culture war roundup
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
20hr ago
As the 2024 election is mulled over by pundits to see what, exactly, went wrong, I wonder if we are missing similar “warning signs” in trends. The Bernie-Bro-turned-Trump-supporter pipeline a la Joe Rogan could be symptomatic of voters aligning more along an axis of “insiders vs. outsiders” instead of policy preferences, education, age, or race; while there are correlations with each of those things to an “insiders vs. outsiders” axis, none of them are definitive.
I'm on the record as saying that this has been coming for quite a while now. Google is broken and not finding my posts on the old subreddit, but I said this 10 months ago (https://www.themotte.org/post/842/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/181915?context=8#context)
That said I think I go a bit further - I think Left/right as a meaningful political divide is going to either go away or simply transform into pro/anti regime/establishment, because neither of them can offer anything which actually helps people deal with the problems they're facing in their daily lives. Trump is just the early foreshadowing of that realignment.
Urgent Cares exist because people these days refuse to use the system how its designed (and it's because of incentives, I get it and have committed this crime also) but they aren't really designed for the care people ask of them.
Sounds like a design problem.
This has a number of important effects one of which is: most of the shit that annoys you most about doctors is not their fault, they are required to do it because they aren't in charge anymore (most people in most specialties are employed now and not in independent private practice).
Sounds like a design problem.
Doctors no longer work for themselves and are now required by law and by their employer to do things that annoy the hell out of patients and we hate it but its not our fault please dont blame us thank you.
Sounds like a design problem. I'm not blaming them, definitely not individual doctors.
But doctors are theoretically in the best position to raise the issue and demand or impart adjustments. Seems like there's a large... incentive problem, who profits from keeping things as they are, and why don't they suffer consequences for failure?
Another Eliezer Yudkowsky tweet that lives rent free in my head on top of the other one is his almost certainly correct argument that completely removing all regulations currently effecting the healthcare industry would create immediate improvements compared to the status quo.
So, hope that Trump takes a chainsaw to the healthcare regs?
He also has interesting ideas on addressing the status quo.
faceh
1d ago
Yep, we discussed that a bit not long ago, so I can't say I'm donating entirely out of altruism.
I don't know if they filter out the microplastics from the blood somehow (probably not) or if they just get passed along to become the next guy's problem.
Well conveniently I explained what happened with my primary care physician elsewhere in this thread.
i.e., he's been 99% useless to me compared to the time and money cost, so urgent care is simply the better option.
Ultimately if you say, go to your lawyer and ask for accounting help, they may charge you for it and try and help but they aren't an accountant.
Ackshully, as a practicing lawyer, I can say that that may very well be malpractice, and its for this exact reason I keep a number of trusted accountant and financial advisors in my rolodex to send clients to rather than even risk that issue.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.
One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.
Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.
One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.
My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.
Folamh3
3d ago
I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Let's go a bit slowly here, as you've shown yourself very prone to erratically jumping between different arguments, without much logical connection to what has been said. We were discussing a specific aspect of medicine, and after you struggled mightily in using your vast domain-specific knowledge to make a coherent argument, you invoked Chesterton's Fence, again sort of erratically and not weaved into a coherent argument. Chesterton said:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
This was your pithy attempt to just tell me to shut up and go away. However, Chesterton explicitly said that one is to come back after they can explain what the use of it was, where usually, this is interpreted to mean that one has understood that reasonably intelligent humans went through the effort to erect the fence, and so this must have happened for some use for someone. In our case, the fence is the requirement that basically every drug requires a prescription.
I'm going to start needing some clear affirmations of the progress we've made if I'm going to believe that you're arguing in good faith and are willing to have an honest back-and-forth rather than just erratically lurching in every which way, mostly trying to wave your degree around and telling me to shut up. Do you clearly affirm that I have, in fact, described how humans found value in setting up this fence and why it came to be?
If you do not agree, then we need to return to that question. If you do agree, then we can come back to where we were. Let's talk testosterone. Let's hear your argument (only after you explicitly agree that we have satisfied the last demand you made, but before we lurch off onto another hundred erratic demands you'd like to make).
Sophistry (and gish gallops) is not a substitute for a coherent argument.
With the possible exception of Hogwarts, gender restrictions in bathrooms are not strictly enforced. Someone who is entering a women's bathroom to commit rape is unlikely to care that he will also break some trivial statute about not going to the women's bathroom.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
You are advocating for people to do what they want and have others pay for their failure.
