I agree with you because I am just like everything you described. But I have to ask the question: are we being too cautious? Once bitten twice shy. We have been in the trenches in the most awkward of warfare, and I know I've lost friends and opportunities from being too vocally centrist. I hate getting yelled at and lectured to.... So I'd rather just not start it anymore. So I keep my damn mouth shut.
But truthfully I don't think it's the case that we are being too cautious, not yet. But I must raise this question because there may come a day when society does, or could, accept centrists again, but it won't happen if centrists don't feel free to let our middle-of-the-road freak fly. If people don't start speaking up, others who agree will stay suppressed themselves, due to lack of common knowledge of centrist acceptance.
So basically, I think we can say that the woke conditioning of the past 15 years was massively successful. Even when things are starting to get better, we can't go back to feeling better and acting like we used to. We've been trained to act like the woke, even though we are not, and this makes it all the harder to change society to non woke.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
To be clearer about my fears about social justice mobs; I'm less concerned about people actually getting killed by them than I am about them changing social norms that make people's actual lives actually worse.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
That's interesting. Can you cite historical examples, from various time periods over the past century? What specific tactics are we talking about?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
confected
A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate
Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Haha yes, that's fair. I really don't remember the details, I just remember that when I looked into the details 7 or whatever years ago, it was another straw on my personal "Believe Trump's Critics" camel's back.
I'm not engaging in standard Trump apologetics. I'm trying to tell you why he doesn't lose the social credit, at least to someone like me. It's because I can't trust anyone when they say these things about him, because everything for the past 10 years has been an exaggerated character attack, even the things that don't remotely deserve it. Time and time again I hear "Trump is Hitler for having done x", and then I look at x and I see that if you squint at it the right way you can see that, or not. Repeat for 10 years (or even 1 year), and I get my own form of epistemic learned helplessness.
So fine, the mechanism by which Trump is punished is dead. Because leftists killed it.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
mocked a disabled journalist
This is the sort of thing that makes me not take arguments like this seriously. It's been a long time since this supposed incident, but I recall it being pretty conclusive for anyone who spent more than thirty seconds listening to the outrage bait of the day, that he wasn't trying to mock a disabled journalist, and it was just the press once again seizing on an opportunity to claim Trump was the worst person ever. I don't recall the details, but it seemed clear (I thought at the time) that he was just doing one of his normal mannerisms. It's crying wolf and it makes me not take other claims seriously.
Well, that statement of mine is purposely simplistic, to kind of try to get at the point.
First, this is closer to what I actually believe (or naturally am inclined to jump to): I'd expand that statement to a belief in a general state of equilibrium when it comes to abusing the power of the government (especially by the Right), such that if actors go too far, then there will be a reaction against those actors whether by checks and balances in the law or by other means (though I'm glad that checks and balances do exist to help along the equilibrium, unlike in the social justice mob case). I definitely don't believe in the automatic axiomatic morality or infallibility of written laws.
Second, I know that overall my general high level belief in this equilibrium is a simplistic belief that probably doesn't hold true all of the time. This is just like my wife's simplistic belief that the power of social justice mobs will never go too far, because she believes in an equilibrium; that if they push the societal norms too far the societal backlash will correct it. Neither of us trusts the other's belief in the equilibrium, but we maintain analogous simplistic beliefs ourselves.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Honestly, though, you pretty much answer your own question in your opening paragraph;
Well, I can say I've paid about as much attention to Trump as I have to every other president, including Biden - which is not much. But it's taken significantly more effort to afford Trump the same level of indifference as I have for Biden and other presidents, and that's been true since 2015. I see that as indicative that information I shouldn't trust is being pushed my way, which reinforces my tendency to tune it out.
However, it's the fact that the Republican half of the government (and at least a third of the population) is either doing nothing to stop it, or even actively cheer it on, that really causes me to despair over the situation.
Your response hasn't given any consideration to the mirror image aspect of my original post. I encourage you to try to put aside your preconceptions and consider how the other side might have felt looking at the BLM situation of 2020-2021, and the power that mob mentality held at the time. Can you sympathize with someone else's fear of the lack of checks on that power, the same way you worry that the checks and balances in government won't be enough to stop Trump? Can you see how someone on the other side would have had similar reservations about those in power at the time doing nothing to curb that power, and to the contrary actually cheering it on?
