vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
7hr ago
How do you figure Cthulhu always swims left, if conservatives have more agency?
Even before Obergefell, people were getting state level initiatives for gay marriage passed, for example. And progressives have been filming ICE, whistling, and occasionally unarresting people. None of that sounds low agency to me. It actually sounds very, "You can just do things."
vorpa-glavo
17hr ago
Yeah, I don't think Hamas attacking civilians was justified in any case, but I think it is more understandable if you don't ignore the constant low level application of military force that had become a part of the status quo in Gaza.
It's similar to how murdering your husband is never right, but it is possible to look back to the days before no fault divorce, and at least understand why some women, who felt trapped in horrible marriages, decided that murder was the best way out. Such a murder didn't come out of nowhere, and it would be silly to say that the wife in such a case "started it" with the murder, even if both participants in the marriage had done their fair share of retaliation and escalation over the years.
vorpa-glavo
17hr ago
But the fact remains: in the most recent conflict, Hamas struck first. That part is not open for debate. Other things that are not open for debate: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians; most civilians killed were intentionally killed by Hamas and not by the IDF; Hamas intentionally chose to attack Israel. The October 7th attacks were not "inevitable", and to claim that they were is to, ironically, deny the agency of the Palestinian people.
Wasn't Gaza under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007? Is a blockade not an ongoing military action that kind of complicates the whole idea of Hamas striking first out of nowhere? Like, even if Israel wasn't killing people, they were preventing a lot of imports and exports under the theory that many kinds of goods are dual use, and restricting the free movement of Palestinians.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
I don't actually think consent is an ordinary word. It has a legalese connotation, and really does come up most frequently for ordinary people in the context of sexual consent.
Almost always the words "agreement", "signing a contract", "permission" or "asking me/someone" would be more casual ways to refer to this concept.
Part of the problem is the strange mismatch of expectations. If I say, "My neighbor starts mowing the lawn at 9 AM without my consent", it implies that there is some reason to think your neighbor should need your consent, but unless there are local noise ordinances or something, why should your neighbor need consent for that?
I'm on the record elsewhere on the Motte saying that I would prefer to limit non-discrimination law to essential domains like housing, banking and hospitals. I don't think governments need to force gay wedding cakes at gunpoint.
vorpa-glavo
1d ago
Can I put syrup clubs anywhere?
I prefer my syrup clubs next to a Waffle House.
Can I allow kids to enter the strip club?
I don't think this is a valid comparison, since drag is not inherently sexual or "adult."
Watch an episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race. It has a rating of TV 14, there's nothing that bad in it. Certainly nothing that would scar an older teen.
Drag as a category is similar to live music performances as a category, there is a range of salaciousness. On one hand you'll have performers like the Pussycat Dolls or Sabrina Carpenter who try to titilate and provoke, and on the other hand you'll have Christian rock which is squeaky clean and wholesome. Should we just blindly ban all music performances because some are 18+?
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
So why is it legitimate to ask for action at the local/district level, but not at the state level? That seems fairly arbitary.
I mean, I'm partial to something like Scott Alexander's Archipelago, where aside from some high level rules everyone has to follow, everyone is free to pursue their own version of happiness, preferably in community with other people.
State level bans are preferable to federal bans, but I would prefer many bans to be at the city or county level, if they're going to happen at all, for two reasons: 1) the population of the United States has become less mobile and doesn't move as often, which means that the ideal of Archipelago, where someone can move to a different "island" that better represents their values is becoming less of a reality, and 2) I just think cities are more natural community-like units for policy to be carried out in than states.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
I think it is legitimate for you to participate in things like local schoolboard elections, or local city council elections to get performances that use your tax dollars shut down. I don't think it is appropriate to restrict everyone's freedoms because you're unwilling to take the time to research your local schoolboard elections. (I'm a libertarian, and I would generally prefer for government spending and policy decisions to be as local as possible, largely to avoid the incentive to keep making a bigger and bigger administrative state that is impossible to dismantle.)
I can't exactly "boycott" every single public space
Are these events really happening at every public space? I've wandered through various commercial neighborhoods in my city, and I've never just randomly stumbled upon a drag show. I'm sure on any given weekend, I would find one if I was determined to, but randomly having them happen has never really been an issue.
And yes, when we're talking about people trying to force their sexuality on the rest of us, I do think that usingi the language of consent is appropriate.
Drag doesn't have to be sexual though. Shakespearean actors did drag, and it wasn't sexual. English Pantomime had drag, and it wasn't sexual.
While I don't necessarily endorse drag shows for elementary schoolers, I think that a more toned down drag performance could, in theory, be appropriate, if that is what parents and the local school board want to do with their local community resources. I think it would also be appropriate to give parents the opportunity to opt out, as is often done for things like sex ed, or occasionally for other controversial parts of a school curriculum.
