bambamramfan

[bambamramfan]

Discourse knows, there have been too many articles in the UMC publications about polyamory, and I apologize for adding to the bonfire of think pieces. At least this one linked above is less obnoxious than most of them.

(The most obnoxious one is referenced in this article, the Atlantic piece saying that polyamory is bourgeois identity politics distracting from material change.)

And what gets me is that for a bunch of supposed Marxists decrying how polyamory is just cultural superficiality irrelevant to the superstructure of material conditions.... none of them can bother to write a Marxist analysis of polyamory! It's just throwing different names at each other, no discussion of material incentives.

And it's so fucking easy to write one, isn't it. Here's our starting points:

Marriage (and the relationship models that lead to it) is an economic institution.

The change in modern polyamory fads is, like most fashion, coming from the upper-class.[1]

I think we can all agree on these basic premises, and they provide a great deal of grist for economic analysis.

For instance, the middle class in America is falling apart. Especially if you are a recent college graduate. It's easy to get an internship that might be on track to a very lucrative career, especially in a big city. It's a lot harder to start a stable middle-class job somewhere between the coasts. So you can't really start planning for baby until you're 30 and after 5 different careers you maybe have one that will last more than a year, and can put a down payment on a home at maybe 35. (Housing costs rising, especially in cities, has really exacerbated that.

Does this apply to everyone? No. Does it apply to more people that in the past? Big yeah. So, what does a young educated something do in their twenties and early thirties?

But the upper class - I suppose we are supposed to say upper middle class, but c'mon programmer earning $250k you're fooling no one - is booming. It's easier to enter it, especially if you're smart, than ever (note that increasing from 1% mobility to 10% mobility is a big change, even if on the absolute scale it's still unfair.)

Polyamory - or extramarital sex - has always been popular among the rich. Because marriage isn't really an economic necessity for them. If a couple splits, well there's enough money to go around for all the kids to live in nice houses. Mormon bigamy flourishes when a male breadwinner is so ultra-successful they can support for 5 wives, and geek group poly houses flourish when one systems engineer can pay for the whole house on their own too (maybe there's one kid everyone chips in babycare for in the house, but no one is even thinking about enough children in the group house for a fertility rate close to 1:1.)

So if you cut out the ladder from the middle-class-monogamy path, and widen the highway for upper-class-laissez-faire-culture, then cultural norms are gonna flow from the former to the latter.

The thing about relationship norms that makes the change really noticeable is their NETWORK EFFECTS. Being the only polyamorous person in a monogamous community is basically irrelevant, right? Who you gonna date? Similarly if you are in an entirely polyamorous community, my sympathies if you happen to be monogamous and so everyone you want to date has incompatible norms.

But once you start getting away from the edges, they S-curve up real fast because there's finally the option to try the minority relationship style, and for the agnostics who are okay poly or mono, they start seeing people they think are cute in the other camp, and hey, why not try it out.

So combine the collapse of the middle class, the proliferation of upper class hedonism, and network effects and a poly-explosion seems almost inevitable, doesn't it?

...

Of course, I haven't presented any hard evidence, this marginal change at most applies to less than double digits percentage of the populace, and this isn't even how the story feels from inside my head (as a poly converted person.)

But it was. At least. An attempt. To do. Materialistic analysis!

Why are all published Marxists so bad at this.

--

[1] Polyamory, or extreme family/relationship/household flexibility has always flourished in the underclass. But the NYT isn't going around interviewing trailer parks in Appalachia to ask them about their exciting new lifestyle.

#polyamory

[bambamramfan]

I know this isn't going to satisfy Scott, but I think there is a pretty good reason for this argument.

Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!

The people making this argument are not trying to win by pure formal logic, and in fact, no analogy should ever hold sway in pure formal logic - because there will remain differences in the analogy from the original object, and well, those differences might be relevant.

But one of the times when we do not adhere to pure formal logic, is when matters are so complex and poorly informed that we do not trust our own brains to figure them out. So we (as a person or as a society) generate some best practice heuristics to follow... or rather, least-destructive.

One heuristic is "if someone says give me all your money, and give up all your connection to others" then we assume "something sketchy is happening" even if the other person is very good at proving it's the right thing to do.

