toasted_cheese
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User ID: 1143
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
scales
The seaponies and mermares of Seaquestria would like a word.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Fair! This is something I think is actually worthwhile to discuss. I also sometimes like political themes (Ghandi is one of my favorite movies, for instance). I'm less happy about politics being sprinkled on mermaid movies for kids, in the same way that Rick and Morty gesture at at the end of "Story Train" -- even if the writer has sincere beliefs, sticking them into your work is going to immediately derail it. (Same deal with the Hallmark channel -- there's a market for people who don't mind that kind of thing, but it's really off-putting to everybody else, and isn't likely to produce a lot of literary classics, because it ends up obliterating anything interesting you might have said.)
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Given that, someone who really cares about being principled would fight for their principles in cases that offer them little benefit with just as much (actually, even more, given what we know about biases in perception) vigor as in cases that offer them a lot of benefit, and likewise in cases where following those principles would harm them. It's only by taking a costly action by focusing on things that would be of little personal benefit at the cost of things that would be of great personal benefit or by outright calling for something that would harm oneself that one can actually prove to oneself that one believes in those principles rather than adopting them out of convenience.
Yes! This is right on. Old Man Waterfall from Futurama nailed this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ay1MGWeWLtA
Bonus: they even predicted the fall of the ACLU!
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
And would your Facebook friend who is so eager to change things up for the sake of diversity be happy to recast Mulan so that a Black woman could get the lead role?
Good question! I'm glad it's my friend who I know a little about and not a rando on twitter. Her quote surprised me because it seemed to imply that a black person happened to try out for the role and was picked on merit, just as when somebody applies for a random office job. I look at the situation and see politics in movie casting, she's assuming some poor actress did her best and is getting attacked by people looking to disqualify her on ostensibly artistic but actually racist grounds.
She's what I call a social-justice Mormon: very Mormon, but also posts lots of SJW stuff. If she sat down and thought about it, I don't think she'd be on board with the extremist smash-the-patriarchy stuff. And one of my criticisms of a lot of SJW stuff is that it obfuscates things like this -- it's happy to let her believe that the role was based on artistic and acting merit. But I think she'd be sympathetic to my white friend who's a children's book author and keeps getting discriminated against for being white.
That's why I think it's more productive to focus on the deeper principles than the pre-drawn battle lines. She could probably have a productive conversation with us about the hazards of putting politics where it doesn't belong, because she remembers at some level that her grandparents were wary of that. But when people say "artistically it's just not appropriate for Ariel the mermaid to be black" while BLM is telling her they're secretly white supremacists, well, that's a much harder sell, and we'll have to have the argument all over again when it's trans Joan of Arc.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Too broad for what?
Too broad of a definition of "political". If we define it such that everything is political, then the word no longer conveys any meaning.
How do you propose to do this?
I picked fast food specifically because it's something that is overtly political now (rainbow-washing from most chains, conservatives going to Chik-Fil-A and progressives avoiding it) that wasn't before. Gay marriage has very little to do with hamburgers and fries, and is not a thing that should have to factor into your decisions about where to eat. ESPECIALLY if you're part of a socially-disfavored group.
Motte: everything is in some way connected to politics
Bailey: it's fine for me to wage the culture war in any context
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
I will watch all of those movies with my kid if they're not total flaming pieces of crap on a stick due to studios forgetting how to write good movies because they make more money stoking the culture war. And with how fast AI is moving, there may be a brief period where we can have all of those tailor made to our own ridiculous preferences on demand, just before we're all turned into paperclips. The real question is what the academy will think of Paperclip Ariel.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
You seem quite drawn to the conflict-theory view on this. In your view is it just a question of whose boot is on whose skull, forever? Or is there a way for our society to have nice things like literature that isn't insufferably preachy and full of actors chosen for their culture war value?