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
Some have described it as "girl face," like the "black face" that people used to do in minstrel shows to make fun of black people. [...] We don't have to ban it all together, but we can limit it to the more fringe parts of society, like strip clubs outside of town, rather than welcoming it into public streets, libraries, and everywhere else where we're forced to look at it without consent.
I hate the way that "consent" language has infiltrated society at all levels. There's just a gradual erosion of people's understanding of private ownership, and public spaces. Whether it's oil pipelines, AI data centers or a new Buc-ees, everyone seems to think they should have a say in how private corporations use their own private property.
Black face is legal, and "girl face" is legal. If a privately owned business open to the public wants to put on a minstrel show or a drag show they are legally allowed to do that everywhere in the United States. The public is also allowed to boycott such businesses, if they want to. Stop being lazy and leveraging the government to do your work for you. Vote with your wallet, and don't frequent businesses that do things you find distasteful. If a public library has a drag show, go to your town council meetings and get the libraries defunded or whatever. Don't just hope that we'll all ban a thing you happen to dislike.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I don't dispute that the OWW occasionally grants wishes in a straightforward way.
The male shopkeeper at the magic shop made a wish, and it is implied he is perfectly satisfied with it. And Ian's wish for a million dollars is fulfilled with no gotchas.
But there are elements like the female shopkeeper's utter unhelpfulness. (Oh, you've gotten complaints from OWW customers who have died or wanted to die because of their wishes, maybe give a little bit more of a warning to the next customer then instead of saying it in a way that implies it is no big deal so he thinks you're joking?)
Whether they're literally demons or not, the two shopkeepers and the OWW customer service guy are definitely malevolent entities.
I don't think wish Nikki is necessarily a demon, but I don't think she's just Nikki + obsessive love for Bear.
In her first few moments of existing, she misspeaks and says her cat just died instead of Bear's. And while I can buy some of her behaviors as being normal person + overwhelming obsession, I just don't think cooking the cat or even the cat shrine are something a person with common sense would do as a grand gesture for their beloved.
With the way the real Nikki seems to surface and freak out from time to time, I think it is obvious wish Nikki is essentially a separate entity created by the wish.
I also just think that the reactions of the two magic shop employees, and the complaints department guy are a few degrees off from a normal person's. I'm not sure if they're all wish personas submerging a real human, or demons or what, but none of them seemed quite right to me. They were all too blase about the very dangerous product they were selling.
Yeah, I think Bear was a selfish coward, but I'm not sure he had a lot of good options once he had the conversation with customer service and was sure what was happening and how he could end it.
Sacrificing yourself to save someone you essentially accidentally whammied with a wish would be very noble, but it is a tall ask, and I'm not sure most people put in Bear's situation would be able to go through with it. And the other out he is given, when the real Nikki begs him to kill her isn't exactly great either, since he's going to be the prime suspect if her body is ever discovered. So he's got two no win options, his life is over in either option that "fixes" his mistake.
Bear is absolutely selfish and not concerned about the real Nikki at all, and even his actions at the end, trying to get Ian to make it so he had never made a wish can be read as manipulative (sure, it would presumably undo Sarah's murder, and get rid of all the social consequences for Bear and Nikki, but it also probably leaves Bear able to make a new wish, and I don't think that's an accident. Even at the end he was trying to find a way to get an alternate version of his wish granted, knowing full well what it entailed.)
I think Bear's morally bad in a banal way, but I think if he had been "good" but not saintly, I'm not sure how things could have turned out much better for him or Nikki. I guess if Bear had sought out more One Wish Willows before someone died, and tried to calmly explain things to Ian, there's a small chance Ian would take it seriously enough to actually make the wish to undo things, but I have my doubts.
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
It's just an odd sort of moralizing. Bear was just making a wish on a tacky toy from a New Age store, and it is clear from his own disbelief at Nikki's reaction that night and into the next day that he had expected the One Wish Willow to be about as effective as a birthday wish or a wish on a penny fountain or a falling star.
Maybe it's a bit loser coded to literally wish for someone to fall in love with you, but he had almost no reason to think that he had a genuine wishing artifact. And even if he truly wanted what he wished for, it's not like you want people's free will to be subverted so you can get your wish. If you throw a penny in a fountain and wish for your crush to fall in love with you, you're usually just hoping that they'll organically fall in love with you (however contradictory that is with the action you're taking.) If you wish to get your big promotion on a wishing star, you're not really hoping that your boss will be possessed by a demon and forced to give you a promotion.
Bear factually derailed Nikki's life, but he did so largely in ignorance of what he was doing.