I cannot believe this is a good faith reading of what I wrote. You think that I am advocating for people to do what they want with their cars and have others pay for their failure?! h-What?!
antibiotic
Ah, yes, the one example people always go to when they want to defend the status quo. It may be the case that antibiotics have a significant externality. Perhaps some drugs are, as you put it, "complicated". We might have to figure out what to do about that one. It might be the current regime; it might be something different. But for now, let's do a little exercise. Let's put antibiotics to the side. They're "complicated", maybe even a special category. Now make an argument for the entire rest of the world of prescription drugs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Folamh3
4d ago
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing.
To quote myself:
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity", and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
You'll never get sexual assaults in bathrooms down to zero, but as argued in my other comment, there's some evidence suggesting that they're more common in gender-neutral bathrooms compared to sex-segregated bathrooms. A common understanding that male people are not supposed to be in a particular space (and hence that any male person who violates that rule is up to no good) seems to go a long way towards preventing sexual misconduct.
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously. The best case I've seen people come up with is that one high school bathroom assault, and that involved a couple who had met up for consensual trysts several times in the same bathroom.
When I wrote my post criticising Freddie deBoer's stance on trans issues, I admitted that, of all the demands made by trans activists, "using our preferred bathrooms" is the one I find least objectionable, even though I understand why it makes some women uncomfortable.
Many feminists appeared in the comments of the Substack article providing sources which suggested that my agnosticism on this issue was misplaced, and in fact women are at far greater risk of sexual assault in gender-neutral bathrooms than in single-sex bathrooms:
Unisex changing rooms put women at danger of sexual assault, data reveals:
The vast majority of reported sexual assaults at public swimming pools in the UK take place in unisex changing rooms, new statistics reveal.
The data, obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Sunday Times, suggests that unisex changing rooms are more dangerous for women and girls than single-sex facilities.
Just under 90 per cent of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment are about incidents in unisex facilities.
What’s more, two thirds of all sexual attacks at leisure centres and public swimming pools take place in unisex changing rooms.
Of 134 complaints over 2017-2018, 120 reported incidents took place in gender-neutral changing rooms and just 14 were in single-sex changing areas.
Unisex facilities account for less than half the changing areas across the UK, but the number is on the rise - doing away with separate male and female changing rooms and toilets is seen as a way to cut staff costs and better cater for transgender people.
As I also pointed out in the post, it's no good saying "we're not advocating for gender-neutral bathrooms - we just want trans women to be able to use the ladies' room". There is zero practical difference between the two. After all, trans women don't owe you femininity, so if you're a female person in the ladies' room and an obviously male person walks in, you're not allowed to kick up a fuss about it even if said "trans woman" is making zero effort to pass and has fully intact male genitalia.
"How dare you say that trans women are rapists?!" trans activists will howl. No - a policy of gender-neutral or trans-inclusive bathrooms poses obvious risks for female safeguarding even if literally every trans woman in the world is just a delicate little flower who wants to use the stalls in peace. (At least some demonstrably are not.) If you're taking the stance that
- women are permitted to use the ladies' room
- every person who says they're a woman is a woman; no criteria must be met (medical transition, dressing in a conventionally feminine manner) to meet that standard.
an inevitable byproduct of that is that perverts will exploit trans-inclusive policies for their own nefarious ends. It is literally unavoidable under this rubric.
Hell, trans activists even acknowledge that "genderfluidity" is a thing, and one can "identify as" a man at some times and identify as a woman at other times, perhaps hopping back and forth multiple times a day. What's to stop a pre-transition male person from "identifying as" a woman just long enough to go into the ladies' and sexually assault someone, then walk out and immediately resume "identifying as" a man? (I say "what's to stop" like it's some far-out hypothetical; obviously I'm sure this has already happened somewhere.)
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
4d ago
Too antagonistic. Don't get personal.
Your conduct in other threads right now is, while not quite as bad, not good.
You've been warned about this before. A lot. Ever since your first ban, where you claimed you were taking your ball and going home because this place sucks so much, and yet you keep coming back.
You've collected an impressive eight warnings since then, but no bans. And contrary to what some people think, I don't look forward to banning people (it's clearly a failure to steer people towards better participation, but some people are unwilling to change). I can only conclude you've interpreted our forbearance as tolerance and weakness.
One week ban.
