popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
It seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
Well
The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII
Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.
Chinese in (or 'around') WWII
Their society experienced complete collapse major problems (EDIT: To be fair) a generation later.
Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies
They haven't fought a high fatality war. I'll admit I haven't looked into the correlation between peacetime women military service and their fertility, but do you seriously doubt it will be negative?
I haven't crunched the numbers here, so calling me lazy might be fair.
popocatepetl
2hr ago
The Motte’s Declining Audience
I don't think the problem is pageload time. Fewer people are posting high quality toplevel posts. Most people, myself included, just respond to toplevel conversations that strike our fancy. What's causing this, IMO:
- Motte's audience is now on average 5-10 years older than when they started. We have less testosterone, more responsibility, and less truth-seeking fire.
- "Discourse is dead", as my bae Dave Greene says every single stream. 2012-2022 was a very dynamic decade ideologically speaking. Now most of us have settled into one bunker or another. The culture war is still live, but in a All Quiet on the Western Front sense, not a Guns of August sense.
So what we have here is not a problem, but a predicament. Even if we invited new friends for fresh voices, our friends are also 30yo+ (#1) and they also live in a world where discourse is dead (#2). The Motte is on its nice, slow decline from here on out.
We can mitigate it by being less lazy and striving to post more middle-effort toplevel content. Responses per toplevel are still healthy. I tried this today, posting something on my mind that I usually wouldn't bother, wouldn't think was "good enough" back in the golden age of The Motte.
Women in the military
I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.
It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.
Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.
The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.
Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.
But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.
I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.
Can someone help me understand horror as a genre?
Sure.
either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone
The appeal of these is (a) date night with your girlfriend/boyfriend, since it's a good excuse cozy up, (b) a quick endorphin hit, like going on a rollercoaster (c) as a social bravery game, usually by young boys, where a group tries to see who will crack and get ripped by their bros.
So, social lubricant.
a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff
The appeal of ugliness in horror, or cosmic and existential horror, is that it stirs the sense of beauty by remotion. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are games I remember not because they were scary or fun (in fact playing them could often be tedious) but because they evoked a deep longing for meaning, sympathy for suffering, and a desire for catharsis. Horror also works to make you more emotionally vulnerable to such themes, because being scared is tiring, and tired people are less emotionally regulated.
Recommended video from the Distributist. The framing is political but IIRC he discusses the psychological hole filled by disturbing horror.
I'm not, strictly speaking, a paedophile
I don't believe people who look at (or even write) porn of anime schoolgirls are generally child-molesters-to-be, future-thailand-visitors, or groomers-in-training. That said, this is not a sentence anyone should find themselves saying. Consider not doing things you'd rather die than have people know about you?
Thank you for the frank and interesting post though.
...At which point I learned a rather-vital piece of information: the courts uphold these crazy laws when cases are actually prosecuted, but the police consider them a crock of shit and don't actually arrest people for them except in highly-unusual circumstances. So I got in no legal trouble whatsoever, and the motivation to kill myself evaporated.
This is a common intuition gap between the general public and the legal system. Most people walk around in blissful ignorance about how common things like sex crimes, domestic violence, or driving with substance abuse are. If we dragnetted everyone guilty of these and prosecuted them to the extent that John Q Public thinks reasonable, it would cripple society.
Necessarily, the police exercise discretion in who to throw the book at. This state-of-affairs doesn't mix well with moral panics about racism, but that's another topic.
Video games thread:
Back to Silksong after a few weeks break. A difficulty tweak mod made the game much more enjoyable for me. If you're in a similar boat to me — if you enjoyed HK1 but thought the Radiance ending challenges were too much, enjoyed the difficulty of early FromSoft games but thought they crossed a line around Sekiro/Elden Ring — I recommend the following changes to the config file, as the defaults trivialize the game a bit too much: 2x -> 1.5x Player damage, 2x -> 1.6x rosaries, disable Tool regen. On the other hand, consider changing the health regen to every 1 second; it only starts after you're 12 seconds damage free, so it won't make the boss gameplay much easier, but will make runbacks less tedious.
On my first post I complained that there's not enough exploration in Silksong. I'm glad to say the situation improves a lot once you read the Citadel at the top of the map. It acts as a massive hub area disconnected from the main fast travel network, with many hidden areas you can discover and tackle in different orders, lots of unlockable shortcuts, etc.