I would chalk it to either an angler fish strategy, or the OWW having a sense of dramatic irony.
Since there are enough OWWs in the world that you can see other people's wishes granted, maybe the OWW lures people in by granting a subset of wishes not touching on human agency in a completely straightforward way. That way, it generates positive word of mouth and gets more people to use it for the kinds of wishes it likes to corrupt.
Alternatively, maybe the OWW just knew with high probability that the guy would never get to use the money because of Nikki, so it was happy to grant the wish for the dramatic irony his death would produce.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
'anyone in the world' clearly includes psychotic, insane people that do crazy things like killing themselves to further political or religious causes. The magic is entirely about non-consensually shifting the behavior of a regular woman into the most insane possible woman infatuated with main character. You can probably find evidence of separate insane women doing all of the insane things Nikki does in the movie.
While I think there is ambiguity in Bear's wording, I actually interpreted the wish to be for "Nikki to love [him] more than [she loves] anyone [else] in the fucking world" as opposed to for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world [loves anyone else]."
This is part of why I say it is a monkey's paw, or some other flavor of asshole genie. Almost any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.) The sign of a "good" genie, is that you make a wish in plain English, and they interpret in a way you would endorse via coherent extrapolated volition, or they at least make a good faith effort to give you what you asked for with no nasty gotchas.
If the One Wish Willow will just give you a million dollars in a pretty straightforward way, but it creates a demonic persona when you make a love potion wish, that's an entity that is out to get you in some way.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
The creator of the film Obsession, Curry Barker, claims that the One Wish Willow is not a monkey's paw, but I feel like this doesn't make sense, or, if it is true, it undermines the point of the film.
Bear wishes for "Nikki to love [him] more than anyone in the fucking world." An aligned One Wish Willow should not have made her obsessive to the point of murder and cat-cooking. Even if you follow the logic that the real Nikki would never fall in love with him, so it has to create a Freaky Nikki persona who would, that also just isn't what he asked for.
Even if he was more in love with the idea of Nikki, than in her in her full personhood, Freaky Nikki is not Nikki, and not just in the minimal way that his wish should have implied.
I feel like Barker's statement implies that a more evil wish, like, "I wish for Nikki's personality to be completely erased and replaced with a robot persona that carries out my orders exactly as I intend them" would have had better results than Bear's comparatively less evil wish. But since the film is a classic "be careful what you wish for" horror movie, I find it easier to believe that the wish granter is actively malevolent in how it interprets any wish that impacts human agency, and even a wish like that will have a bad outcome somehow.
Like, is the take away really supposed to be that Bear simply should have waited to get a better sense of the limitations and proclivities of his wish-granting artifact, by watching other people use theirs, and then make his wish after running it by a lawyer? Surely not.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
But isn't some of the complaint that even aside from plagiarism and outright lies, Arday's actual function was to be the guy who gave cover for the "destroy whiteness" or "Britain has always had black people" lines of thought that make it harder for anti-immigration people and white Britons to remain equal in their own society?
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.
Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)
Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?
At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
I don’t think this will go the way you imagine it will. At least, there’s a lot of room for people to change their minds. I don’t think it will help that the concerns about water and toxins are basically fake news. The challenge that AI will rapidly change society is more serious and I think there are a lot of serious anxieties mixed in with that.
I think the problem is that a good portion of the public has these points precisely backwards. They believe in the stupid water and toxin points, while believing that AI is all empty hype that will surely end in a rapture-like bubble pop that will magic everything away and make all technology revert back to 2021 again.
I've had frustrating discussions with people in my life who say that all the data center build out isn't worth it for "a better search engine." I had to make the point that if it is all hype, then they don't need to worry about the environmental effects of data centers, as we'll have a 5-10 year period of build up and usage and then all the infrastructure will be shut down and put on moth balls. The idea that LLMs and generative AI might actually be something new and interesting is not very widespread.
Heck, my D&D group has people who think that Mythos-tier cybercapabilities literally do not exist, and I still have art friends who act as if bad hands are an inevitability for AI art.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
Sadly, I've spoken to enough friends in real life to know that it isn't astroturfed. People are using all sorts of discredited arguments to argue against AI datacenters. It's all the worst parts of NIMBYism come to roost.
I've seen that adaptation, and I think it dropped central themes of the story. Xenia truly is central to that story, and I don't remember it being emphasized at all in the TV movie adaptation.
I think there are valid complaints you could make of how hamfistedly Nolan crammed "Zeus's law"/xenia into the narrative, but his choice to try and include it at least makes it feel more like the original epic in some ways.
(I say that even if I also think Nolan removed a lot of opportunities to emphasize the importance of xenia in the story, like Polyphemus saying his xenia was to eat Odysseus last, or Nausicaa and the Phaeacians finally showing how civilized folk treat Odysseus with hospitality, which also works as a good reminder of what sacred laws the suitors are violating right before the final arc of the epic.)