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
I think we're in violent agreement here: we're both claiming that Disney is doing this for political reasons. I love that you researched the whole cast to make your point, but they're not being cagey about it at all. I think the place that we might disagree is that I claim "Ariel isn't black" and related arguments get too easily sidetracked into questions of artistic license. I think a better argument is "you're making political casting decisions, you're also doing exactly the same racist shit that was the reason people complained in the first place, just with different races, and we know this because you won't stop talking about it".
The pre-planned focus-group-tested battle lines are about artistic merit, and they'd love it if we argue about "who is Ariel, really?" forever. There's a better argument to have, and it's the one that advocates a world where lefty hippy screenwriters are expected to write good literature, black people are allowed to be mermaids, and Disney doesn't get to conscript half the populace to watch a stupid remake of a kid's movie because that's somehow owning the Nazis.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Someone who consistently follows principles that I consider evil are people I can learn from and live with, but someone who inconsistently follows principles that I consider evil are wild cards.
This is a great point. Lawful evil vs chaotic evil!
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
That's a lot of cynical questions followed up with a tired class-struggle talking point. I'm not claiming that race and gender didn't used to matter, and in fact I cited how surprised I was when I learned about the Bechdel test. My claim is that we should oppose art being a unipolar or multi-polar game at all, and especially a zero-sum or negative-sum game where one coalition or another uses movies as a pulpit to preach to its choir.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
It used to be "doctors and college professors are not women". You're just asserting boundaries for a category without arguing why they should be there. But my argument is that this is the wrong level at which to have the debate in the first place.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Sure, but my claim is that the actual controversy isn't at this level.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Agreed that we're often bad at living our stated principles, but I think we're worse off if we abandon the principles entirely. Hillary Clinton's speech that I linked below is a good example from when the cracks were just starting to show -- she mostly praises free expression, but puts some caveats in there about hate speech and terrorism(tm).
"Politics" literally means the conflict between differing groups and/or people concerning the organization, conduct, and governance of society. Wherever people disagree about what is right to do, there is politics.
I agree with your first sentence more than the second. A lot of people claim that everything is politics, which is way too broad. Disagreeing about what is right to do is narrower, but still too broad -- a lot of that kind of debate is religious rather than political, for instance. But your first sentence gets it about right, and I stand by my claim that we should confine that conflict so that, for example, debates about gay marriage don't leak into our fast food chains and web browser companies.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
(I'm touched by your concern for me and my kine, by my ass was religious back in the early 2000's. Nevertheless, let's pretend I only start to notice wrongs when I'm being wronged). As Fruck points out, this is a strength of principles, not a weakness. Even if I only attach myself to a general principle once my ox is gored, you can hold me to it when it's your turn. But if we presume that nobody means it when they espouse a principle, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and all we're left with is power struggle.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Brushing your teeth helps you not have terrible dental hygiene. I suppose we might wish that evil people won't brush their teeth and thus be less able to do evil, but tooth brushing is still considered a good thing.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Twitter's official blog in 2011: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/the-tweets-must-flow.html
Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.
Looking for that, I also ran across this speech by Hillary Clinton in 2011 on internet freedom. Lots of interesting things in there that would sound very out of place today.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/01/135519.htm
In the last year, we’ve seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet. ... We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone. ...
And censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand. I’m confident that consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles.
Now, we are reinvigorating the Global Internet Freedom Task Force as a forum for addressing threats to internet freedom around the world, and we are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.