Maybe that's the top heuristic.

Another heuristic, much further down the list is "if someone says people doing what they want that isn't bothering anyone will lead to vague but MASSIVE disaster in the distant future, they're making a power grab." Let's call it the Sky is Falling argument.

This is the source of most moral panics, right? "All these degenerates doing a different drug than normal, or sleeping with different people than they should, it's gonna cause god to drown us in a flood or at least lead to mothers abandoning their babies in the future."

It's one thing to say "when gambling is illegal, these specific people almost immediately go bankrupt and we as a society don't want that" and another to say "not respecting the Sabbath is going to cause God to lose favor for us." The lack of concrete specificity, the distance in the future, make it unfalsifiable. But the claim is still very emotional, and so people still get worked up over it.

I think human history would have contained a great deal less unpleasantness if we had always had a rhetorical silver bullet against arguments of this type.

... however, humanity right now, well we are facing several problems that look exactly like this.

Global Warming

AI Risk

Nuclear Risk

Transgender Ideology

... but then not all of us actually believe every one of these risks threatens to destroy us in the future? (I certainly don't believe the fourth, and do worry about the first.) It's very hard arguing about something that basically comes down to "look 25-100 years in the future and let us know."

#astralcodexten #existential crisis

[bambamramfan]

"If you're looking for a magic bullet, occasionally you're gonna get shot."

Neal Brennan

[bambamramfan]

Gentrified food snacks

[bambamramfan]

I said you could fill a book on this topic and I meant it and I'm not going to, but just to stake a claim on the take: the key reason people use the idiom of contractualism to describe invocation of and negotiation with sublime powers, demons but also fairies and genies and so on, is because vernacular law has supplanted liturgical languages as the language of magisterium, and that's what gets imbued with magical potency in folk culture.

Everyone here loves that Brian Eno quote that goes, like, "whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"; it's that. When the language of magisterium is one that most people don't speak, the phonological features of that language are what we associate with power, and that's where you get pseudolatin incantations as a kind of huckster's business. A less-discussed effect of vernacularization of the language of authority is that it changes its topology of salience, it displaces the "essence" of power, in the mind of the public, onto the features that still stand out even to a fluent speaker.

This is where you get the Anglo-Protestant mysticization of the differences between the KJV's dialect and their own, "thou" as a word of power of a very different kind than was intended. This happens in the secular domain, also, a focus on jargon -- it is to some extent the appeal of the "buzzword" to the managerial caste -- but also on precision and formal and technical structure. Vernacularization has to some extent displaced numen from language to structure, and when we daydream about the true and essential thing of which all these experiences are pale reflections, we think now less of the language God spoke to Adam than of the rules and procedures governing that process. And in the modern era the hucksters with their pseudolatin incantations have become sovereign citizens, cod-proceduralist magi, and we must imagine Odin's songs of power as articles of law. This is why the story of the genie who grants wishes has, like the old "deal with the devil", been reimagined a cautionary tale about drafting imprecise contracts, so thoroughly that people barely remember that these stories were ever anything else.

[bambamramfan]

Update. I saw the movie and it was good.

I never considered the AI art could be justified as reinforcing the themes of the movie - but it turns out the movie IS about "selling out parts of your integrity bit by bit to evil powers that leads to spirits that surreally interfere with your work."

"Late Night with the Devil" is a horror movie releasing tomorrow about a 70's late night show that has been highly anticipated by the indie film scene.

That is, until reviewers discovered that 3 title cards during the movie were AI generated art. (I couldn't tell myself when I saw the images, but if you look closely enough the telltale signs are there.) Now the same people who were championing it, are boycotting it. I'm not kidding.

These are from the same community that if you ask about a movie by Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, or Harvey Weinstein, talk about "separating the art from the artist." I'm not calling them hypocrites - these are apples to oranges - but the scale of the difference is very funny.

I'm not a fan of AI art, at least in its current incarnation, which promises to replace quality, adequately paid art with industrial slop at a mass scale. I get drawing a line and trying to defend the line.

If anything, it reminds me of tumblr and fan fiction communities. The way the sharpest knives in identity politics aren't out for Republicans and white men and grey tribers - no these days they are wielded against authors who have five intersectional flags but offend against a sixth. Because you can't hurt the mega-establishment, but you can hurt the queer POC author next door.