I will say that I would have liked Odysseus' cunning and trickster tendencies to shine through more. I couldn't really see Matt Damon's Odysseus attempting to lie to Athena-in-disguise, much to the latter's delight.
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened
The nature of storytelling is that new retellings emphasize different things than the original.
Almost no Westerner retelling the Prodigal Son story ever mentions the famine that happens in the middle of the story. The Song of Hiawatha emphasizes different things than the original Indian version of the story. Sir Orpheo gives the Orpheus myth a happy ending.
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
I was personally pretty lukewarm on Frankenstein. (Spoilers below for GDT's adaptation.)
I feel like making the monster immortal undermined the way Frankenstein actually overcame death (by animating a creature made out of dead people), and while I thought it did a good job highlighting parts of the original novel I hadn't picked up on the first time I read it (such as the implicit comparison between the polar expedition and Frankenstein's experiments), I also just think it made a lot of del-Toro-esque changes that actually undermined many strengths of the original story.
Having no aborted female creature, and making Frankenstein kill his fiancee instead of the monster, actually felt like weird attempts by del Toro to minimize some of the worst things the monster does in the story, but it makes the monster less human not more. In the original story, the monster is a true tabula rasa, and it is because he is treated like a monster by most of the world that he lashes out and kills people around Frankenstein. But in del Toro's telling, the monster is a sort of living embodiment of the trauma of the war that killed the people he is a composite of, and not truly a blank slate. And he doesn't do bad things like kill Frankenstein's relatives, because del Toro thinks monsters shouldn't do bad things or something.
Like I get it, this is the guy who saw Creature from the Black Lagoon, and sympathised with the woman-kidnapping creature instead of the woman, but does he not see how Frankenstein's monster is actually more compellingly human if he does horrible things?
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted? Has most of Greek myth?
It is hard to say that Hollywood has recently gotten bad at adaptations, if they've never been very good at adaptations.
I enjoyed the movie Jason and the Argonauts, but I wouldn't say it is the most faithful adaptation of the Argonautica. I enjoyed Troy, but I wouldn't say it was a totally faithful retelling of the Illiad.
While I agree that Nolan's Odyssey was unfaithful in various ways, I actually thought it was more faithful than a lot of past attempts, since it at least tried to do something with the themes of xenia that almost all modern adaptations adapt out.
I almost wonder if a "faithful" adaptation of something like the Odyssey or Illiad wouldn't use a framing device similar to the Princess Bride. Maybe an opening scene with Homer as a bard, telling the poem to an audience, and then you could include abbreviated versions of the catalogue of ships in the Illiad and other parts that always get dropped in adaptations, while showing how the audience at the time reacted to those sections.
Maybe you could make it so it is not a single bard telling the story, but a series of bards and scholars all adding their own bits. Have the segment where Odysseus first lands back on Ithaca told with a framing story of the neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry telling all of the supposed symbolism of the cave of the nymphs (which gets dropped in almost every adaptation, as a supposedly totally superfluous scene.) Maybe add some of the bits that happen after the Odyssey ends, from the Greek dramas, using the plays as the framing device for that part of the story.
Now granted, my proposed adaptation has the potential to be the most boring and meandering version of the story of the Trojan war ever put to film (people want faithful, but does anyone actually want catalogue-of-ships faithful?), but I think it would at least be a different take some could appreciate.
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
I can't think of any adaptations that are very different to the source material but still good, but I suspect in those cases the film/TV adaptation could end up eclipsing the original, which fades from public memory.
What about Green Knight? I read the original for fun in high school, and I enjoyed it as a film despite it not being a very faithful adaptation.
I have more mixed feelings about them but Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Frankenstein were at least interesting films, even if some of the changes were quite baffling.
Maybe this is some of the appeal of horror media. It's one of the main forms of media that is just happy to end with a downer ending.
For example, I love that in the movie Weaponsthe parents and kids who were whammied by the witch didn't just get better when the spell was broken. Something was taken from them, and while months later some of the kids are slowly regaining the ability to talk, the parents, who suffered under the effects longest, have to be institutionalized.
I remember loving the Goosebumps books as a kid, and several books end with the monster or whatever winning. For example, I vividly remember the "baby's first body horror" book, Chicken Chicken, ends withthe characters being cursed to turn into pigs, after they re-offend the witch that cursed and decursed them with a chicken transformation.
Though I suppose the problem is that when you start reading horror, you know the odds are weighted in that direction. (Even if there are several horror films where the evil is sealed or contained for a time, and the protagonists live to fight another day.)
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