Here's Eric Schmidt decrying censorship in China in 2011: https://phys.org/news/2013-11-google-boss-freedom-speech-china.html
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
It occurred to me after I posted that a good collection of bedrock yet underappreciated principles is found right at the top of this thread. I think it was /u/TraceWoodgrains who wrote it originally? Like, where in the censorship/misinformation debate do people ever call for speaking plainly, or the hazards of shaming, consensus building or sweeping generalizations? Yet I don't think we'd be here in this forum today if the mods hadn't been able to point at this as our shared set of principles for years now. Mostly the world has given up on public forums, or is pretending like fact-checkers and public authorities are somehow going to be able to save Facebook and Twitter. But we have an existence proof right here that with a small group of dedicated mods, you can have a forum open to the world where people deal with the hottest of hot button issues without resorting to impositions of draconian ideological conformity. And those pillars up in the banner are what hold it up.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Yeah, I think you're identifying two bedrock principles there. One is that our political views are separate from our personal integrity. And the other is that accusations of hypocrisy are serious and worth careful examination, not to be casually tossed around or accepted at face value.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the culture wars to me is that I repeatedly see attacks on principles so fundamental we don't even have explicit definitions for them, and then the battle lines that get drawn up are nowhere near that critical issue. Examples:
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Censorship: in every HN thread people immediately start arguing about whether tech companies should be regulated to allow all speech, or whether private companies can do whatever they want and only the government is prevented from infringing on freedom of speech. Admittedly there is a "freedom of speech" principle at play here that does have a name, but everyone seems to have forgotten that it meant we were supposed to be tolerant of opinions that we don't agree with, which has almost nothing at all to do with terms of service on huge tech platforms. I think Scott is one of the few people I've ever seen address that directly (both in tolerating the outgroup and another article more directly about free speech). But there's a second issue even more central to censorship by big tech platforms: they all claimed to be huge proponents of free speech, gave soaring speeches during the Arab Spring about their high minded principles. Abandoning that is something that should cause us to withdraw a lot of trust and goodwill, even if we agree with their new policies. (Also, suspiciously, the two options people argue about both involve giving government and corporations more power: regulate big tech, or give up on free speech as a general principle. Don't get me started on astroturfing.)
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Downthread there's a discussion about diversity casting in TV and movies. The most common argument I hear against it is that it's not appropriate for the setting, and the most common argument I see in favor is that people should be able to see characters that look like them. Those both sound fine to me, as far as they go. The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?" And I realized, right, the original claim was that Hollywood (mostly implicitly or systemically, less-so explicitly) racistly excluded people who weren't white and pretty. Which sure looks true - I was blown away when I started noticing how many things failed the Bechdel Test. But now we've replaced that with explicit, proudly-advertised activism, yet the battle lines are drawn such that we've just flip-flopped on who's wearing the fig-leaf of "[white/black/gay/trans] Ariel seemed like the appropriate artistic choice". Meanwhile we've damaged two deeper principles: keeping politics out of where it doesn't belong, and actually meaning it when we said that we wanted race not to matter.
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Also downthread is a debate about whether it's okay to spell out racial slurs here. And I remember the wave of renamings that started with what seemed like a ridiculous objection to "master/slave" used in the context of IDE hard drives, and ended a few years later with those terms actually being renamed in a lot of technical contexts. In both cases the battle lines are drawn along "these words hurt people / replacing them causes more harm than gain". But the deeper issues to me are about injecting politics into places it shouldn't be (same with fast food joints becoming politically loaded), and the notion that we shouldn't taboo words at all. There was a brief period a few years ago when atheism was winning and we were all proud of the fact that we could say curse-words and anything else we wanted without the sky-fairy torturing us forever. Now we've flipped sides on that too.
Ultimately this boils down to two problems I worry a lot about. One is that the whole idea of having principles at all seems to have much less support than it should; people simply don't notice or care as much as they should about flip-flops or even expecting anyone to state or stand by a consistent set of principles at all. And while this isn't a place with obvious battle lines, I've noticed people quietly excusing it here and there. It's not immediately obvious why it matters to have principles! And I think this is why it's easy for people to discard. But it's really important! Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values. That seems, like, utterly critical to any kind of functioning society, but I had to re-derive it for myself because nobody seems to talk about it.
