07mk
1d ago
The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.
To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.
07mk
3d ago
Retard was never quite ubiquitously PC-banned, but there was a lot of spikiness. I grew up in the 90s and 00s in an area with such a spike, such that calling someone a retard or something retarded was probably about equivalent to calling a gay man a faggot. I was quite surprised when I grew up and encountered people in my professional life calling things retarded in the office.
I think it's probably retreated a bit such that it's not considered quite as offensive here anymore, but certainly almost no one ever says it in casual conversation. The last time I heard it in a social situation was a friend's gf who had recently moved into the area, which prompted the friend to stare daggers at her and compel her to shut up.
I've noticed a bit of hubbub in the PC circles due to the distress at this word becoming more common again. Ironically, I feel like this is an example of moral progress: in the 90s, we naively thought that it was morally correct to discourage the use of that word. 30 years later, we've realized that, like slavery or human sacrifice, such a notion was just a primitive belief by a less moral culture that we've outgrown.
Drunk who slapped her around, lived off her money while not giving a penny towards upkeep of the house and his kids, isolated her from family and friends and was big dreamer who couldn't follow through. He seems to have had a shallow, facile charm that impressed people on the surface level until they got to know him better.
This is a common enough phenomenon that it's essentially a cliche both in fiction and IRL. I know someone who's living in a household with a man like this right now. The husband stays at home all day watching TV, barely doing any housekeeping while the wife, who needs dialysis 2x a week, is doing manual labor to support the family and their 2 teenage kids. He hits her sometimes (no idea how often) and also hits their housemate's dog sometimes. The kids reportedly often complain to the mother, but the mother is also the biggest defender of him and will apparently never every blame him for anything or put any responsibilities on him.
It's certainly a curious phenomenon, because the biggest cliche is probably that women will put up with a lot of abuse and other negatives from a man if he's rich/high status enough. But this man is neither. One time, they reportedly got into a fight and he was kicked out of the house, and he had to come back begging later than night, because not a single one of his "friends" was willing to lend him a couch or floor space that night. He used to have jobs but kept getting kicked out for insubordination and bad attitude. He reportedly used to have a coke habit that is not fully gone. Status can be hard to ascertain and context-dependent, but for this guy, it's hard to imagine a realistic context in which he is anything but quite low status.
Maybe this cliche comes from the intersection of men who are huge losers like this who are also somehow ridiculously good in bed or something? I honestly have little idea what's going on.
07mk
5d ago
The right way to deal with that is just to ignore it. Men are slowly learning to do that, but it's not an instinctual thing for them to do, so it's going to take another few decades for them to evolve far enough to have a healthy response to this.
Turns out that the feminist cliche about men not being sufficiently evolved for modern civilization was true, after all!
07mk
5d ago
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.
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I couldn't help but read your comment and be intensely reminded of my father. Both my parents grew up and lived in Korea until after I was born, and the culture in Korea in the 70s-80s when they were dating and then married was certainly very very permissive of physically abusive husbands (it was only very permissive in the 90s). But that's not the part that reminds me, it's that whenever my father beat my mother, he would excuse it to her that this was just a result of the upbringing he had in his family (his father beat his mother quite a lot worse than he beat my mother, by all accounts), that he was trying his best to escape it (they were/are both second-wave feminists, which was a movement that, AFAICT from my mother, was quite popular in Korea during that time).
I haven't watched the show, but I heard that there's a scene in The Last of Us Season 2 where there's a flashback to Joel's father Lalo Salamanca explaining roughly the same thing to him while or after beating him and his brother, that his father beat him really really bad, but he only beat them really bad, and they'll go on to beat their sons only kinda bad, or something. So I get the sense that this is at least common enough to be a cliche or stereotype, and it matches my anecdotal experience.
My father's 2nd wife was also Korean and even less agentic than my mother by my judgment and also suffered quite a lot of beatings from him, which at least somewhat anecdotally points in the direction of such men seeking out such women who are ready to be victimized.
07mk
5d ago
I would argue though, that women sure seem to complain a lot more about landing in abusive relationships than men do, so clearly there is some kind of gendered thing going on here.
