FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
9hr ago
I first came across it when Scott linked to it in "Radicalising the Romanceless". I think it should be required reading for anyone training to be a GP, social worker, psychotherapist etc..
FtttG
15hr ago
As ever, I'm reminded of this immortal piece by Theodore Dalrymple.
FtttG
1d ago
Fine, why some women. I've never even suggested this is true of all women so please don't put words in my mouth.
FtttG
1d ago
True, some people are better at compartmentalization than others. But I'm not talking about the more general case of a boss who takes credit for his subordinates' hard work while blaming them when his projects don't go according to plan. I'm talking specifically about people who develop the defense mechanism of referring to nasty things they did as if they were committed by a third party.
FtttG
1d ago
Well, it's a sort of first-order/second-order problem. Why do people drink too much? Addiction pathways in the brain. Why are people violent and abusive? Testosterone + a strategic understanding that this can be an effective way of getting what you want, in certain contexts. Why are some people controlling? See previous point + evo-psych explanations for jealousy and mate-guarding behaviour.
These explanations are straightforward and uncomplicated. But a statement like "some women are attracted to men they know to be abusive and controlling" is counterintuitive – it contradicts a basic understanding of human instinct rooted in self-preservation. It's so counterintuitive that feminists spent decades flat out denying it ("of course women don't go for assholes – if they did, you'd have a girlfriend" etc.). We notice we are confused, and attempt to explain this surprising observation about human nature.
FtttG
1d ago
From your description, I'm having a hard time imagining how "this is the thing we're doing" might differ from confidence. What is confidence, if not protecting the idea that you have a specific goal in mind and you know you're able to accomplish it?
FtttG
1d ago
Are you not even a little bit curious as to why women voluntarily get into relationships with men they know to be abusive and untrustworthy?
The Hollywood actor Barry Keoghan by all accounts had a very difficult upbringing: drug addict mother who died when he was 12, spent years in foster care. He was in a romantic relationship with the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter, but they broke up, with her apparently no longer being able to tolerate his drunkenness and loutishness. Her song "Please Please Please" consists of Carpenter pleading with an unspecified lover not to get drunk and embarrass himself (and Carpenter, by extension) at a public event. Keoghan, naturally, features in the song's music video. One of the most interesting lyrics in the song is the below:
I heard that you're an actor, so act like a stand-up guy
Whatever devil's inside you, don't let him out tonight
I tell them it's just your culture and everyone rolls their eyes
As an Irishman who likes a drink and who has made a drunken tit of himself on plenty of occasions, I bristled at Carpenter's claim that Keoghan might have defended his bad behaviour on the grounds that he's Irish. Being Irish is not a blank cheque to get falling-down drunk and embarrass your girlfriend. But I wonder if, when Keoghan said this to Carpenter, he wasn't just telling her what she wanted to hear. Carpenter is a Gen Z American woman who's a conspicuous advocate for assorted progressive causes: no doubt she's "done the work", understands that the body keeps the score, that everybody has trauma. And Keoghan, in turn, doubtless knew that Carpenter believed all of this. So the two of them go to a party, Keoghan has too much to drink and makes a fool of himself, Carpenter has to carry him home, and the next morning she gives him a bollocking for having embarrassed her. Eager for her to get off his back, Keoghan gives her some bullshit pop-psychological explanation for his bad behaviour, when the truth of the matter is more prosaic: he's a drunken lout. Carpenter is mollified by this, nodding sagely while Keoghan knocks back his hair-of-the-dog. Rinse and repeat.
I wonder how many physically abusive men, when "apologizing" to their wives for their most recent outburst, have excused their behaviour with exaggerated or invented claims of being victims of abuse themselves. I wonder if abusive men even deliberately/unconsciously seek out gullible or suicidally empathetic women who'll be more susceptible to these kinds of rationalisations.
Tangentially related: so many convicted child molesters purport to have been molested as children that it's a cliché. But I read an article once* that found that, when you hook convicted child molesters up to a polygraph, the proportion who claim to have been molested as children plummets. Polygraphs, as we know, do not detect if someone is lying: they test proxies for that like heart rate and sweating, but there are lots of reasons a person might be nervous other than lying. But many people believe that polygraphs are literal lie detectors, so connecting someone to one is an effective countermeasure if you want to be sure they're telling the truth.