I'm not asking you to agree that those concerns were valid or that the situations are equivalent - I'm asking whether you can see the structural similarity in how both sides experience fear when they perceive threats from power sources they believe lack adequate restraints. If you can only acknowledge that the other side had feelings while maintaining that your fears are categorically different or more legitimate, then you're missing the point about how these dynamics work. Your response kind of proves the point about us trusting different institutional mechanisms without engaging with it.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
That's a fair point, but I think the pure contempt with which I remember people speaking about Bush, compared with the number of times I've heard similar people point to him as a surprisingly human decent dude in the past 10 years makes me really skeptical. If he was truly so awful back then, he wouldn't be forgiven and nostolgized so easily, even if someone worse came along, at least not by an intellectually honest person.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I just looked it up in the dictionary. It means "To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary".
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Yikes. For some reason, I end up getting more scared off by any refined palate, non-vanilla, porn stuff. Even simple things like foot fetish porn kinda weirds me out. Maybe because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, resulting in my being unable to fuck my wife, and then go down in an ever accelerating spiral, ending with me dying like David Carradine.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Well I'm not too surprised that exists. But let's see if it catches on. I think there might have been a talk on the Motte a few years ago (I think) about how male sex toys will never achieve mainstream popularity, or even just sub-mainstream.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Actually, also, I just realized, I don't think that caffeine is a natural pesticide. I thought it was regarded as having evolved to attract bees, making them addicted to certain plants that produce it, thus acting like the opposite of a pesticide.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Haha. I have not tried an Oculus with VR porn, but just tried with using a mouse to scroll where the view is pointed. I don't really see the point of it. There's almost always only one view I want to see, which is the view where the entire woman is in the camera. I don't want to look off to the side. Maybe that'd work if the VR device had a way of simulating you, so it could feel like you're having sex while looking elsewhere, but for now I don't think we have that.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I guess that makes sense. But I don't follow these people's lives, so I wouldn't really know what happened to them. Ignorance is bliss.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
A few years after that, I'm guessing we will all be hooked up to neural stimulators that simply give direct electrical impulses to the dopaminergic pathways in our brain a'la Olds and Milner. That's all that's left, really.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
We believe that it may be an outbreak of sex addiction. It's a new phenomenon we don't completely understand yet, but it seems to make people... different. Of course, we all know the normal healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners. But in the sex addict, their entire lives are consumed with thoughts of wanting more and more. The mere sight of an attractive woman could... can make them think about sex with her.
As a connoisseur of older content, I really don't understand. I mean, I like newer content too, but as some comedian once said, why is new porn being made? Has anyone already seen everything that exists for free on the internet? Really, there's so much good porn from the 2000s, and I find new stuff from that era all the time.
Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?
Yes, that makes it better. There's something I find to be a strong turn on by thinking about the timelessness of sex. And to be clear, I'm not taking about GILF porn, I'm not into that at all, just normal porn from people who some may consider to be GILFs now.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Well, good on you for reading that and trying to steelman it. No matter what, I always believe that all ideas should be considered at their own merit.
However, I'm not sure I fully agree with your analysis. I'm not the best at understanding those sorts of jargon-upon-jargony passages in this type of philosophy. I'm inclined to, at a certain point, simply write it off as something that's so detached from reality as to be worthless. I can understand a little better if I go really slow, but even so, I'm not really seeing how what you said relates to the passage you quoted. It seems to me that her point has something to do with (arbitrarily) claiming that metaphor is more like a solid, and metonymy is more like a fluid, presumably because fluids in real life have the capability of changing shape. But this to me already is an overstep into the ridiculous, because she is simply using her own personal associations to claim two unrelated abstract concepts are related, not justifying it, and then going on to use that towards her own end.
I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.
And in reply to the point that you think she's trying to make, I'd say, if people are choosing spherical cows for their thought experiments (not something I've personally heard of myself, but I'd believe that it's a thing if you say so), it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows. And it's not un-justified, since our bodies behave more like solids than fluids under such conditions; we generally take up a certain volume, give or take a very small amount for our ability to deform our skin by pushing into it. Certainly the outside of our bodies generally stays together under normal conditions, and holds inner fluids inside, such that they have little effect on how we'd interact with an incline.
Not really, maybe sometimes with regard to individual incidents, and sometimes those do result in me changing my mind on small things. But I've mostly come to terms with stuff by now.
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