If the doctor had claimed that in her reasonable medical judgement, Cox was covered by the medical exception, most likely the issue of whether such judgement was reasonable would have been litigated. But you yourself MadMonzer gives the real reason for Cox's wanting an abortion here; it was the non-viability of the fetus, not the threat to the mother.
strong supporters of Israel will weep bitter soyjack tears when such tactics are used by any other party in any other situation.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6d ago
Thankfully I do have my effortpost/AAQC on the topic handy:
https://www.themotte.org/post/983/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/209218?context=8#context
(In short, yes)
gattsuru
8d ago
Most coverage focuses on his alleged sex scandal. Which is lurid, but has the dual problems of being having run too long while, when described in detail (some ludicrous), just isn't damning enough. About the best that can be said there is that Gaetz lacks Kavanaugh's charisma: even if someone tries something really stupid like trying to bring a Mann Act prosecution against him, everyone's just not gonna care.
The other side is that he's actively uncharismatic enough that I could see him having a tougher time getting confirmed than RFK. Gaetz is hated, and he's an easy man to hate.
More critically, my impression's that he hasn't shown the competence or leadership skills necessary to do much more than take a few retirements out at the belt. My opinion of the DoJ is low enough that 'wrecking ball' might well be an improvement over BATNA, but I'm skeptical that it's the only or best option available. We know what happens when Gaetz demands someone do something and they refuse, and it didn't work out great for Gaetz last time, and it's gonna be every single day at the DoJ. Maybe he wakes up once shoved into the role -- if the conspiracy theory is right and that sex scandal above was being assisted by the DoJ, he'd have a lot of reason! -- but my bet is no. He might be vengeful enough to do a Nunes, but it takes more than a grudge.
Corvos
8d ago
Thanks to everyone who answered my hypothetical about the startup.
General opinion seems to come down to ‘you don’t owe them anything but a decent sum of money would be a gentlemanly / ladylike show of gratitude. Which seems about right to me.
One of the reasons I’m interested in the question is that much social conflict comes from the discrepancy between the market value of labour (determined primarily by the number and type of people able to do the work) and what you might call the utility value (determined by how important it is that the work gets done. For example, @PutAHelmetOn’s code saves hundreds of thousands in processing costs, farmers stop everyone dying of famine, longshoremen make it possible to have international trade (modulo automation).
I would say the primary economic conflict of the last two hundred years is that the employees think in terms of the utility of their work while customers and employers think in terms of the market value.
Trade unions and guilds have historically been used as a method of arbitrage between these two values, limiting competition to drive market value closer to utility value. And the communist states show pretty clearly to my that trying to base your society on something other than the market value causes problems. I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.
Would like to write an effort post but this is what I have for now.
(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).
OliveTapenade
8d ago
About two months ago, I had a chat with @gattsuru about Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, which I had been struggling through at the time. I've since got on with it and finished Dawntrail's MSQ, and I promised to get back with some more thoughts then.
So, what do I think?
For a starting point, I'd have to grant that this is FFXIV's worst outing since 1.0, and I don't get the impression that this is particularly controversial? There's a clear decline in metascore (PC only, ARR is 83/7.0, HW is 86/8.0, SB is 87/7.5, SHB is 90/9.1, EW is 92/9.0, and DT is 79/5.3), and anecdotally my sense among fans has been that there's a sense that this is a slog. I occasionally chatted to people doing story dungeons, and never encountered pushback on the idea that this is a weaker outing. Fortunately, FFXIV is very good, so the worst FFXIV expansion is still potentially quite good relative to its competitors.
I found that the first 75% or so of Dawntrail's story really dragged. I think the primary issue for me was that neither the world nor the cast of characters I was exploring it with were particularly interesting, or revealed any compelling dramatic tensions. I'll talk about the characters a bit later, but Tural in general is not a very interesting place until you get to Mamook, because it's just a very peaceful place with no outstanding issues. The formula for most of the MSQ is that we visit a place, the locals are friendly and generous and tell us about their culture, Wuk Lamat appreciates that culture a bit, maybe one of our rivals does some Scooby Doo level prank to annoy us, we resolve it, and then we move on. Unfortunately the cultures we visit are all very superficial. The Pelupelu like trade and negotiation. The Hanuhanu have a harvest festival. The Moblins patronise craftsmen. The Xbr'aal like chili wrapped in banana leaves. It all feels like surface, and comes off badly compared to some of the cultures we met in previous expansions, almost all of which were complex, contained both sympathetic and unsympathetic traits, had their share of unresolved issues or tensions, and invited some level of engagement with them. Dawntrail improves a bit towards the end - I liked the Old West bit in Xak Tural, where for once there was an interesting domestic conflict, with crime springing up in the wake of a rapid economic and territorial expansion into the ceruleum fields of the north, and formal legal institutions clashing with the ad hoc codes of justice worked out by vigilantes on the frontier - but it doesn't measure up that well compared to the past.