*Here's the study I was thinking of. Over two decades in Malheur County, Oregon, clinicians ran a treatment program for sex offenders. By 1983, clinicians had grown increasingly sceptical of the claims made by participants in the program, and decided to vet them via polygraph test. (Interestingly, participants were promised conditional immunity if they confessed to additional sex crimes during these sessions.) The results are striking: in the five years prior to the introduction of polygraph vetting, 67% of offenders claimed to have been sexually victimised as children. After the introduction of polygraph vetting, this figure fell to 29%.
FtttG
1d ago
"Teach rapists not to rape."
No one is defending or excusing this man's behaviour. I think the point of OP's framing is that his behaviour doesn't require much explanation: everyone understands that some people are abusive, controlling and drink too much. What is surprising, and hence which does require explanation, is why someone would get into a relationship with someone like that of their own volition, and why she would stay with him long past the point it was obvious he had no intention or desire to change his behaviour.
FtttG
1d ago
The Last Psychiatrist made this point before. If you get into the mental habit of blaming your mistakes on outside circumstances, of saying that "somebody else" had too much to drink and made a fool of themselves – eventually it becomes impossible for you to feel responsible for your positive achievements as well.
FtttG
1d ago
I think jazz is one of those genres meant to be experienced live, especially given that improvisation is such a core part of it. Listening to recordings doesn't have nearly the same impact.
FtttG
1d ago
Perhaps this is what the typical person thinks when they hear "school shooting", but I'm not sure if it accurately describes any specific school shooting, thus rendering it a Dead Unicorn Trope. Consider the most infamous American school shooting which inspired legions of copycats, Columbine:
- As mentioned above, Eric Harris turned 18 two weeks before the massacre. Dylan Klebold was 17.
- Harris was diagnosably mentally ill and had been prescribed SSRIs (this led to him being rejected from enlisting in the Marines, just five days before the massacre). While I'm not aware of his receiving psychiatric treatment, Klebold's journal entries detail his depression and suicidal ideation.
- While the entire massacre took place on the school campus, many of the victims were shot outdoors.
- While Harris and Klebold were both white, both had criminal records prior to the massacre, having previously been convicted for breaking into a van and stealing electronic equipment.
FtttG
1d ago
Scott sort of gestures at this in the linked post:
This leads to the classic freshman-philosophy critique of postmodernism: “Postmodernism says nothing is objectively true and it’s all just opinion. But in that case, postmodernism isn’t objectively true and it’s just your opinion.” Make this a little more sophisticated, and we can get an at-least-sophomore-level critique: “Postmodernism says that facts have enough degrees of freedom that they often get reframed to support the powerful. But there are bucketloads of degrees of freedom in how to use and apply postmodernism; it’s inevitably going to itself be twisted to support the powerful."
FtttG
1d ago
I've read three of the items on OP's list. I loved Slaughterhouse-Five, though as I said elsewhere in this thread I question its categorisation as postmodern literature. I also remember really enjoying Catch-22, but it's probably twenty years since I read it and I've been meaning to read it again. Of the three that I've read, White Noise strikes me as the closest to the platonic Ideal of what most people think of when they hear the word "postmodern", and I hated it.
FtttG
2d ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned Scott's attempt to explain postmodernism to a rationalist audience (which he later retracted, although I don't think he should have).
His explanation is really about the postmodern "mindset" rather than postmodern literature specifically, although it could be argued that postmodern literature is just a textual representation of the postmodern mindset. He sees the unreliable narrator as key to postmodern literature: much as postmodern readings of history challenge us to consider how historical metanarratives have been selectively constructed to favour the powers that be ("history is written by the winners"), postmodern novels routinely feature narrators whose testimony cannot be relied upon, forcing the reader to consider what "really" happened versus what the narrator wants us to think happened, and why they want us to think that. Unreliable narrators are likewise a common feature of films, video games etc. which have been characterised as postmodern.
FtttG
2d ago
Several people replying to you point out that the traits that you cite as quintessentially postmodern have antecedents in literature prior to the postmodern era. As ever, there's nothing new under the sun. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is often called the first postmodern novel despite having been written smack-bang in the middle of the modernist era. Many of the techniques associated with experimental postmodern literature were first used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), if not earlier.
42% German, 24% autistic. The fact that the two figures are mirror images of one another is pleasing to me, which probably means I should be awarded an additional 5 autistic points.
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