My intuitive guess is that this is due to there being a mismatch in how much women rationally expect their complaints to have positive impact in their lives versus how much men rationally expect such. But I'm not sure how much is that versus more women being in abusive relationships or women tending to be in abusive relationships that are more violent.
07mk
5d ago
Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.
I think the same, but I assume that omnipotence includes the ability to convince people like you or me that we are wrong about this, without resorting to hypnosis or mind control or whatever.
07mk
5d ago
The men are being reformed; we have plenty of coercive systems in place to punish men who behave like the man in the story. The men who keep doing it are the ones who decided that the benefits of being abusive outweigh the costs or are simply lucky enough not to get caught. If someone's benefiting from their current status, they're not going to be amenable to reformation, and that's an entirely reasonable position to take for such people (as such, we use coercion and deadly force, but, again, there always will inevitably be people who avoid detection or capture). These men have agency; they're rationally using that agency to escape our reformation attempts.
The asymmetry here is that the woman in this story clearly was, by her own judgment, not getting benefits commensurate to the costs. It'd be reasonable for someone like that to be amenable to reformation such that she doesn't choose to stay in such a situation, and an agentic woman who has unwillingness to do so would be a peculiar thing that, at least on its surface, seems unreasonable, which raises questions.
07mk
5d ago
the simple reality is that it's very hard not to have sex with someone you're attracted to
Hey now, I do this every single day, and not just once, but like a million times a day. It's not that hard.
Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color.
Right, and my point is, if we were to answer that question I asked previously, it wouldn't establish the "objectively correct beauty standards" or whatever, just "beauty standards that are shared among cultures in the world, as measured by [the people involved]." This will forever be intrinsically subjective, and we will never have any access to some sort of "objective" beauty standard unless God comes down and proves His existence and then declares it So. But the point of an "objective" beauty standard, like any standard, isn't to be some sort of invariant Truth about our world that we can write down onto some tablets to shoot out into space or whatever, it's a tool against which to measure other things when trying to decide how to categorize those things for use in our real life. And we can certainly discuss how useful the objective standard I came up with is for those - the judgment on how useful that is compared to other objective metrics one could come up with is also inescapably subjective and context-dependent. But we can still argue about which ones are the best and then come to a conclusion that we decide is useful enough for accomplishing our goals.
07mk
5d ago
I don't see any indication that anyone is excusing this abusive man's behavior. The question is, why did this woman decide to stay with him despite all the obvious red flags and the red marks that followed? That's an entirely separate question from, was this man being a bad person in his decision to physically abuse this woman? Which isn't really asked nor answered in that comment and is, actually, pretty much irrelevant to the particular topic the comment raises.
07mk
5d ago
The bad boy gives you the tingles, but it's not his fault that he's bad - it's society/his parents/mental illness/the patriarchy/capitalism. You, oh enlightened Liberal Woman, can heal him with your soothing therapy speak and magic vagina. Go out there and make yourself a martyr on an 80 IQ thug with no self control! I can fix him! You go girl!
I think I've seen this idea before, but written this way, it feels more clarifying to me. This seems like the female version of men who've grown up being told the same things either going to inceldom and/or attempting to date women without considering his own physical attraction to her. That this mirrors so closely things I've seen a lot IRL on the male side makes me feel like your last sentence is likely true.
07mk
5d ago
Your comment reminds me of the famous Asimov line from an essay, which I agree with: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.
The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works.
The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.
E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?" The choice of the question is subjective, but this question certainly has an objective answer, which we can figure out or at least approximate, and then we can decide whether or not the answer has some use.
And anyone motivated to actually learn about beauty standards or anything else so fundamentally subjective would certainly be motivated to come up with objective measures like that. But the fact that so many stop before that step and just say, "Welp, I guess that means I can just declare that any arbitrary beauty standard that places me at the top is exactly as reasonable and proper as the mainstream ones that place me at the bottom, and enforce it through righteous violence."
I recall first encountering something like this back in 2014 during the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, when the exact same people who had decried the Jack Thompsons of the world in the 90s-00s for falsely (or at least empirically unjustifiably) attributing violent acts by gamers to influence from playing violent video games were championing the Anita Sarkeesians of the world for alleging that "misogynistic" tropes in video games would cause gamers to adopt misogynistic attitudes. When I pointed out the obvious contradiction, I was rebuffed with the notion that misogynistic attitudes aren't like violent actions because they're internal and subjective and whatever, and so we can just declare it to be the case through standard literary analysis.