Which just makes the insular progressive communities hellscapes without proportionality.

No enemies but the in-in-in-in-in-group.

[bambamramfan]

It's interesting how the friends I consider professionally serious are more likely to have cartoons for avatars in various social media, while the ones I consider more informal have respectable photos of their own face.

The reason for this is because the former group would NEVER use their primary social media for anything professional facing, while the latter see no problem doing that, and then are forced to modify that presence for public respectablity.

I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon and it comes up elsewhere.

[bambamramfan]

Thinking about your hero/maiden/monster trinary again; it really spoke to something lodged very deeply in my soul. I'm pretty sure I'll do something centered on it at some point.

Specifically I'm thinking about how really laying the trinary bare and analyzing it seriously - fully acknowledging its basic arch-regressiveness but also studying it on its own terms and exploring the possibility space of building interesting variance or subversion on that foundation - really puts to shame the pop feminist media criticism that's seemed to me for much of my life to be increasingly hegemonic. This movement, I think, is rooted in possibly-deliberate failure to understand the hero/maiden/monster trinary, and specifically the maiden role.

Funnily enough, I remember experiencing a similar distaste for/discomfort with/"interrogation" of the maiden role when I was a small child, but this was very clearly my own culturally enforced gender-insecure girls-are-icky-ness talking. I think pop feminism does something very similar but for different reasons, exaggerating the passivity of the maiden role (and throwing in a whole lot of empty mockery, highlighting bad or just tired writing) to build a case that it's a degrading, inferior role that adds nothing to the narrative. Although this memeplex is commonly accepted at basically face value even by people who don't generally consider themselves aligned with pop feminism, it does strike me as a very bad thing for someone's ability to comprehend and create narrative.

Once you've actually comprehended the hero/maiden/monster trinary, the popular refrain that the maiden can be replaced with an inanimate object rings entirely hollow; it's no truer of the maiden than it is of either of the other two roles. The inanimate maiden is the MacGuffin, sure, the golden idol that the hero and the monster are both trying to get. But the inanimate hero is just the deus ex machina, the chandelier that falls on the monster and lets the maiden escape, and the inanimate monster is just the crisis, the well that the maiden's fallen down and the hero needs to get her out of. This monomyth still "works" in maidenless form just like it still "works" in heroless or monsterless form. Perhaps it reflects on the shallowness with which popular media has approached the maiden that popular media critics don't see what value she adds to the story - but I think it notably also reflects on the immaturity of the popular media critics, that they're only able to perceive the bluntest and most kinetic interactions in the story (those between hero and monster), not the exquisitely artfully subtler touches the maiden brings.

...I encountered this very old ask while looking through my archives. Right at this moment I don't have a particular response to offer, but...unsurprisingly I like it, and it seemed substantive enough to be worth sharing with the class.

[bambamramfan]

Community Building Secrets

A couple weeks ago the SSC reddit had a discussion "If people want a community so much why aren't we creating it?" I found it really odd since it comes from a place of "here is why community building doesn't happen" and you can tell that in the tone of the comments.

But obviously communities are being made, every day. (There is a secondary problem which is that all communities have some problems - drama, eventual collapse, inequitable burdens, exclusivity, cults of personality, problematic members, etc - but they do EXIST, and presumably people want them despite knowing that problems of some form are likely if not inevitable.) It would be like a reddit thread on "why does no one date" despite, you know, a lot of people dating out there.

So a more legit question would be "why are our community efforts not succeeding? What is the difference between our efforts and the communities that are made."

I don't have nearly all the answers to all their questions, but reading it and thinking on the topic let me crystalize some thoughts I've had for a long time. Thoughts that are very important about how communities start, and how they go forward. I'll put them below the fold.

The Golden and Iron Laws of Communities

The Golden Law of Communities is that you need something shiny to start the kernel of any community. It is nominally the thing the community is "about", but even when it's not explicitly that, it's still the hook that gets people interested.

