It reminds me of a friend who was doing a PhD involving some weird, new kind of lasers. Catching up with her one time, she said "Well, men have started explaining my own research to me, so I guess that means I pass ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ".
My response was “Congratulations? Also, F.”
<grabs your ears>
Something something troubled pagh, child
I also read a paper (or maybe a book chapter?) a while back that discussed the fact that the way we teach engineering actively encourages people to become less socially conscious and more conservative. I can’t remember the name of the author, but I remember I found the paper/chapter from this video(total video is 33:52 in length and is a great watch if you’re a video person. However, the link is timestamped to the engineering bit that cites the paper/book I referenced)
Your comment reminded me of Innuendo Studios’ video series “The Alt-Right Playbook” — in particular, “There’s Always a Bigger Fish”. I feel like this really made something click for me about how conservatives think.
I think that conservatives often recognise the injustice they face, and I agree that many of them identify themselves as rightfully belonging to the tribe that’s at the top of the pyramid — the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. What I find more interesting though are the ones who seem like they’d be content to be exploited by the ultra-rich, as long as they can believe that it’s a righteous kind of oppression, in which everyone is in their right place within the system. They seem like they’d be happy being trampled on by the people above them, as long as they can feel like they’re fulfilling their purpose, and that their suffering is as a result of some natural order.
Of course, even though they may welcome being crushed by the ones above them, implicit within the sense of order they crave is the fact that they would not be on the bottom level of the pyramid. That is, they believe that in return for their suffering, they feel they are entitled to power over the people who they consider to be “rightfully” beneath them. Their anger at people who resist oppression often seems to be like “hey, I’m doing my part in being subservient to the people above me, but this only works if the people at the bottom get in their place”. They seem to believe that letting oneself be crushed by those above you in the order of things is a noble fate — a stance that’s easier to take if you’re not on the very bottom of this order.
The core of this seems to be a deep, desperate belief that there is some intrinsic order to things, some arrangement of society that would make everything make sense. I can’t say I don’t sympathise with this; the world is complex and overwhelming, and things change so fast that I can’t hope to keep up. It reminds me of some advice I read about how to write good characters in fiction — “what lie does your character tell themselves?”. I think that this is their lie. It’s what they feel they need to believe to make sense of their own suffering. I agree that in-group mentality is a huge part of how they respond to the world, but I think that the out-group is more than just people they perceive to be beneath them, but more like the people who challenge the lie that they tell themselves to cope.
Perhaps they have moments where they recognise the injustice of their own suffering, and then they look at how the systems that produce that are so much larger than they are, which makes them feel small and scared. I sympathise with this too, because I also think that the power that I have as an individual is laughably trivial. For me, that’s why I find solace in solidarity, and in striving for intersectional progressiveness within my communities.
I wish that they could work with us to build something better. It is scary, but it’s easier when you’re not alone. It seems pretty lonely to be a conservative. Sometimes it feels like I care more for their own suffering than they do, because they either refuse to recognise the way the system is grinding them up, or they argue that actually it’s a good thing. Conservatives can seem like they’re driven by selfishness, but then they continually do things that directly harm themselves and people they care about. That propensity made a lot more sense when I understood the weird martyr complex they tend to build.
That’s an incredible description, and I’m feeling a deeper empathy for Conservatives than I had before. It’s fucking tragic what they do to themselves; it seems a sad life to lead.
Sometimes when I find myself struggling to grasp something that’s beyond me, I recognise an instinct within myself that wants to become hostile and belligerent at the text, as you describe — to do whatever is necessary to reorient myself such that I am smart and capable, instead of being thoroughly humbled by the uncomfortable experience of personal growth. I’ve become pretty skilled at recognising that instinct, and running in the opposite direction (that is, into the things that challenge me), but I can imagine what kind of person I’d become if I indulged it.
I love it when I stumble across incredibly human moments like this in textbooks in the wild. It really brightens my day because it reminds me that a person (or more usually, people) wrote this hefty tome.
I’m not on Bluesky, so I’m not going to follow this person. However, I really appreciate how considerate it is to leave this link for people who would like to. Thank you; this is the kind of action that communities are built on.
I really like the world exploration. The world is pretty big, and it’s common to come across an obstacle that you can’t get past. I like the feeling of spending a few minutes trying to assess whether there’s a way past, and then going off adventuring elsewhere, eventually finding something that makes you go “ooooh, that’s how I’m meant to get past that earlier place”. I like that it really rewards exploration. There’s a lot of hidden stuff, but it’s not overly opaque — there are usually lots of clues that help you to find secrets.
The open world also makes bosses easier. I’m not great at bosses, so quite often I will get bored of trying against a difficult boss and go elsewhere. There’s nearly always more places to explore, and possibly find things that will make things easier.
