You ever think about how World of Warcraft repair fees and auction listing costs – set not because mods needed the gold but to counterbalance their distribution of new value and prevent inflation, with a side effect of encouraging authority-approved means of generating resources at the expense of ones deemed abusive and antisocial but otherwise viable – were taxes?
internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner
there’s a person on twitter who’s a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, “when men have messy apartments I’m like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I’m a little freaked out and I judge them more”
I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn’t have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.
almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not “literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender”. And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you’re in some New Weird Sexism land, it’s still sexism and you should cut that out.
when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on “literally treat people the same way”. then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn’t possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology
I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men’s asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you’re relaying this so casually – don’t you want her banned? I will if you want.
And he just – didn’t. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn’t mind that much, and he didn’t want her banned just for fairness’s sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.
(Not that I’ve, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said “HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –”)
sigh. I’ll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I’ll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this
but. come on! I know this isn’t 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?
Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.
This dissensus is, of course, why gay and lesbian sexual culture are so distinct.
I actually knew a bunch of WeHo lesbian fuckbois in LA back when they had a lock on DJing the “Cahuenga Corridor” clubs. I’d be surprised if any of the equivalent personalities today weren’t trans men, though.
One interesting thing around Portland these days is no form of personal motorized transport below the Vespa level – this includes underbones, 2-stroke motorcycles, dirt bikes, mini bikes, pedal bikes, rental scooters, e-bikes, and I suppose Segways – has established a norm around not using them drunk.
Wait, no, I bet those guys who go down the street standing with like one wheel between their feet do, they at least wear helmets.
Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
ALT
In support of this, the US Navy seems to have known that the sub was lost almost immediately after it happened. Presumably “the sound was not definitive” because they wanted an excuse for a training exercise, but the fact that they used the location of the sound to narrow the search area somewhat reveals how little they were planning on finding anyone alive.
Part of it is – the military only publicizes the successful search & rescue extractions, they don’t put out press releases “yeah, that guy’s a goner” for the troops to update their probabilities on.
The post-Vietnam “POW-MIA” conspiracy theory that missing but unconfirmed dead combatants were being still held in captivity got a lot of its kick from the way a lot of those MIAs were well-connected college-educated officers, becausethe typical US combatant never heard from again was a pilot who had been shot down over the jungle.
Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
ALT
In support of this, the US Navy seems to have known that the sub was lost almost immediately after it happened. Presumably “the sound was not definitive” because they wanted an excuse for a training exercise, but the fact that they used the location of the sound to narrow the search area somewhat reveals how little they were planning on finding anyone alive.
internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner
there’s a person on twitter who’s a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, “when men have messy apartments I’m like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I’m a little freaked out and I judge them more”
I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn’t have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.
almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not “literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender”. And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you’re in some New Weird Sexism land, it’s still sexism and you should cut that out.
when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on “literally treat people the same way”. then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn’t possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology
I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men’s asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you’re relaying this so casually – don’t you want her banned? I will if you want.
And he just – didn’t. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn’t mind that much, and he didn’t want her banned just for fairness’s sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.
(Not that I’ve, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said “HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –”)
sigh. I’ll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I’ll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this
but. come on! I know this isn’t 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?
Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.
So in Japan itself, between population density and Mazda-inspired knowledge base, was the assumption that everyone would have access to a mechanic who knows what to do with a Wankel engine?
Russia has basically privatized all of its military operations in Africa over to Wagner in the last few years, so one big question is what now happens to the tens of thousands of Russian mercenaries spread out across like ~5-10 African nations
Wild card in the new Chinese/French/Saudi Scramble for Africa
internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
I totally understand the sentiment behind applying the “I want shorter games made by people who are paid more to work less” meme to tabletop RPGs, but speaking as an editor and project manager, convincing tabletop RPG authors to write less is often precisely the problem. Like, no, Steve, a special ability whose mechanical effect is “you get to reroll a die” doesn’t need 275 words of flavour text. Put the worldbuilding bible down, Steve – don’t make me get the garden hose.
Like, I get that nobody wants a tabletop RPG that reads like stereo instructions, but on the other hand, RPG manuals are a kind of technical reference, and people need to easily be able to look up what shit does. There exists a happy medium between the RPG-as-stereo-instructions and a sea of italics were half the time the name of an ability and its associated rules toy end up on different spreads because the associated lore forced a mid-sentence page break.
(At one point I tried to compromise with an author like “well, what if we keep the long version, but also include a bullet-pointed quick reference sheet?”, and they were like “but I want people to have to read the microfiction”. I had to let that one sit for a full 24 hours before I trusted myself to compose a sufficiently diplomatic response.)
Given writers’ love of writing about writing, this was maybe an advantage of the Shadowrun books’ flavor-text-as-forum-posts format, if a writer was tempted to write too much and received pushback it could be replaced with dramatizing an in-universe poster starting to go overboard and getting brickbats
So two people matched on a dating app and both of them used ChatGPT to message each other, went on a date and had a horrible fucking time.
Two other things
1. This is creepy and extremely dumb from both sides
2. However, it is very funny (read: absolutely expected) that the woman immediately came clean and owned up to using ChatGPT and the fucking guy didn’t own up to it
3. If he had owned to it they *might* have had a good laugh at how silly it was and then actually had a good date
kick the people out of the situation. let the AIs date
yeah. yeah. I kink hard on trad marriage, relationship as employment contract. that shit is so fucked up and hot. wife as maid + prostitute + bReEdEr, husband as bank account. ooooh yeah baby I want to be mutually dehumanized by the gears of capital with you.
part of what’s so hot about it is that there’s a clear dom role and sub role for whatever suits your preference, but also the power dynamics are kind of mixed. like yeah the husband is in charge, he has all the “hard power” by virtue of being a petty bourgeois employer. but also the wife has various types of leverage she can use, she has sexual and emotional soft power because of the intimacy of the relationship, and she’s incentivized to use it because of the adversarial economic nature of the thing. I mean it’s so fucked up but it’s so fucking hot. and then it’s all confusedly mingled with genuine affection for one another because, at least in a fantasy, you probably got into this marriage because you did actually love each other, and maybe still do.
holy shit.
@iridescentknife is this what you meant by “some people’s /d/ worldbuilding scenario got to be real life”?
in addition to being super hot if you’re weird like me, this is also like… one of the primary things that is wrong with society. so.
A lot of aspects of normie heterosexuality sound like an insane kink premise (because they are), when you just… Explain them. This is why I have no respect for the “heterosexuality is boring” position. No it’s not! It might be morally reprehensible (as commonly practiced), but it’s far from boring!
Going back in time to the 2010s to tell the people tearing society down that we follow up by reassembling it from first principles
twitter is like. DNI with me unless you are a perfect clone of me. and tumblr is like. hi. you share exactly one interest with me. would you like to subliminally influence each other’s thought patterns through funny text posts until we develop a hive mind? yeah? cool.
My biggest fantasy is to start shit with Daft Punk at a bar. They’ll be minding their own business and I’ll roll up and start singing “around the world around the world around the world around the world” derisively until one of them glasses me. I’ll be completely unprepared for a fight and they easily win, throwing me on the ground, stomping all over my midsection with their stupid robot boots, breaking my ribs and nose and collarbone. I pass out bleeding and broken on the floor. When I come to in the hospital and the gendarmerie ask who did this to me I tell them it was Justice
ALT