The major exception for me was Mamook, which I did find interesting, but also tragically under-explored. I'd also like to add Mamook to the pile of evidence that FFXIV is secretly a quite conservative game, because to me at least the whole Mamook story felt like a blatant pro-life allegory. Even if it's not quite about abortion, it is very easy to read as being about IVF. The Mamool Ja are desperate for more blessed siblings to be born, mutant two-headed Mamool Ja of superior strength and power, and to accomplish this they've been mass-producing hybrid eggs, even though they know that the vast majority of these hybrids will die unborn, struggling in vain to break free of their own shells. Only one in a hundred of blessed eggs successfully hatches, and the survivors, like Bakool Ja Ja, carry the weight of this holocaust of the unborn. The Mamool Ja believe that they need blessed siblings to survive, but the guilt of this crime weighs on their entire community, a hidden torment that they cannot reveal to the rest of Tural. Naturally the heroic thing to do here is to convince them that they don't need to engage in this kind of eugenics, that it is not worth sacrificing so many lives for the sake of worldly, military power. A more blatant pro-life allegory I struggle to imagine!
Likewise when we get to the end of the expansion, well, it's a bit more subtle, and the script occasionally ventures that we shouldn't be too quick to judge another culture, but there's no disguising the fact that the narrative thrust of Dawntrail is strongly critical of Alexandria and the world of Living Memory. The soul-recycling of Alexandria and the unnatural immortality of the Endless are condemned. This too strikes me as remarkably amenable to a conservative interpretation - much like the world of the Ancients before it, Sphene's paradise is fundamentally flawed, and the right thing to do is to smash its memory banks, let these digital ghosts fade away, and encourage the living to return to the world.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. I do think the expansion picks up considerably once you reach Alexandria. I don't love Alexandria overall, and in particular its neon futuristic aesthetic is a pretty big clash with the rest of the setting, but since it's explicitly from another world, that helps a bit, and it seems likely to remain cordoned off to its own part of the setting. Still, I hope this isn't a sign that Eorzea may end up going the same way as Azeroth, with new, high-tech additions gradually building to the point where it becomes impossible to take the world seriously. Even so, Alexandria is better than most of Tural because it manages to be a portrayal of a society that's complicated. Alexandrians aren't bad people for the most part, and there may be much to admire in Alexandria, but even so, there are clearly deep issues in its society. The fact that we rapidly meet a group of Alexandrian dissidents who articulate some of their complaints helps with that as well.
Now let's talk about characters a bit as well...
This is probably the weakest part of Dawntrail, for me.
Some of the Scions are still around to help us, but for the most part they feel under-used or mis-used. Some of them are present but do almost nothing, and feel like they're just there to provide a familiar face or two. Alphinaud and Alisaie, Y'shtola, G'raha Tia, and Estinien all appear a few times, but none of them do anything in the story or contribute anything, and might as well not be in Dawntrail. Thancred and Urianger sort of have something interesting, and it's neat to see them mentoring Koana, but unfortunately most of that happens off-screen. Lastly Krile... should have had a chance to shine here, but unfortunately I feel she was screwed over a bit. She doesn't do much for most of the story, and then the discovery of Krile's parents and her discovery of her origins is rapidly shoehorned in at the very end of the story, in a way that honestly kind of ruins the pacing of the end as well. I feel Krile was done dirty here. For most of FFXIV before now, Krile has never really gotten a chance to shine, and she should have had it here, but she didn't. Perhaps some of the new characters got in the way?
Speaking of... well, I'll preface this by saying that I don't hate Wuk Lamat as a character, and I don't think the issue with her is the voice acting. Sometimes I switch the voices in FFXIV to Japanese and it doesn't substantially change how I feel about Wuk Lamat. The problem is that only a few local Tural characters, mostly Wuk Lamat but also Koana, need to carry most of the story, and it is too much for them. Wuk Lamat is not a particularly interesting or deep character and it means that the expansion spends way too long stretching out a character arc that just doesn't have much bite to it. Wuk Lamat is fundamentally an optimistic, cheerful, kind person who wants to be Dawnservant so she can protect her people's happiness, and her biggest character flaw is just that she's a bit naive and a bit prone to self-doubt, so her story is about gaining confidence. Koana is basically the same - he's a good guy, he wants to help, but he struggles with self-doubt. Add in that Wuk Lamat is basically the protagonist of this expansion, with the Warrior of Light primarily a helper, and a lot of the expansion comes off as just following around a not-massively-interesting person as she goes on a tour. I don't find Wuk Lamat particularly *dis-*likeable, but she's just not up to the task of carrying this story.