It could be "we have the word of God and this is how to avoid Hell." It could be "we are all descended from this sacred bloodline." It could be "Sharon hosts dinners and her husband is an executive chef so they are amazing." It could be "this famous blogger is part of the community and you'll get to meet them." It could be "we talk about and run alternative theater." It could be "there are lots of sexy young people and who knows what might happen." It could be drugs, going to water parks, arguing about charities, talking about politics, a favorite scifi author, watching black and white movies, speedrunning videogames, a particularly charismatic founder of the group, or any damn thing.

But you can't just say "hey everyone, let's have weekly dinners and help each other babysit or play boardgames, because community is nice." You have to advertise (even if just by word of mouth) a short idea that motivates people to want to get in on that.

Got that? Can you admit that dark truth? Okay we can move onto the second law.

The Iron Law of Communities is that the thing the community is about doesn't matter.

Two seconds after you have enough people in your group to begin enjoying themselves, someone will ask if they can invite their friend "who is totally cool but aren't really into X" where X is the thing in the Golden Law. Or someone will invite the people in the community to a completely generic event that has nothing to do with X - because they're cool people and you're enjoying hanging out.

And that's... fine? Like you might say yes or no to the request, but either way it will start happening, and your group will do the same things and have the same type of people and same discussions as every other group. Your identity that separates you from other people will dissolve away slowly. (In very official institutions, this will take the form of adjacent informal activities.) Congratulations, you have now made a Community with the potlucks and babysitting share-schedules and networking and incestuous dating drama.

There are of course, communities that fight against the Iron Law harder than others, but it just doesn't really matter. They're just as likely to wither and die as any community eventually, and if they had admitted those adjacent people that wouldn't hasten that day. Most of the communities you see have plenty of "members who don't care about X, are just here for the people/stuff."

If everyone was coming to the events just to see some famous blogger or sparkling charismatic leader, they would soon find out they get very little face time with that person, but there are other people around, and they're fun, and they'll start coming back for those other people and the group activities.

There's a running joke that no matter WHAT your Discord server is about, eventually they'll make a #politics channel, then an #nsfw channel, then a #nsfw-hardcore channel, etc etc. And that's where most of the chatter will take place in, eventually.

[bambamramfan]

You do not get cool authentic artist points for "resisting how capitalism commoditizes every personal work" if you still take the money to create or endorse that replication.

#vagueblogging #iykyk #m5

[bambamramfan]

My upcoming novel “Trauma and Found Family in Liminal Spaces”

[bambamramfan]

Hey, is it possible for you to upload SMG’s criticisms of Red Letter Media throughout the years? I’d like to see his thoughts on that channel.

I only found a couple posts.

[bambamramfan]

discourse

The gender inverted version of a simp (male) is not a simp (female) but a pick me (female)

[bambamramfan]

"You're a mad monk, an unmitigated madman. You don't have to tell me how weird you are. I know how weird you are. I'm the girl in your bed the past two months. Even sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant… which can be very nice, but I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging priest in the act of receiving God."

Altered States, 1980

[bambamramfan]

It seems likely that non-human sentient species have existed, like the Cro-Magnons. There are plenty of *almost* sentient animals on this planet already. And humanity spent about 300,000 years being sentient but not civilized. So no, an additional uncivilized but somehow thinking being would not be very shocking to me.

What magic would they have? Dunno. Psychic powers replicate in laboratory conditions.

This emphasizes my thesis that most people don't understand how much little understood, weird stuff is out there. It's not in defiance of science, just outside of it.

Certainly the emphasis on "... and they are at MY door specially interested in ME" makes it more unbelievable. But this just tips the question back into the "improbable" territory. If fairies exist, I find it as improbable that they are interested in me, as that a walrus would come out of the water to greet specifically me. But just judging different practical improbablities, which meh.

walrusfairy

Apparently there is tumblr discourse or drama over this absurdist poll question

In the middle of the night, you hear a knock on your door. You go to open it, and you find on the other side, one of the following options. Which option would be more surprising to you? -A Fairy -A Walrus Explain your answer.

Unlike the blue pill/red pill discourse, at least this question cuts to a clear ideological difference.

