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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Suppose you asked a black person which historical period of the USA they would rather live in. Very few would prefer to live in the 19th century, or during Jim Crow laws, or during racial segregation, or any time before the recent present. Would you also conclude that black people are accelerationists, and be surprised when they also agree that they would rather live in a less socially cohesive environment but also less racist environment? Same would go for gay or transgender people - my own answer wouldn’t be any different from the women you talked to.

Also I don’t understand why the answer to “in which historical period would you rather live” would be anything but “now” for literally anyone (except for a cop-out answer like 2013). What advantages are there to living in any pre-21st century period? Even setting medicine aside - higher rates of violence and warfare, fewer social opportunities (most people lived and died as farmers), living under the threat of famine, much worse food, living conditions and sanitation, repressive social conformity (look what the Catholic Church did to slightly different versions of Christianity, no need to be an atheist). All this for… what, having a vague sense of purpose? Surely you have a higher chance of getting purpose and social cohesion today by joining a community, movement or even forming one around your idiosyncratic belief system (see Rationalist), without abandoning any of the modern advancements that truly make your life better?

The fact that people are able to feel purposelessness today is an utter luxury born of the fact that their life are stripped of the daily struggle for existence and that they have time to engage in activities other than obtaining food, clothing and shelter - the answer to modern alienation is not to return to a life of privation and barbarism but to find meaning in the new social and technological landscape. Is there not a great meaningful story being told in the current digital age, where we are on the cusp of creating generally artificially intelligent beings? Doesn’t being part of an huge interconnected network of minds where thoughts can be beamed across the entire earth in less than second not fill you with wonder? Plus, for the first time you can find your community around something other than mere geographical proximity and the happenstance of your birth - why would I trade that for being an 11th century peasant who lived and died within a few kilometres of the village he was born?

What advantages are there to living in any pre-21st century period?

You can get a wife that doesn't have to work and can take care of your kids. People still believe in Truth. No nuclear bombs have yet been detonated. Privacy is a real thing. People still read books. Money is backed by gold. Industry has not yet devalued the power of your mind and body. Etc.

It's not really hard to find a reason not to want to live in the decline of a civilization. Unless all that interests you is material things, of course. But it's a nonsense idea anyways. You don't get to pick your time.

People still believe in Truth.

So youre saying people did not believe false things before the 21st century?

Certainly not. True things and the concept of Truth are different things.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#EpiRel

I dunno, I certainly wouldn't mind being able to visit the 1980's, 1990's, or even something like the Old West/Early New West, even if only in simulation form.

The analogy between black people and women is a false one. The historical treatment of women was vastly different to that of blacks. The idea of universal, mass oppression of women is a falsehood created by historical revisionism, something I've detailed here and on the old subreddit in the past.

Most women would live relatively happy lives as the wife of some minor Roman noble or merchant in Renassaince (in fact, framing it as 'wife of' basically plays into the framing and ignores the influence and power these women had). It's just that this doesn't match how the liberal and feminist zeitgeist thinks women should live their lives. Would it have sucked to be a poor or peasant woman in the past? Sure, but for much the same reason it would have been for a man.

Most? Who were all the peasant wives then, aliens perhaps?

By 'most' I meant that most women today, engaging in this lighthearted thought experiment of throwing yourself back in time, would be perfectly content with a position of a high status women.

When men engage in this thought experiment, they rarely imagine themselves as slaves or peasants. The same can apply to women.

Is there not a great meaningful story being told in the current digital age, where we are on the cusp of creating generally artificially intelligent beings?

I see this as terrifying, precisely because of the state of decay we find ourselves in. Yes, we have progressed, and I wouldn't want to go back, but we are currently stuck in a pit of philosophical relativism and a suite of human political problems, no different from the past but exacerbated through the new technology of the internet. In short we have fallen already from peak-progress and are now adding disruptive technologies to the already existing X-risk problems.

Call me an old-fashioned pessimist, or just old maybe...

Ted Kaczynski would like a word.

This is why Curtis Yarvin irritates me so much. He's an unapologetic monarchist, but the definition of monarchy he uses doesn't describe any actual monarchy in history. In one of his articles he lists ten principles he wants, the implication being that they cannot be achieved by democracy which is why monarchy is necessary:

  1. The health of the citizens is the supreme law

  2. Every citizen is equally protected under the law

  3. The law does not notice trivia

  4. Every citizen has freedom of association

  5. Collective grievances are socially unacceptable

  6. Every citizen gets the same information

  7. The government makes all its own decisions

  8. The government is liable for crime

  9. The government is financially simple

  10. The government curates labor demand

I could go by these blow by blow, but one would be hard-pressed to find historical examples of monarchs who subscribed to any of these principles, let alone all of them. In the introduction to the article, he tries to differentiate monarchy from dictatorship by describing the latter as merely physically competent while the former is also spiritually competent, which brings to mind images of Platonic virtue and philosopher kings. Well, what actually kings could be described that way? Henry VIII? Louis XIV? Nero? Mohammed bin Salman? Once you have absolutist rule you have absolutist rule, period. The minute you put restrictions on a monarch's power (especially the kind of restrictions advocated for here), congratulations, you're a liberal.

which brings to mind images of Platonic virtue and philosopher kings. Well, what actually kings could be described that way?