In a sense, it reminds me a bit of some of the criticisms of Dragon Age: The Veilguard for being far too positive - all the characters are friends, and rough edges are all sanded off. In this case, Wuk Lamat is nice to everyone, and the WoL and the Scions with her are also all very nice, and no significant conflicts ever emerge. Even the rivals end up quite friendly; Koana is also lovely, and Bakool Ja Ja is a jerk for five levels and then pulls an extremely rapid heel face turn and then he's our friend too. This just makes for a story that feels bland.
By comparison, let's look at some earlier expansions. One of my favourite parts of Heavensward was the Warrior of Light's trip into Dravania with Alphinaud, Estinien, and Ysayle. This was another small ensemble cast, and it worked really well because all of those characters have depth, and are full of complicated feelings and ambivalencies, and those feelings then bounce off each other and throw sparks, creating tensions. Alphinaud is a prodigy who had a brilliant scheme to create international peace, but has recently seen that whole scheme blow up in his face and end in disaster. He thought he could unite Eorzea through diplomacy, but treachery, greed, and violence have seemingly destroyed his dream. Estinien is a veteran warrior driven by a need for revenge against the dragons who slaughtered his family as a child, and stoically holds himself aloof from others. Ysayle is a heretic from the Ishgardian church, a dragon-sympathiser who believes that dialogue will make peace with the dragons possible, and a cult leader whose followers have been responsible for violence against innocents in the past. Together we are going to confront the leaders of the Dravanian Horde - Ysayle firmly believes that they will listen to us and be willing to make peace, and has agreed that, if this fails, we may have to use force; all while Estinien believes that Ysayle's hopes will fail and then we'll need to try it his way, and just kill the leader. You can see how Alphinaud is then in this interesting place between them, where he's been where Ysayle is now and seen it fail, but also doesn't want to embrace Estinien's bloody worldview. However, as the adventure progresses, evidence of a past age of human-dragon cooperation seems to validate Ysayle's view and Estinien perhaps has to re-evaluate his view of dragons, and meanwhile he's slowly developing a father- or older-brother-like relationship with Alphinaud, whom he's clearly taking a shine to. Ysayle's hopes grow, but are dashed when we do meet the dragons and they inform her that all her dreams are impossible, and she collapses in despair as we move on with Estinien's plan.
That's just a period of 2-3 levels in the middle of Heavensward, but I was drawn into it and fascinated because there's a huge amount of tension there - both internal tension, with three characters all of whom find their own beliefs challenged and need to undergo growth, and external tension, as the characters dispute what we must do with each other. And this was just one example. At FFXIV's best, we see these kinds of tensions again and again - think of Yugiri, Gosetsu, and Hien in Stormblood, or Fordola and Arenvald's growing friendship, or the way Shadowbringers built Emet-Selch into a beloved villain through a long period of travel like this, or the way we saw old characters challenged and recontextualised (like Alisaie's despair at seeing her friend become a monster, or G'raha struggling to bear the burden of an entire city's hopes, or Y'shtola becoming 'Master Matoya' and stepping into her old teacher's role). Ever since at least Final Fantasy IV back in 1991, Final Fantasy has been all about an ensemble cast of colourful characters interacting and growing.
That kind of cast is what I think is missing from Dawntrail.
But I'm not done with characters yet, because we need to talk about villains. Specifically, Zoraal Ja and Sphene, both of whom I think have a lot of potential, but both of whom I'm also ultimately a bit disappointed by.
Zoraal Ja has a lot of potential! There's a very obvious theme of fathers and sons going on with him, and measuring up to or exceeding his father, and I think it could work, except it has the one fatal flaw that we just don't see enough of Zoraal Ja. He is an extremely reserved character who almost never talks, and neither do we really meet or talk to people who know him well. Baby Gulool Ja is adorable and it would have been great to learn more about Zoraal Ja's time in Alexandria, how he came to have a son, and then how he came to abandon him, but we don't get to see any of that. Surely there must have been ways to write the MSQ to show us more of its central villain? (Sphene comes in too late, I think, to claim that role, even if she is the final boss.) This is a game in which the player character has the explicit superpower of seeing flashbacks of things that he/she did not witness personally! The Echo has been used quite hamfistedly at times, but surely if it's for anything, it's for this? It is an excuse to let the player just see visions of things that are narratively useful. Why not use it?