I can now recommend the game with a few reservations.
four Gospels correspond to the four Keirsey MBTI temperaments (SP artisans, SJ guardians, NT rationalists, NF idealists).... Conveniently, you can also draw a parallel here with the four Hippocratic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic)
I love this idea so much it's almost too good to check. That said, n=1: As INTJ and Melancholic, Matthew is my distant favorite, John second, and then a dropoff to Luke and Mark. If this model holds, it doesn't apply for me.
(The standard explanation for different-seeming Jesuses in the four gospels — besides "Christians are sanewashing irreconcilable conflicting evidence — is that Matthew emphasizes Jesus as King; Mark, Savior; Luke, Healer; John, God.)
BTW if anyone doesn't know about Hippocratic temperaments, check them out. Since learning about the model, I've found it cleaves very naturally to buckets of different people I know IRL and characters in fiction. Also, while it could be partially the Barnum Effect, I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today.
In the current moment libs/leftists feel themselves losing harder than they ever have in living memory, even if the rhetoric was sometimes crazier in 2017.
This is it. In 2016, leftist freaking out was mostly a performative way of calling for the managers to take care of a problem, according to Victimhood culture rules. Progressives (and indeed, most everyone) saw Trump v1.0 as a passing blip who won due to Hillary Clinton being a uniquely unelectable candidate, and whose administration would be smothered by "institutional checks and balances".
Cultural leftists did not really feel like they might actually be losing grip on the country until recently. Probably the last twelve months.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
cradle
I just posted a comment recommending Cradle. Good job me. Since you've already read Cradle, I agree with FC that Beware of Chicken is extremely funny.
As for another... I enjoyed listening to an AI audiobook of Release That Witch, despite an embarrassing pseudo-harem element. It's an isekai where a chemist bootstraps an industrial revolution in a magical setting; the "progression" is more Civilization than Amazing Cultivation Simulator though.
Very interesting how Communist theory seeped into the Chinese author's depiction of a state planned economy.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
All bluesky is now alight in celebration of the murder
I doubt /all/ of them are.
It is very strange how I must be on the backfoot arguing that radical violence-enjoyer leftists exist, year after year, when they completely color every corner of the internet that isn't a total right wing bubble.
I was in the same position as Doubletree or 4bpp yesterday, reflexively ascribing this to a few left extremists nutpicked by the algorithm. But "he got what was coming to him, I have no empathy" really does seem to be the prevailing vibe on Reddit at least.
I've done well enough insulating myself from leftist online spaces after we left Reddit, I had somehow forgotten what it's like.
The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence
The 50 million or whatever Leftists in America don’t feel that way. Like two people do. There’s this guy and then Luigi Mangione.
You mean that like two people were willing to pay the personal price. Do you really believe if we distributed Death Notes to the other 49,999,998, MAGA figures wouldn't start dropping dead?
History shows that people readily indulge in violence against the hated outgroup when they feel perfectly safe from blowback. Are leftists moreso? I would suspect a little, since right-left are self-sorting groups moreso than tribal conflicts of the past, and the hard left does not even have a fig leaf moral code against violence. We can't know if the 50 million Death Notes distributed in the other direction would stay any blanker. (My unproveable guess is, maybe 20-30% blanker.) But "only two leftists feel violence is justified" is ludicrous; if favorable circumstances opened up, millions would sign off on killing at least the leadership class of their enemy.
Serious question: at what point is political violence justified?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
The Catholic church has an explicit social teaching on this. From Catechism 2243:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Traditional leftist revolutionary violence has run afoul of 3 and 4 at least. Likewise, so would any right reactionaries eyeing violence, even in a truly horrible situation like South Africa. I would say Francisco Franco was in the clear, probably.
You are right to bring up just war theory. The throughline of all Catholic teaching on "When am I allowed to harm?" is the double effect. You are not allowed to do anything that is intrinsically evil (which, contrary to mischaracterizations of Matthew 5:39, violence is not). You must not desire the evil outcomes (so no wanting to hurt enemies for the sake of hurting them). Evil outcomes must not directly cause the good desired end (so no terrorist killing of civilians, even if that helps lead to victory). And there must be a proportionate cause (so no rebelling over the government failing to fix that nasty pothole).
In some ways, this is a hard teaching for many people, but the Christian POV on violence is not as alien from intuitive morality as is often suggested.