Two immediately come to mind coming very, very, close if they didn't actually achieve it - Marcus Aurelius, and Pedro II of Brazil. I'm less familiar with non-Western history, but I imagine some others would qualify, perhaps Harun Al-Rashid, Ashoka (after conversion) and others.

Also, this engaging in a bit of a nirvana fallacy. A hypothetical just monarchy doesn't have to be perfect, just reasonably and practically just. Our own liberal democracies aren't perfect either (as was and is commonly proclaimed in communist propaganda)

The minute you put restrictions on a monarch's power (especially the kind of restrictions advocated for here), congratulations, you're a liberal.

Does liberalism follow the "one drop rule", but monarchism doesn't? Because to preserve symmetry, one would have to be called a monarchist the moment one puts limits on the power of the masses (supreme courts, human rights, abolishment of lynching).

I think that something like mid-1990s (or a few years earlier, depending on society) would be an acceptable answer in Western context. Well over a decade of almost uninterrupted growth until the Great Recession awaits, along with the rise of Internet as a system that facilitates human communication and togetherness instead of replacing it. Technically, that's pre-21st century...

Even that would be too much of a culture shock for most people. Consider the cell phone. Now that they're ubiquitous there's some consternation that they intrude too much into daily life; it used to be that if someone wanted to get a hold of you either had to be at home or (in an emergency) another known location. Now there's nowhere to hide. This ignores the fact that before the rise of cell phones if you were expecting a call you were pretty much stuck at home until that call came. And when a call did come you had no control there. Caller ID existed, but it cost extra so few people had it. When that phone rang it could be anybody, and the only way to find out was to pick up. When you did make a call, you generally couldn't call just anyone, since there was a charge for anything other than local calls, and it wasn't cheap. And of course you can forget about text messaging.

along with the rise of Internet as a system that facilitates human communication and togetherness instead of replacing it

While the 90s may be know for the internet's meteoric rise, it wasn't really a thing for most people until the end of the decade, and even then it was more popular as a buzzword than something people actually used. By the year 2000 only about half of American households even had a computer, and fewer than 40% had internet access. In 1995 fewer than 10% had internet access. And the most popular way of getting internet access was through AOL, which was describes as a "walled garden" since it wasn't true internet access but access to a curated selection of popular sites. You got this access via a 14.4 or 28.8 kbps modem (though broadband was available in some places by the end of the decade) that was slow as hell, and through a machine that was as finicky as hell. This was the era when you'd try to do something relatively straightforward—like connect to a new printer—and all hell would break loose with Illegal Operations and Blue Screens of Death while you tried to navigate the autoexec.bat and config.sys via MS-DOS to make sure there wasn't some driver problem or IRQ port conflict or whatever. And this "togetherness" was limited to the before time, when the internet was Usenet and was the domain of hippies and nerds. By the time normies got online chatrooms were full of drunken fratboys swearing at each other and flame wars over which pro wrestlers were better (I still maintain that Nailz sucked).

Re: cell phones vs. home phones, you do realize that answering machines also came about at around the same time, right? We literally had machines for being able to receive phone messages in the event we were called and weren't at the house to take it, I don't think the whole "trapped at home waiting for a phone call" thing was all too common even before the dominance of cell phones.

Dude, if you were waiting for a girl to call you back you weren't looking for her to get the machine. There's a reason Soul Asylum sang "Waiting by the phone / waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone".

Okay, but what about the 95% of the time where you're not looking to score pussy?

I'm not saying I'd go myself, really - just that it wouldn't be in the same category as, say, answering 1917 or 1950 would be.

Also, of course, going by personal experiences, I started using Internet around mid-90s (being around 10 at that time), I'm fairly sure we had Internet at home before 00s, and was already pretty deep in the forums world around 98-99. Finnish online access was, of course, world-class from the get-go, with none of the AOL walled garden stuff. While I've had my fights with autoexec.bat and config.sys, that was more connected to (pirated) games to work than anything Internet-related.

There's a lot of charts like this showing that the time from ca 1997 to ca 2012 was basically less lonely time for teens than before and after that, and I hold that the most likely explanation is, indeed, that it was the time after it became possible to form and maintain friendships online but the online part of the friendship complimented the physical, in-person part instead of replacing it, which happened after smartphones became ubiquitous.

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