As for Sphene... I think Sphene is fine by herself, but is let down contextually for two reasons. The first is that we've already met Emet-Selch and he already did this story better. An ancient leader of god-like power who wants to sacrifice or doom our world in order to save/maintain/restore an ancient world that he/she believes is utopian and more worthy of existence. We've already seen that story, and Emet-Selch was built up for an entire expansion to try to give that story some emotional heft. Sphene comes in for the last 25% or so of Dawntrail to basically speedrun that story for a second time, and it just can't hit as hard as it did before.
The second is the relationship with the heroes. Good villains in FFXIV have often mirrored the heroes in some way. Nidhogg is compelling in large part because his feelings and motives are the same as Estinien's, to the extent that the two of them literally merge together for a bit. Heavensward is about vengeance and hatred and exacting retribution on the ones who dealt you an inconsolable loss, and both the heroes and the villains undergo that experience. Hopefully even the player does as well - that's why Haurchefant has to die, so that, like all the other major players in the story, we experience that need for vengeance. Zenos, meanwhile, has been presented as a superlative warrior yet one who suffers tremendous ennui, and only finds a purpose to life when fighting against the worthiest of foes, and Zenos explicitly draws a comparison between himself and the Warrior of Light, inviting you to see your own quest for martial excellence (because why are you playing an MMO anyway?) parallelled in his. It's then up to you to decide whether you accept or reject that comparison, and if so, why. Emet-Selch wants to doom your world to save his own - and of course you're in a position where you're going to let his world be lost forever in order to save your own. The blasphemies in Endwalker all played around in this space as well.
A disappointment I had with Dawntrail was that it didn't really explore this the way I hoped. Wuk Lamat talks a lot about understanding Sphene, and indeed this seems reasonable. Wuk Lamat and Sphere are both young queens with kind and compassionate dispositions who are fundamentally driven by the need to protect their people's happiness. Before we reach Alexandria, Wuk Lamat has spent the entire MSQ talking about how precious the people are to her and how she loves them and just wants them to be happy. Then we meet Sphene, who has the exact same motivation, but in Sphene's case, this leads her to ruthless and genocidal excess. You'd think that might be an excellent opportunity for Wuk Lamat to re-evaluate her ideals a little. Does a good leader need to have something more than love for her people? If so, what? Good judgement? Sense of justice? Meeting Sphene seems like it ought to provoke a bit of soul-searching, but alas, it never happens.
Ultimately, I think I come to the end of the MSQ not really sure what Dawntrail was trying to do or say. There were some interesting ideas in here, but they were often a bit rushed or incoherent, or just not explored as skilfully as FFXIV has handled similar issues in the past.
On the positive side, though, the environments and the music are still gorgeous as always, and the dungeon and trial designs are all great. So there is still material to like here, and I hope that with the next expansion FFXIV will be able to return to form.
I wanted to reply to this but forgot about it, but this did get really personal and I know I also found it frustrating, and actually kind of laughable in that sense. Like you give a shit whether a married stranger on the internet thinks you're marriageable.
I'm with you, man. But I think this interchange illuminated one of the big lessons I've learned from being on the motte: the worst enemy of men who struggle romantically isn't progressives, but traditionalists.
Progressives will tell you you're lonely by making up all sorts of just-world reasons why you're a bad person, but traditionalists will come right out and say they think you're unworthy of being married because you're a weak, cowardly man. What you've learned from this interchange is that it's not just the men who think that in trad communities, but the women too. And even hydroacetylene has gone on record that the trad approach to dating doesn't actually work very well.
I'm certainly a pretty conservative believer, but what I've learned from the motte is that I absolutely, under no circumstances, want to be a trad Catholic. Or at least a trad Catholic disagreeable enough to post on a politics board. They are fanatically bad apologists for their understanding of the Christian approach to gender roles and even for their understanding of the Gospel.
Whatever they think they're doing, our local trads are doing the very opposite of evangelism. Someday they will have to make an account for their behavior before the throne of the Lord. And I hope the judgment will not be too heavy upon any of us, distracted from prayer and charity by useless arguments and the sound of clanging gongs.
I care to bicker about a number if it's the difference between 32 and 68 or 80. I don't care between 68 or 80. I sincerely doubt any person has some marginal number between those 2 figures which significantly changes their opinion. Use whatever number between those you feel like.
But since you asked, babies are recommended to get 2 influenza shots in the first 12 months of life, so the number is 20 and not 18. If we're counting the combos, MMR & DTaP would count for 24 and not 18 (8 total doses of these shots). HPV is 2 or 3 doses. When I count, I get 72 or 73 not including the RSV.
the "around 80" comes from boosters (teal), RSV, and "some children" recommendations like dbl flushots per year for very young children which I believe to be routinely recommended for those following the schedule and my experience with young children going through this process at multiple median pediatric practices in different states
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9d ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW.