I also love how well tutorialized the game is. When you get a new ability, the level design in the section after that helps you to learn first hand how that ability works, so even though the literal tutorial bit is little more than "Press [button] to [use ability], you come away with a good understanding of what that new ability will allow you to do.
I’m also typically not keen on platformers, but this game scratches a different itch for me
We shouldn’t conflate the Jewish people and the Israeli state/Zionists. That benefits Israel
I agree that cultural hegemony plays a huge role in how studies consider concepts like democracy, and that this can lead to problems in the analysis — it sounds like we’re on the same page about that. What I’m struggling with is what you would consider to be a neutral, scientific study? Because even if we agree that this study sets out its baseline poorly enough that we should take it’s findings with plenty of salt, I am unclear on how one could set a baseline in a manner that’s objective.
Your point comparing Switzerland and Cuba is a good example here. You highlight that ideological values reveal themselves in which statistics are chosen to include, and which are ignored. My question is whether it’s possible to do objective research in these areas at all; if one were to take into account the pressure of cultural hegemony in defining democracy, and instead included commonly ignored statistics in one’s analyses as part of an effort to produce counter hegemonic research, isn’t that just as politically biased as the study in the OP?
Zooming out a bit, my wider question is not just about whether we can analyse things like democracy in an objective, scientific manner, but also whether we should. Science is often rhetorically leveraged to “objectivity launder” issues, which is especially problematic because that involves ignoring how Western science itself is borne of imperialist and classist systems, and often perpetuates elements of these (especially when people buy into the idea that “objective science” is a thing that exists, which I don’t).
How does one scientifically define a democracy?
That’s a great line, and captures a lot of the complex feelings I have around this
Thanks for your service o7
It took me a while, but I ended up really enjoying Death Stranding. One of the things that made it click for me was that I watched a video essay on a different game that used the playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-effect as an analytical frame.
My rough understanding of it is that Brecht wanted to break the fourth wall and prevent audiences from identifying too heavily with characters, enabling them to better engage with the themes of the play; for example, if audiences end up identifying with a character who is a relatable asshole, then they might be less inclined to critically understand this character and the systems that facilitate their assholery.
Death Stranding invokes this with its absurd characters and setting. I never stopped finding it jarring when you have such silly character names and plots. This meant that for my first few hours of playing, I felt like I didn’t “get it”, and it seems like this is a fairly common reaction. However, this sense of “I don’t get it” is interesting because of how it primes you to search for something to get — some larger point that Kojima is trying to make with the game. If nothing else, I appreciate games and other media that have something to say, even if I struggle to grasp that message.
If I had to distill things down, I think the most prominent theme I understood was “Play is an essential component of human wellness, and it has tremendous capacity to facilitate building human connection”. I enjoyed how this was explored narratively through Sam’s interactions with various characters, but also through ludic means via the player interacting with other player build structures (I really enjoyed getting so many thumbs up for all the roads I built). Death Stranding sometimes feels pretentious, but I remember thinking “what’s more pretentious: the game that’s trying (and possibly failing, depending on perspective) hard to say something larger, or the player who regards the game with disdain”. Ultimately, I feel that the potential pretentiousness is neutralised by how earnest it is. Yes, it’s a very silly game, but that’s sort of the point.
Regarding Rings of Power, I absolutely hated the show, which sounds like a stronger opinion than what you hold. However, I completely agree that the discourse around the show is a trash fire of bad faith criticism that makes it impossible to express legitimate dislike of the show that’s based in honesty.
My current computer is the one that I helped my late best friend build, and I’m so glad that we ended up going for an AMD GPU. I wasn’t using Linux back then (and neither was he), so it was just a lucky fluke. My switch to running Linux as my main operating system would’ve been far more stressful with a Nvidia GPU, it seems.
I bought a pint for an acquaintance at my philosophy discussion group because he was moving away and this was his last session. I’m pretty poor at the moment, so even a small purchase like this was a lot. It was definitely worth it though, because it convinced him to stay for a while longer than he would have (the group session is held upstairs in a pub, but afterwards there’s usually informal discussions that continue downstairs in the main pub).
It felt very much like I was performing human socialisation in a deliberate, but nice way. I already told the dude that I would miss his presence at the group, but buying a farewell drink for him was a way of reiterating that sentiment.
This is hilarious. I’m deeply sad that I don’t think my irl friends would appreciate this joke, because I want to share it with everyone.
(I am personally irked by vibe coding because some assholes in my life have been real smug about how much better of a programmer they are than me due to vibe coding. )
One of the key motifs of conservative ideology is zero-sum thinking: they seem to think that if someone else is gaining something, it must mean that someone else (possibly them) are losing.
I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).
The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.
Ooh, I really like this phrasing