that if you were approached by Epstein and he said "hey that girl you banged was actually 15/16. We can keep it under wraps but you'll have to do some favors going forward", aren't you a LITTLE morally culpable for not taking the hit and blowing the whistle? Yes, you acted with reasonable propriety, you were lied to, you weren't intentionally doing the illegal thing, but now you're buying into it.
It beggars belief that nobody attending the parties came into knowledge that he was bringing around underage girls. Its uncertain how many sought out the parties because there were underage girls there, but the claims of "oh yeah, everybody heard the rumor that this was going on" only come out once the truth is already known.
Sure would be nice for someone to proffer these facts before they become public knowledge.
faceh
3d ago
Epstein‘s MO was to lie about his girls’ ages to collect blackmail material, theres no reason to believe these people are like actual pedophiles
I mean, sure. But you'd really hope that such people would want reassurances that the woman was there willingly and weren't coerced, drugged, or blackmailed into it themselves. I think most 'normal' people would be sketched out, even if they don't immediately go to the cops.
That he was able to get away with it for quite a while hints that people were willingly turning a blind eye. Not the same as being complicit, but it still reads like a moral failure.
And of course we can go AKSHULLY there's no pedophilia involved whatsoever b/c all the girls were post-pubescent and in their teens. I am sure some people think there's documented proof of like, children being raped or something.
Though of course the more conspiratorial element is that the really nasty stuff occurred on the jet or on the private island.
Do I think there was literal child sacrifice or something going on? No.
But my priors on someone who is involved in pimping underage women out being involved in even more depraved activities are... reasonably high.
It is genuinely harder for me to believe that almost all global elites diligently avoid taboo and socially abhorrent/illegal behaviors. Especially with the more recent dominoes falling WRT to P. Diddy and that whole circle. That said, I don't think they're going around consuming human flesh or bathing in virgin blood, I doubt the very worst of the theories are at all accurate.
What can I say, ensuring there are consequences for elites misbehavior is one of my pet issues.
faceh
3d ago
Could he say something that makes him look more guilty?
"I am pre-emptively pardoning any person who might be connected to this case whatsoever."
(i.e. what Biden did with the Hunter situation).
I'd immediately assume he was directly involved if that happened.
I did some self-interrogation on why I was dissappointed with this outcome, and I think a lot of the issue is that there wasn't a clear definition of what people wanted to see from this investigation.
There's at least two, maybe three 'generally accepted' definitions of the "Epstein Client List."
-
The literal list of people who appear in Epstein's notes and logs and such. This we kind of know exists, and it has been released, at least in part. Not dispositive proof of any actual wrongdoing.
-
The list of people that Epstein kept of those he had compromised directly and trafficked women/girls to for purposes of blackmail, and who thus would be at risk of legal consequences if discovered. This would be pretty decent proof of wrongdoing.
-
The list of people that the FBI has constructed via corroboration of details in the above notes and evidence and established some cause to believe were actually complicit in Epstein's activities either because they benefited from them or were trying to keep their own activities under wraps. THIS one would be the grounds for actual legal action.
And I find that I wanted them to release #3. I don't want a bunch of disparate notes and papers that people have to comb over and construct elaborate theories around, I wanted the designated law enforcement officials to do their job and actually zero in on the people 'involved' in the conspiracy (look, we KNOW there was a conspiracy, its beyond 'theory' at this point) and thus would be truly culpable, even if there wasn't quite good enough evidence to convict. The FBI is very good at rolling up whole organized crime groups at the same time. There's a reason the Mafia is not really a major force in the U.S. anymore. If there was a larger group of people at work its impossible that they COULDN'T trace their activities. It is possible they traced them and realized it would be a fruitless exercise to attempt prosecution.
So people who wanted lists 1 or 2 released are disappointed because they're being told such a thing technically doesn't exist. Which may be true! Maybe the only true list of co-conspirators existed in Epstein's brain. Which, if so, definitely bumps up my personal odds of him being murdered.
But I think the real issue that is pissing people off is the lack of #3. As in, we know there were girls being trafficked, we KNOW there must have been people they were trafficked to, and there's significant reason to believe some of them were high powered politicians, celebs, and other elites. If the FBI has exonerated such people, fine. But what it feels like is that they just kinda shoved it all in a drawer and decided there was no reason to dig deeper. Or were told to do so by some other power.
Anyhow, I genuinely expect that the truly salacious, explosive details will be kept under wraps until most of the involved parties are old and all but immune to prosecution, or dead. We'll get a declassified Epstein report in about 10-20 years that reveals the full extent of the coverup, but by then it'll be hard to gin up the public ire enough to actually take any action, and obtaining justice against the involved parties will be impossible, so it'll just fade into status as a historical scandal.
That's just how it goes. Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown
faceh
3d ago
To an extent, I'm using the availability heuristic based on my initial impressions of white identitarians as I remember them.
The Northwest Front was my first exposure to this particular approach to White Nationalism, and while I wouldn't call the members associated with it dysgenic, well, you can see how effective they are at website design. There's a sheen of incompetence over the whole affair.
faceh
4d ago
The simple fact is that there's like a 2:1 guy:girl ratio on the apps.
And the girls are much, MUCH more selective than the guys.
So the pool of women being limited is, inherently, the issue. Some guys will lose, guaranteed. Its not a traditional market where you can achieve mutual gains through trade.
And in a zero sum game, optimizing to try to win just makes it harder on everyone at once.
And it IS a zero sum game. Every guy that pairs off with a woman is making it harder for the remaining guys to get what they want.
So telling guys to optimize their profiles is just increasing the competitive pressure with very minimal change in success odds. Improving YOUR chances makes some other guy's chances decrease, and vice versa. If you both compete as hard as you can, most of the efforts are wasted for no real gain.
I think the only way to make it 'clearer' was to not make the whole fanfic explicitly about disrupting the canon set up by Rowling in every way possible.
That is, its still pretty possible that there was an incompetent Lord Voldemort who got destroyed by the combined might of the good wizards...
AND there's a vastly more competent dark wizard who isn't blatantly evil but is definitely running machinations in the background that are far and beyond what Voldemort could achieve, whilst having nothing to do with voldemort.
I guess the one factor I didn't see right away is the why, as to why a supergenius wizard with demigod-level powers would want to adopt that persona for long periods of time. That came out later.
But yeah, he practically bashed people over the head with clues.
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