Sherlock Holmes famously put it "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Douglas Adams in his book "Dirk Gently's Holisitic Detective Agency" (you should read it) spends much of the book reversing this aphorism: "Once you eliminate the improbable, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth." We, after all, know a lot about human nature and practicality as we must deal with them every day, while we take scientific truths and metaphysics for granted and are actually quite ignorant of their foundation.

The question takes for granted that I even know that fairies don't exist. I don't know this!

"Supernatural" knowledge in the sense of institutional religions and recorded superstitions is falsifiably wrong, as people have put their claims to test and they don't bear out. But this is very different than "there exist things we do not know about." There's a lot we don't know! I doubt creatures resembling our stories of fairies exist, but if one did, it wouldn't upend my view of the entire world.

[bambamramfan]

walrusfairy

Apparently there is tumblr discourse or drama over this absurdist poll question

In the middle of the night, you hear a knock on your door. You go to open it, and you find on the other side, one of the following options. Which option would be more surprising to you? -A Fairy -A Walrus Explain your answer.

Unlike the blue pill/red pill discourse, at least this question cuts to a clear ideological difference.

Sherlock Holmes famously put it "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Douglas Adams in his book "Dirk Gently's Holisitic Detective Agency" (you should read it) spends much of the book reversing this aphorism: "Once you eliminate the improbable, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth." We, after all, know a lot about human nature and practicality as we must deal with them every day, while we take scientific truths and metaphysics for granted and are actually quite ignorant of their foundation.

The question takes for granted that I even know that fairies don't exist. I don't know this!

"Supernatural" knowledge in the sense of institutional religions and recorded superstitions is falsifiably wrong, as people have put their claims to test and they don't bear out. But this is very different than "there exist things we do not know about." There's a lot we don't know! I doubt creatures resembling our stories of fairies exist, but if one did, it wouldn't upend my view of the entire world.

#walrus vs fairy

[bambamramfan]

It's always fun when my replies prove for me "some people are absurdly upset about this." You should read them.

Bruh if you can't tell those images are AI at first glance that says a lot about you...

To be clear, I consider this "debate" so far beneath discussion that it's just a joke. But it's also my rule of thumb that "the side who avoids mentioning the object level is the one to be skeptical of." Ie., if someone says "it's unbelievable what will get you canceled these days" and an opponent actually quotes the offense, well, there's a good Bayesian prior for who was acting more egregiously.

So here's one of the stills

No, I could not "tell at first glance" that was AI. Now, some people on twitter inform me that when you know what to look for - asymmetry in the eyes, etc - it becomes obvious. But it sure wasn't obvious to me, especially if it was a split second during a movie (caveat, I have yet to see the movie.)

But even as I agree "AI art = bad", this shows how much the anti movement is becoming puritanical and obsessed. They sound just like the TERF's who say it's obvious how an image of any particular transwoman is not a """real""" woman - and both groups are wrong half the time, lumping original art and slightly mannish ciswomen in with the "fake" stuff they hate so much. And then it becomes a sin merely not to see what is "obvious" to the paranoiacs.

Or maybe I am blind and the above image is obvious to anyone, enough to ruin their movie going experience. I guess that makes my ignorance blissful.

It says a lot about me.

"Late Night with the Devil" is a horror movie releasing tomorrow about a 70's late night show that has been highly anticipated by the indie film scene.

That is, until reviewers discovered that 3 title cards during the movie were AI generated art. (I couldn't tell myself when I saw the images, but if you look closely enough the telltale signs are there.) Now the same people who were championing it, are boycotting it. I'm not kidding.

These are from the same community that if you ask about a movie by Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, or Harvey Weinstein, talk about "separating the art from the artist." I'm not calling them hypocrites - these are apples to oranges - but the scale of the difference is very funny.

I'm not a fan of AI art, at least in its current incarnation, which promises to replace quality, adequately paid art with industrial slop at a mass scale. I get drawing a line and trying to defend the line.

If anything, it reminds me of tumblr and fan fiction communities. The way the sharpest knives in identity politics aren't out for Republicans and white men and grey tribers - no these days they are wielded against authors who have five intersectional flags but offend against a sixth. Because you can't hurt the mega-establishment, but you can hurt the queer POC author next door.

Which just makes the insular progressive communities hellscapes without proportionality.

No enemies but the in-in-in-in-in-group.