Useful essay on heteropessimism, inceldom and biological fatalism:

Very struck by the Blackpill-Feminism section at the end -capaciousjournal.com/article/hetero… Firstly, the introduction to r/BlackpillFeminism:

Misogyny, male violence and female pick-me behaviour are biology. Equality is a lie. Feminism is a scam and failed movement. We are heading towards a misogynist dystopia and there is nothing we can do about it.

Why do I find heteropessimism so funny Partly it's my snotty teenage self going "see, told you those social scripts were utterly ludicrous and would horribly distort any possibility of real connection between human beings!", which was true but also I wasn't taking into account that I was autistic

1997, I think, I was in a radical bookstore in Cardiff bringing a copy of Derrida’s “On the Name” to the counter, one of those swish glossy-covered Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics editions. Two women around my age were stood by the counter, one had a nose to see what I was buying. “That’s a good one”, she said. I said something like “oh, good”, and no further conversation ensued, although I would dearly have liked to talk more to these women who had views on which Derrida books were the good ones: surely they would be my sort of people.

ok there is something psychologically novel going on here Going (sarky voice) "you do know that characters in works of fiction aren't actually moral persons and can't be harmed by how they're depicted, right???" is all very well, but this clearly isn't simply a *mistake* - a new kind of identification is being produced somehow

Only slightly more amusing than seeing a soi-disant Derridean brandish a dictionary definition as an authority is seeing a soi-disant materialist who starts intoning in Heideggerian as soon as the topic of history emerges More sympathetically: domination, exploitation, require affordances; you can't get blood (or labour) out of a stone. A system of sexual domination and exploitation depends on the identification and cultivation of sexual affordances, both physical and ideological/psychological.

Since, apparently, men do not write to share advice or observations about relationships, here is a thread on the topic from someone old (48) and of limited experience (13 years into second LTR/marriage, never “dated”). I cannot tell you how to navigate contemporary dating etiquette, or other people’s behaviour and expectations within the bounds of that scenario. I’ve never been on any of the apps.

How do we disabuse people of the evidently very popular folk notion that LLM media generation is "plagiarising" its training corpus? I guess the first step is to try to make explicit, and cogent, the basis of the intuition that it isn't so... Like, it's "obvious" to me that it isn't, but "obvious" based on a somewhat fuzzy picture of how things work that it would take a lot of effort for me to make more crisply defined and communicable

There’s a modicum of bad behaviour an elite in-group will shield its members from consequences for on the principle that if you let the rabble take down that one guy, they’ll come for the rest of us Beyond a certain threshold though they’ll throw you to the baying hordes if you embarrass or inconvenience them enough - unless you perform some useful function or have some really good dirt on influential in-group members

laughs in foucauldian

https://twitter.com/DrRJChapman/status/1618920775226122240

Not to be mean, but I think “it’s dialectical” even when the act of dx/identification is “spontaneous” (in the sense of not directly institutionally enacted), and produces new forms of compliance as well as new possibilities of articulation

Cardiff central library, circs 1997, was a haven and a place of wonder for me. They had the first Tindersticks album, and second Come album, on CD. They had Donald MacKinnon's The Problems of Metaphysics. They had Deleuze's book on Kant, Klossowski's on Bataille. They had Miracleman vol 3 (but not 1 and 2, for some reason), the one I was re-reading the other day, in which Kid Miracleman goes on a superhero-serial-killer spree through London. I remember sitting there reading that with a feeling of genuine shock. Also Gaiman's voi 4,

Thought that seemed extremely obvious the moment I'd thunk it: the real AI risk isn't that AI will want to kill us all and have the ability to do so (since it will always be subject to the "turn it off at the wall" constraint), but that AI will be weaponised by human genocidaires In which case it won't be the AI itself you need to persuade/deter, although techiques for doing so might form useful countermeasures in that scenario, like dropping propaganda leaflets over enemy positions

A plausible origin story for incels incidentally is that they are people who took the provided mythology around attraction, relationships etc at face value, went “it can’t possibly work like that” (or found that, in any case, it did not for them) and fell hard for a counter-myth

https://twitter.com/dynamic_proxy/status/1577565130556047364

I for one spent a large chunk of my late teens going "it can't possibly work like that" and not doing the necessary fucking around and finding out to discover how it actually worked. The PUA / evo-psycho discourse was fortunately not a thing at the time -

For a reasonably bright autistic student (ie the sort who does in fact know the answers) I would put it this way: the instructor isn’t asking questions because they don’t know the answers, but because they don’t know who knows the answers.

https://twitter.com/HJosephineGiles/status/1577337403475386369

You can co-operate with their enquiry by waiting to see who else besides you can attempt an answer. That’s actively helpful, and you may also see and understand more of what is going on in the lesson if you are curious about the same thing.

Fuckle up, buckos, it's time to talk about Nietzsche again 1/???

https://twitter.com/852derek852/status/1553456570973003776

Might do this thread for real, just because

Would anyone seriously dissent from the view that Mickey Mouse is cringe, and Bugs Bunny is based? My childhood hierarchy: Mickey, Donald and Pluto - wearingly zany narcs, basically youth pastors. Bugs, Daffy, Marvin, Roadrunner - verbal and visual wit, a sense of the world as absurd and cruel. Tom and Jerry - entertainingly violent. Hanna Barbera stuff - trash but killed time

#accelerate

https://twitter.com/BKergin/status/1552760072576438272

We never had the Jetsons on TV, so I know of it mainly through an Annual I used to have. Was it as good as The Flintstones? I suspect it persists in cultural memory now largely via Futurama.

ok that is quite clever, I mean fuck you, but yes it is clever

all the more so because Mark was a big Burroughs fan and Burroughs’s bit about “wising up the marks” was indeed well known to him

https://twitter.com/BostonStomper/status/1552492316690202626

k-punk on Burroughs from 2004. I haven’t re-read this; it may be dreadful cringe. But also, you had to be there, man. k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/00403…

Metallica, Iron Maiden, or with about equal probability Tracy Chapman

https://twitter.com/baronessvonthot/status/1552700363651825670

Haven't deliberately listened to Tracy Chapman in many years. I think @AlexeiSaylePod pretty much ruined her for me - "'Poor people gonna rise up' - [spluttering] no they're NOT"

Watching the BBC QAnon doc last night - it may be incorrect to describe tge afflicted as uneducated, but what they are often doing is forsaking, more or less deliberately, the background assumptions and inferential constraints of a common worldview - the scaffolding of sense Take the notion that vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to get microchips into people. A baseline non-specialist understanding of microchips is enough to make this implausible - chips too small to see, invisible in a vial of clear liquid? Powered by what? Connected to what?

So I was thinking about how one might quickly explain what accelerationism was actually about, and the example occurred to me of the famous line of Marx/Engels about the bourgeoisie creating its own gravediggers, and the fact that this can be understood in two different ways - On the one hand, you can see it as an argument about immiseration: capitalism steadily makes things worse for workers, to the point where revolt and overthrow of the system becomes inevitable.

Going off Python a bit. Used it for this year's Advent of Code, and for poking around with Wordle, and there are things I like and find very comfortable (basically: generators and generator comprehensions; tuples and destructuring assignment everywhere), but... ...ergonomically it's frustrating me somewhat, there's a lot of fussing around getting things to work, which I think is down to being used to being backed up by a static typing system I understand very well. Python with type hints doesn't quite deliver this, even with PyCharm.