When, of course, the simple, completely obvious next step would be to do some sort of study or analysis of comparing like-for-like gamers exposed to identical video games but-for the presence of misogynistic tropes, and then measure their behavior afterwards (or rather: measure the delta of their behavior afterwards versus beforehand) with respect to enacting acts or saying things determined to be misogynistic. And equally obvious is that without at least 2 different independent, ideally competing, parties doing the hard work of this kind of research and all having to inevitably, helplessly, conclude the same thing, we really can't make any confident statements of truth regarding that matter, and that anyone who does claim to know the truth is at best ignorant and most likely a charlatan like Jack Thompson was.
Pointing this out basically never got any response from such people.
07mk
5d ago
I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.
07mk
5d ago
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.
This isn't directly related to the top-level question, but having read basically this sort of explanation of postmodernism is before, the one thing that struck me as the completely obvious next logical step is to question how this particular meta-metanarrative about metanarratives has been selected by the "powers that be" and why they want the rest of us to believe that that's a meaningfully useful way to analyze metanarratives. How does it benefit them, possibly at the cost to us, because almost certainly, people pushing narratives, metanarratives, meta-metanarratives, or anything else, are doing so under the belief that success in pushing it will result in favor for themselves, possibly at cost to people they don't care about or actively dislike. The moment you realize that the turtle you're on is on another turtle, it's pretty trivial to wonder if that turtle is on another turtle, possibly all the way down.
Unfortunately, a stack of turtles seems pretty likely to be unstable even in finite numbers, to say nothing of when there's infinite of them. Unstable doesn't mean false, of course, but in this case, the instability manifests in the reality that there's no reason to stop on this turtle instead of the next one or the one after that or the one 13 turtles down which happens to be the one that concludes that all of history was actually just setup to justify you specifically getting everything you want and all your enemies being mercilessly crushed.
07mk
6d ago
Does this come from trying to read Shakespeare? I feel like Shakespeare is best enjoyed in performance form, and trying to enjoy his works from reading them is like trying to enjoy The Godfather from reading the script. There's enjoyment to be had, likely, but there's a lot to the experience that's missing, because the target audience for the script wasn't readers, but rather actors and directors and such, for the purpose of informing them on what to perform for viewers. Personally, my favorite Shakespeare experience is the 90s film Twelfth Night starring Ethan Hawke and Helena Bonham Carter.
07mk
6d ago
Arrival is a direct adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life". I love Ted Chiang, but this is one case where I think the adaptation is marginally superior to its source material. Villeneuve and his screenwriter are to be commended, not just for adapting a short story which is aggressively uncinematic and cerebral, but for doing so faithfully and in a way which is engaging throughout. I'd be curious to know if Chiang has ever read Slaughterhouse-Five.
Of course, the concept behind both these books could have been come up with independently by both authors, but given the time periods, the extreme similarities, and Vonnegut's stature, it would be truly shocking to me if Chiang had never read Slaughterhouse Five, or at least a summary of it. It'd be like some prominent author writing a successful story about a prince whose father is murdered by his uncle deciding to orchestrate a revenge plot never having read Hamlet by Shakespeare or a summary of it.
07mk
6d ago
Personally, I wouldn't even characterise Slaughterhouse-Five as postmodern literature. It's a very short and accessible novel which employs a sci-fi* premise in order to make a powerful anti-war statement.
Having read this for the first time around 10 years ago in my late 20s or early 30s, I generally agree. However, I must admit that I don't recall the book making an anti-war statement, powerful or not. I listened to the audiobook of All Quiet on the Western Front after I read Slaughterhouse Five, but looking back, the latter book reminded me a lot of the former, in describing the horrors of war in basic, matter-of-fact ways, i.e. the famous "so it goes."
I'll also add that, the scifi film Arrival came out while I was close to finishing the book, and it was kinda surreal watching that film and realizing in-the-moment that the core scifi concept was pulled directly from that book.