This is a very good point.
When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
It's probably a little of the former mixed with a lot of the latter. The best insight I've had into Korean gender norms came from this AAQC, which I've added to the OP. Almost anyone who dates will encounter heartbreak at some point. That, mixed with a media environment that aggressively highlights every instance of male misbehavior like men murdering their partners, could easily lead to the belief that men as a group are terrible overall.
How about some man-bashing to start your weekend, fresh from Korea?
My take: I think it's pretty clear that gender is a bigger divide than race. Men of all races voted for Trump in larger shares than women did, with Hispanic men even preferring him on-net. Feminism used to be the huge culture war wedge back in the early years of the great awokening (2012-2017 or so). It kind of just deflated as people moved to talking about race instead, but none of the issues were ever really resolved, so there's a decent chance it could make a resurgence.
My best insight into Korean gender dynamics came from this AAQC a while back, which might be worth reading for background.
Here's the article:
No Sex, No Dating, No Babies, No Marriage: How the 4B Movement Could Change America
When I sit down at a bar in Brooklyn with my cousin — a recent college grad from Korea who is visiting America for the first time — I have one burning question: How’s your love life? She keeps her ballcap pushed down low and presses her lips into a tight line.
“I’m not interested,” she says. “I just don’t trust men. You don’t know what they’re thinking these days — whether they’re one of the guys with misogynistic thoughts. It’s so normalized. Why would I even risk it?” she says.
She does not want to date. She feels no need to get married. Her ideal life is to form a tight-knit community with other single women. “It’s not just me,” she says. “All my friends rarely date these days for that reason. These issues are all we talk about when we get together.”
My cousin and her friends are not alone. Across Korea, young women are swearing off men, influenced by the 4B movement, a radical feminist campaign that originated in Korea in the late 2010s. The four Bs stand for bi-hon (no marriage), bi-yeonae (no dating), bi-chulsan (no birthing) and bi-sex (no sex).
The movement formed in response to growing gender inequality and violence against women: Korea has one of the largest gender pay gaps in the world, and brutal murders of women — in subway stations, on rooftops and in their own homes, often at the hands of men they were dating — headline news shows daily. Amid so much political turmoil and bloodshed, 4B activists say the only way to make women safe — and convince society to take their safety seriously — is to swear off men altogether until something changes.
And now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, 4B is going viral on U.S. social media among women who are furious with the men who helped the former president clinch a win. On TikTok alone, top videos have gained millions of views, and one widely shared tweet about the 4B movement post-election now has 450,000 likes and 21 million views at time of writing.
It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election. An uptick in misogyny has already been evident — just look at the “your body, my choice” comments by men online — similar to what’s been seen in Korea, suggesting that this kind of feminist reaction could take hold. And even if women don’t explicitly take on the 4B label en masse, the movement’s message of bodily autonomy, and the anger that drove the conversation in the first place, could have a major impact not just on American politics, but on American life overall — just as it has in Korea.
Think of the movement as a labor strike, says Soha, a Korean feminist who provided only her online nickname for fear of being harassed for supporting feminism. She says it’s about rejecting the additional work women put in to appeal to men, maintain a household and follow patriarchal values — the kind of work that is more widespread in South Korea’s more socially conservative society. It’s the type of labor all women can identify with and push back against with one powerful voice. Many women eschew the 4B label, often in fear of harassment, but still live by its principles. My cousin describes it as an act of survival, a way to shield women from rapidly rising violence, avoid toxic conversations with misogynistic men and resist an anti-feminist government that is actively trying to roll back women’s rights.
Just as gender has become a political predictor in Korea, it’s shaping elections in the United States. The turnout demographics from the U.S. presidential election are still being sorted out, but a few things are crystal clear. The Republican ticket used male identity and gender grievances as a successful political tool, courting the “bro” vote and attributing Kamala Harris’ success to her identity. Young men helped Donald Trump win the election. Many young women are distraught. It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism. An NBC News poll found that 57 percent of women backed Harris, compared to 40 percent of men — with women sprinting to the left while men flirt with the right.
Some U.S. women are seeking both revenge and relief from the consequences of a Republican trifecta, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a broader cultural acceptance of sexist rhetoric. For some online, the answer is right in front of them: the 4B movement from South Korea.