Where the Christian POV is alien is that rebellion against an authority you're born under is truly the last resort. God put you under a prince, even an evil prince, as part of his active or at least permissive will. 'Consent of the governed' is nonsense. Does a child get to choose whether to obey his father? No. There may be extreme situations where a child must run away or even fight his father, but that requires extreme justification. David stays loyal to the evil king Saul, simply running when Saul tries to kill him. Jesus meekly submits himself to be executed by Pilate.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Is it really bad for malignant narcissists to target politicians rather than schools? At least politicians know what they're getting into. If school shootings were genuinely replaced with single assassination attempts on random political figures, I would see that as a big improvement.
This is a terrible idea. A random school shooting is senseless violence. It passes like a hurricane and perhaps leads to some heated gun control debates. But violence that looks intertribal leads to civil war.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Real America's Voice is now confirming he passed.
Kevin is sadly vindicated. He just jumped the gun I guess.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Bennett's Phylactery now says dead. DELETED
Kevin Dolan screwed the pooch with this one.
Rule of maintaining credibility: Don't tweet things like that unless you have a 100% clear insider scoop.
Whether a story is a "pounce" comes down to whether the story actually instantiates a larger problem. That's the rub, isn't it? The left and right don't agree which problems are a big deal, or even which ones are real.
I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'."
Oh, I do this all the time. My reaction to every police anti-black brutality story of the last decade has been to think of those perfidious Chinese cardiologists. To wit, okay, maybe the cop went too far in this or that story. Maybe. But the problem you (progressive journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event. Yes you can supply a lot of anecdotes, but that's only because we're a massive country. And your talking about that freak event is causing riots and lax policing leading to preventable deaths, so actually, your complaining is the problem here.
I suppose this is also what Blueskyers mean when they mock Republicans for being afraid of riding buses or what not. "The problem you (NY Post journalist) are implying to be pervasive is actually a freak event." And they think Republicans talking about this freak event is leading to racism, which is a Real Problem.
teh country
Rare spotting of a critically endangered typo. Autocorrect has driven this once common forum friend to the brink of extinction.
I expect the right to be every bit as cautious and measured with their racial moment as the left has been with all of theirs. And who can blame them?
There's no racial moment. No doubt, the last few years saw a right-wing victory in that rightist views can get platformed again. But it wasn't a platform that made Fergusson or Floyd electrifying. It was a full spectrum propaganda apparatus that amplified these useful signals every hour, every day, from every glowing screen. And I'm not just talking about CNN or NYT. Turn on the Disney channel in 2020, and you'd see preteens raising their fist in solidarity with Black victims. Moreover, the left had sympathetic bureaucrats and NGOs waiting in the wings to cash political capital when it got generated.
The right has none of this. Yes, they're mad. Peasants can be mad as much as they like.
I'm underselling this a bit. With Trump in office, the right can parlay this into some useful currency. But there will be no "moment" for the anti-BLM right just because we have a horrifying video.
So this place is kinda dead now eh? What happened? There’s a ton of stuff happening in the culture war and the main thread is wildly boring with posts not at all topical
"Willing to comment, not willing to effortpost" syndrome.
I have no doubt that if someone made a toppost about the train stabbing of Iryna Zarutska, it would generate hundreds of comments in response. But that requires someone to do the work of writing a summary and well-posed take, first.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out.
I had the same experience of HK. The game was all roses until I maxed out my knight. Then, suddenly, to reach the ending I apparently had play a masocore platformer and a bullet hell game? Why? I checked out and watched the ending cutscene online.
Honestly, I didn't hold this against Hollow Knight. But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.
Update on Silksong.
The conversation around this game is getting on my nerves. Camps have divided over whether Silksong is too hard (double damage, runbacks) or just right (get good). Ultimately difficulty is up to preference. No one is going to convince anyone here, although people denying Silksong is harder are pretty annoying. But no one is talking about Silksong being a different genre than Hollow Knight. That seems important. Am I taking crazy pills?
The core conceit of Metroidvanias is exploration yields power. You have a freeform world and can explore many different areas. As you find collectibles and beat bosses, your avatar strength increases. You unlock new areas, which open up new bosses and powerups, which in turn open up new areas, etc. Not so in Silksong.
First off, the area progression is almost entirely linear. You have one or two optional areas like Hunter's March. But really, you're advancing down the critical path like a regular action platformer.
Second, your avatar strength is barely increasing, and not at all due to exploration or boss-beating. If you comb every area for hidden walls, you can maybe find enough masks to increase your health from 5 pips to 6 pips by Act Two. But since most enemies and environmental hazards do two damage, that isn't an upgrade. As for your damage output, you are gifted a small sword upgrade at a set point in the story about 10 hours in. But since all the enemies from that linear point on get twice as tanky, that's not an upgrade. And there's no incentive to backtrack, so...?