07mk
6d ago
I wonder if it has to do with what seems likely to be fact that the average age at which males become acquainted with porn has been decreasing throughout recent generations, such that a far larger proportion of boys under 18 - and even under 13 - have consumed significant amounts of porn in 2026 than in 2006 or 1986. And due to current laws, this means that these boys have spent some of their most formative years admiring and feeling pleasure watching women who are older than them.
Also the fact that, throughout the generations, the length of time that someone looks like a young adult is increasing. Even if you go back just to the 90s - and certainly if you go back to the 60s - the proportion of people in their 30s who look like they could be 45 versus who look like they could be 25 seemed much higher.
07mk
6d ago
I have no first-hand experience of Europe in the 90s, but growing up in America in the 90s, that Europeans looked down on America and Americans for being backwards religious conservative hyper-capitalists without basic human decency like universal healthcare was pretty much cliche in my experience. Obviously this was strongly a function of the environment in which I grew up, but I don't think it was purely a function of that. So, at the very least, Americans admiring Europeans based on the belief that those Europeans have disdain and contempt for America for its American qualities has been around for 30+.
This is Boston area, and the ultimate Frisbee guys are primarily nerdy college educated professionals in some field, including tech. Elite colleges don't seem any more overrepresented in this group than any other group of college grads; I can only name one ultimate Frisbee guy I know who went to one: Columbia.
Now, they do enjoy drinking beer and watching sports, but I'd say not in a stereotypical male way. More like a stereotypical nerdy yuppie way, only as an outside social event at a bar, and people basically NEVER do things like casually ask each other, "Hey what'd you think of the game last night?" or whatever. We drink Bud Light Lime ironically at tournaments, but otherwise, it'd be very rare for one of us to be seen drinking a beer that's not some microbrew or less popular import or some quintuple IPA abomination.
A lot of them, you'd clock as nerds, some of them as hipsters, and very few as jocks. Though I'd say, due to the nature of a physically taxing sport like ultimate, the overt nerdiness level is pretty low.
07mk
6d ago
I wonder how soon LLMs will become cheap and fast enough that all websites can be rewritten on-the-fly to match whatever UI style and format the user wants. I feel like the tech is pretty much there in browsers, but no human has the time to write a bespoke algorithm for each site they use, which also could change at any time. A sufficiently fast AI could fill that role and do it realtime, adapting to any changes by the website devs.
Because I too dislike the substack comment UI and wish Reddit (and Twitter too, for that matter) hadn't killed all competitor apps and forced us to use theirs.
You're experiencing a bubble effect. I'm an elder millennial, so my peers are mostly late 30s, but because I play ultimate Frisbee which is a college team sport, a lot of the people I hang out with are white males in their 20s as well. I know a grand total of one confirmed Trump voter among them, including myself (I'm white-adjacent enough to count, in terms of how vast swathes of society pre-judge me), and he will only mention it to me when we're the only ones hanging out or if we're with his friends who are barely my acquantiances. Now, I don't know the precise voting habits of every one of my white male acquaintances, but given just how ubiquitous it is to hear some random jab about Trump followed by the equivalent of "aye" or applause in any social situation, and how much pushback I receive when I try to call out dishonest or manipulative framing of Trump's misdeeds, I'd wager that the number of white males I know who even consider it virtuous to treat Trump honestly, much less supports him, is vanishingly small.
What is the typical White, Male, College-educated Democrat voter like? I was surprised looking at the cross tabs for the 2024 election that this group was only 50% pro Trump.
I was shocked by the 50% figure as obscenely high, but surely you mean White Male College educated, but not Democrat? If 1 out of every 2 White Male College educated DEMOCRATS support Trump, this would be quite the coup, almost literally.
I think white and male skews pro-Trump, but college skews heavily anti-Trump, and it lands somewhere around 50%. It speaks to the power of ideas over the power of race or sex that college is able to be equal and opposite those other forces, which also speaks to the utter idiocy of judging the value of words by the speaker's race or sex rather than the ideas they're expressing.
This seems correct and, along with your bullet points above it, indicates that any sort of renewable-focused activism in the past was a complete failure, and in the future would be a complete waste of time. I wish I could hope that those people who were complete failures in the past would learn from this so as not to waste their (and our) time and resources in the future, but I'm not that naive.
More options
Context Copy link