Like the U.S., South Korea’s gender divide played a striking role in South Korea’s most recent presidential election. Yoon Suk Yeol, then the conservative candidate, secured a victory in 2022 by catering to young men who felt left behind during a rapid push for gender equality, especially after the country’s #MeToo reckoning in 2018 tanked the careers of several actors and politicians. Young men cheered on Yoon’s declarations of being an “anti-feminist,” saying that “structural discrimination based on gender” does not exist, despite the fact that the country regularly ranks near the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index. To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers. From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise. Many American women fear the same could happen here.
4B messaging is already echoing on U.S. social media. One X user advertises the 4B movement as a way to “take control of your life under him.” Another user writes, “We need to start considering the 4B movement … We can’t let these men have the last laugh … we need to bite back.” One TikToker has posted she’s joining the 4B movement after breaking up with her Republican boyfriend.
“When I saw the movement go viral in the U.S., I thought, even U.S. women must be at their limit,” says Yeonhwa Gong, a Korean 4B follower who has written on the topic. “But I don’t feel too bad that it has come to this point — if anything, I think of it as a necessary action that had been pushed back for a while and is now finally happening.”
For women who adopt the 4B mindset, not even men who claim to be on the same political spectrum can provide a safe space. With so many men opposing feminism, and even a video on how pro-Trump men could hide their political beliefs from the women they date going viral, how do you know if he’s telling the truth? “A lot of women are just tired of men, and worrying about ‘what if?’” my cousin told me. “I had thought at some point I’d want to find a good man, no matter how hard that would be. At this point now though, I don’t feel that need.”
The 4B movement might seem too radical to get far in the U.S., but the fact that it’s gained traction suggests that at least a number of young women feel more vulnerable since the reelection of Donald Trump than they did before it. The 4B discourse in the U.S. “prompts us to reflect on how much society has taken for granted or overlooked the rights and the freedoms that women rightly deserve,” says Hyejin Jeon, a University of Maryland doctorate student from Korea who is currently analyzing her country’s feminism movements.
If the movement takes hold, it could potentially lead to some of the same outcomes as have been seen in Korea, where women are reconsidering dates with men out of suspicion and lack or trust, young people are marrying and having children at lower rates, and both men and women are expressing deep loneliness. Politicians could take advantage of the divide for their own gains, leaning harder into gender-divide politics, and even outright sexist rhetoric. And even women may turn against one another; American women are already arguing about the inclusivity of the movement, with some saying that women with male partners have no part in 4B. Such discourse has long fractured feminist groups in Korea, according to Minyoung Moon, a Clemson University lecturer who published a report about the backlash against feminism in South Korea. Married women are seen as “serving the needs of men,” she says, alienating the group from what could be a more inclusive movement.
And then there’s the danger of backlash from the right. “The long-term effect I see is very negative, because they chose the radical strategy, giving men and anti-feminists reason to hate them even more,” Moon says. “And when I look at the 4B movement … on YouTube, I already see the conservative party people bashing against liberal women.”
Still, at least for now, the movement appears on the upswing in both countries as women say that the model of life they’d expected — dating, marriage, house, kids — looks, increasingly, like a trap set by men who don’t see them as equals. And women like my cousin want alternatives.
“To live with friends that are close to me, to have the ability to live on my own — living like that is my dream,” she says.
god_from_celegans
9d ago
Here's a great comment
https://www.themotte.org/post/930/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/201239?context=8#context
It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard
It sure didn't seem that way back when it was discussed on the subreddit during Trump's first term. Maybe they honestly changed their mind, but it just feels like they got quiet after seeing they won't make a lot of hay with it.
"The police are hunting down innocent, unarmed, black men like they were animals"? "Patriarchy"? "Rape culture"? "Systemic racism"? Before you try to do a motte-and-bailey on these, bare in mind that there's no shortage of people actually believing the bailey.
Also how do true conspiracist beliefs enter into it? Were people who believed in Epstein's Pedo Island For The Elites back in, say 2018, cranks? Am I a crank if a believe in a conspiracy of Queer Theorist clinicians and academics to normalize and promote various forms of body modification? Am I a crank for believing children walk into gender clinics identifying as inanimate objects, and gender clinics are happily affirming them with little to no pushback? Am I a crank if I believe some global elites are coordinating to promote LGBT acceptance, including putting pressure on politicians through private channels, if the the pushback from the local culture turns out to be too high for them to take a stand publically?
If the term "crank" includes true beliefs I have to question it's usefulness. If it doesn't, how do you handle cases where the truth of a given belief is uncertain? Are people who thought it's plausible for Imane Khelif to be male cranks? What about people who think Epstein didn't kill himself?
How do your resolve these questions in a way that doesn't boil down to "people who disagree with me are cranks"?
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