The other is that the principles that people are discarding are so fundamental, so dyed in the wool for civilization, that we don't have explicit names for them or standard answers as to why they should be preserved. I noticed this when I saw JBP proclaim "tell the truth" as one of his 12 rules for life -- it was like, oh, right, that's really important, isn't it? How did I lose sight of that? Things like "words shouldn't be redefined by political fiat", "leaders should be held to high standards of personal integrity", "you should be prepared to explain yourself and lose status when you abandon a principle you endorsed", "don't inject politics into non-political contexts". All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.
To end on a positive note, I do think this is an addressable problem. But we have to be quicker to look past the officially endorsed battle lines, find the valuable nameless things that are being sacrificed, contemplate them long enough to describe why they're important, and then defend them directly. That's actually been a silver lining for me: now there are a bunch of load-bearing pillars of civilization I've actually noticed and contemplated. I just wish it wasn't because someone was trying to burn them down.
What are under-appreciated values you see that routinely get sacrificed to Moloch in the culture war?
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
A phone drawing max power uses more than a low power charger can provide, so perhaps your phone was drawing almost exactly as much as the charger. Another possibility is that if the battery in the phone is old, it might never get to full charge. But in general I'd expect to get to 100% eventually on most phones even with a minimum power charger. The technical details of battery charging are really complicated and vary by battery chemistry, but unless you're building a project with bare li-ion cells, the rechargeable batteries in things like your phone are paired with a charge controller whose job it is to do the right thing given a steady 5 volts from the USB port.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
Well and on top of that I always prefer in person to video, so you'd probably be better off finding somebody local anyway. I feel like there's some potential in modeling your audience as a single person; half the thing that makes papers such a drag to write and read is how impersonal they are, and the really great academic writers seem less susceptible to that. Seems like if you managed to write an email to a friend describing all the stuff that'd go into the paper, the remaining task of putting it into stuffy academic style could be done almost mechanically. Heck, I bet you could just about get gpt3 to do that part for you.
toasted_cheese
2yr ago
You write beautifully on the motte, so I don't think writing ability is fundamentally your trouble. For me it was about my uncertainties about being in academia, but I imagine there are any number of types of baggage that would fit the bill. I also found it annoying how stilted the academic writing style is, and how lonely academia can be: I'm proud of myself for this result, but now I have to suck all the life out of it and wait months for anybody else to find out about it? That said, looking back on grad school, I'm proud of all the results I published, and I do envy my academic friends at least a little.
It can help to inject some humanity in the process, and I'd be happy to hop on a video call sometime and hear about your research while we transcribe it to a shared doc. I don't know if that would produce a finished paper but it could help get the bones in place.
Were your questions sincere? What are your answers to your questions?
I suppose I dispute that it was ever a fight, in the sense that original Little Mermaid wasn't as racially/politically motivated as the current release. That is, I think there was a default-white assumption that people didn't think about much, plus it was a European tale, whereas now there's explicit racial programming. In the era when I was telling others about the Bechdel test, I hoped that we would stop excluding women and minorities and start getting more variety in movies. And I think we got some of that: to stick with Disney, I think Moana and Mulan and Encanto were all pretty great. Encanto is interesting because it's the most recent, and it feels tryhard in ways that the earlier ones didn't, because now they're explicitly trying to be super race sensitive in ways that are eerily similar to the ways people look down on conservatives for. Whereas with the new Little Mermaid, I strongly suspect they're leaning into the culture war aspects because it drives buzz, and I think we shouldn't reward them for that.
Has entertainment always served dual purposes? Sometimes, I guess? I think I pretty consistently oppose that stuff, though: I don't like that the military trades access to gear for editorial control of movies. Old movies like Sergeant York or It's a Wonderful Life seem like they were pushing viewpoints in the same ways that I dislike in modern woke preachy shows. I do have a couple of super preachy things I like anyway, because I'm specifically into the thing they're preaching: Gandhi and Mendelssohn's Elijah are both in that camp for me.
But most of the literature I consider really great is because it's saying insightful things we don't normally hear elsewhere and that don't map to normal culture war battlefields. Citizen Kane, for example, or Kurt Vonnegut.
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