All crests or tools you get are sidegrades. They unlock other gameplay styles according to your preference. I've mostly ignored them.
Weirdly you do get a few things that feel like Metroidvania "door-opening" moves (See: the Drifter's Cloak or Silk Spear). But they end up only being used to advance from the area you find them in. Want to backtrack? The door-opening moves don't open anything in old zones. And later levels forget about them. (Why didn't Team Cherry put steam updrafts in later levels at least? That was fun!)
At hour thirteen, I don't feel my hornet is meaningfully stronger or more capable than at hour two. Instead, the last eleven hours have been a sequence of challenge levels.
Conclusion: Silksong is in practice closer in genre to something like Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be the Guy than Hollow Knight. The trappings of a Metroidvania are here, but the substance isn't. I feel like this change is more important that just 'second game harder', no?
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.
It doesn't. Dark Souls meant and intended one thing at release. Then they had to make another game, so they brainstormed a sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the original. And then they made another sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the last two games, again. And so on and so on.
This is why "canon" arguments when it comes to stories that were not planned in advance are stupid. Obviously, in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook and the republic collapsed in distant history. Now, when I watch it again in 2025, should I view it through the hermeneutic that Darth Vader is actually Vice-President of the Empire and the Republic fell 19 years ago? Of course not. Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.
It's generally valuable to analyze movies or games on their own, in light of what preceded them at the time of release.
"[X] is persecuted because it's bad" should be the default assumption, despite what a lifetime of cultural conditioning tells me.
Cults are marginalized, criminals are jailed, and pedophiles are excluded from some jobs. Unproductive workers are fired (or at least not promoted), unpleasant people don't get invited to parties, and flaky people don't get trusted with responsibilities. I'm guessing I would agree with the consensus 90% of the time, but that last 10% is very important.
Yeah. I gotta say, mainstream conservatives seem drawn like salmon to their native pool of the worst argument to support directionally correct positions. Throughout the 2016-2024 window, "cancel culture" was the rallying cry of conservatives against the left. But that was always the worst tack to take.
- Bad things should get you cancelled. Even if not, it's a universal feature of human societies. Every society has the sacred and taboos, whether right or not, and violating them has always resulted in punishment or shunning. The left is more likely to eliminate inequality of outcomes than you are to eliminate cancellation.
- When you whine about cancellation, you're pre-emptively sabotaging yourself for when you take the cultural catbird seat back. If you've spent eight years complaining about viewpoint discrimination, you can't easily conduct a purge of the people who did the last purge, the people who kicked you out to begin with. They can then shiv in your back and seize back power at the first opportune moment.
See also: The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies. Well guess what. Now Hollywood is woke, and conservatives are holding the bag of being "snowflakes" for complaining about the representation of blacks or gays in movies. Funny how that works.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
People don't like being lectured by hectoring feminist church ladies any more than christian ones.
I mean it seems like the basic difference here is that a much larger percentage of the population thinks the latter has some sort of moral authority to make lectures
Not any more. What percentage of people goes to church compared to college or works in a corporate environment with HR lectures?
That's a playing field so slanted it may as well be a mountain cliff. Everyone in church getting lectured by hectoring church ladies is there voluntarily, while college and HR talks are mandatory for anyone who doesn't want to be prole.
The average person in the west still sees pastors and priests as having some residual moral authority, which is why leftist activists still try to infiltrate churches. Respect for woke equivalents is mostly (thought not entirely! The piety of towards George Floyd, etc. is heartfelt) a reflexive and instinctive accommodation to power.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!
Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet? The lifecycle of every other I've seen is:
- One month of elevated activity, with everyone criticizing Reddit and celebrating their new home
- A purity spiral towards the far right starts
- Ghost town
I'm certain a few departed/banned left-leaning posters will accuse us of going through #2. But it's nothing like what happened to Ruqqus, for example, and #3 never arrived. We've been stable at 1000-2000 comments/week for years now. Subjectively I'd say quality is down, but eh.
Perhaps mottizens are just built different™?
Are people overestimating how much effort the mods require? I see OPs either posting 50 words (leading to them getting modded) or writing mini-essays. But usually a solid three paragraphs is enough for mods to leave a toplevel alone.
More options
Context Copy link