The tags are variably-legible: #bodyby holds people in many states (drawn, disassembled, flushed), #microthedas has textposts, #poetry has poetry, #caustic's where slurs are, #spectocular goes on aesthetic posts, #selfsaid's for originals, #piping's for brain noise (anything taken from an auditory hallucination goes here as well, though I don't get those often nowadays) #flashinglights is for epileptic-fit-inducing media, #horus in ebony is pointed at sociality and intuition, #newton's spine of six and more contains durable identity content, #romanticystic is a subset of #bodyby, #rhatatata is for YouTube or music or games and #putpaces is about fighting, for example. This post's tagged with the regularly-used. The theme and such are all broken, and will be fixed at some point (though the intended viewing experience is via the app). Most posts are queued.
Some of the tags contain things you would not like to see, probably. I'm opposed to this in principle, but they're there to block.
Ideally it'd go without saying, but I don't endorse everything said by anyone I reblog.
I think there’s been some ambiguity lately regarding my exact politics so I’m going to get ahead of all that by saying right now that I’m an unreconstructed Orthodox Badist. I believe that we should do and say and support exclusively bad things and only cause bad things to happen to people
So, DJT is (or was) great at insulting nicknames. I don't have his talent (it's something to study), but I'm thinking 'corrective rapist JK Rowling' is good: anyone defending her has to bring up V-coding (the practice described above, where trans women are roomed with violent prisoners to reduce staff labour) and explain why she's not monstrous, which is a difficult case to make when you understand what she approves of.
mournful reflection? I don't know what the exact tone is: it's more a diary entry than most things I've posted, and more an llm-style self-prompting or stream of consciousness. I usually write the section before the readmore before I write what's below, so you might consider this part the prompt.
I'm often angry and assholish on the internet, in a way that works against me and sabotages my goals. I'd like to have equanimity, or poise, or at least to be harnessing the anger in a way that's not self-sabotaging.
Why do I find that so difficult? There are many reasons. Recently, my lifestyle's totally fallen apart. My housemate's moved out, and I'm living by myself for the first time. I like having the space to myself, but I don't know that it's been good for me, spending so much time alone. I'm encysting in my own perspective, and given how that's not a sane one it's not surprising that I've spiralled. As much as I resent so much of anyone I've met or imagined, talking to people is grounding, and I'm able to recall their positive parts more easily. If I'm just wandering through the world by myself, it's so easy to be sickened by everything I see.
It's like... by my own values, I wouldn't even need much more money to spend on myself to be happy, I think. I'd like to travel, and to have musical instruments, and to take some classes, but all of these are cheap enough. If I were capable of earning, I'd be earning to give in the effective altruist fashion, splitting it between global development and ai safety (with ratios and exact directions to be determined at that time, in that if I were functional enough to earn a decent wage or found a company I expect I'd be functional enough to engage with the fields in enough depth to have a position on the priority ordering).
So, when I look at the world, almost everything reminds me of human depravity. My phone stopped working recently: in retrospect, having music to listen and dance to as I walk was a load-bearing part of my being able to tolerate the world when I'm in a state of heightened sensitivity.
Australia has fairly unaffordable housing, so there are many homeless people. As I've mentioned at some points in the past, I find it difficult to not give people money if they seem to need it. When I walk through local places, I see people sleeping on the street, I see empty lots and storefronts, and I see real estate agency places. As has been said, it's not the best way to be, to look at people and feel disgust and contempt: even so, it's something I find myself doing almost every time I leave the place I live.
What can be said of these people but that they look away? That they choose to abandon people, and spend their riches gilding a life already blessed?
And then, each time I spend more on myself than the absolute minimum I need to survive, I think "don't you too deserve to suffer, putting your own comfort over that of those who need it more?" and I can't really see that I'm wrong in that assessment. Of course, being homeless myself, subsisting on beans and rice cooked over recycled cardboard and giving the rest of the disability pension I receive to the Against Malaria Foundation would be trading off some small amount of immediate impact against the possibility of having more impact in the long term, so I don't do that, but when I lack hope for any long-term improvement I hate myself more for not doing so.
Ha! And even the above is contemptible, and in some ways a lie: I want to be comfortable. I want to enjoy life. I want to see beautiful things, and make beautiful things, and love, and be loved, and to drink, and smoke, and to take drugs, and to see the world, and to eat tasty food, and to have power, and to be respected, and to be awarded, and to be qualified, and to have children, and to be comfortable, and to look good, and to transition, and to sleep in a soft bed, and to be held, and to listen to music, and to make music, and to have interesting conversations, and to meet people I admire, and to have many kinds of sex.
And when I look at those desires, I think... These are things that anyone might want, and things that are less possible for so many through the vagaries of fate. How pathetic, that I somehow believe I deserve them more than anyone else, and that I bring myself closer to living that life rather than choosing to make others more able to do so: as so many are further from that life, the marginal impact of a dollar goes much further for them than it does for me. By what right might I say I don't deserve to burn, knowing this and still choosing to prioritise my own trifling comforts? What colossal arrogance I must possess, to look down on anyone else, to think less of their moral character when mine is so blighted.
And then looking at the above, it's a classic case of moral scrupulosity. I've thought this way for as long as I can remember, really, though the intensity and implementation are more recent ideas. I then proceed to despise myself for continuing to fall into a failure mode I've seen outlined in such detail, and whose exhibition I well know is sabotaging my ability to execute on the prospective longer-term impacts I might be capable of having.
And then looking at the above, I despise myself for despising myself like this, because I *know* it's a kind of childhood-trauma-induced psychopathology, where I'll look for any excuse to hate myself, and even in knowing that I find I cannot stop myself. It's pathetic, isn't it? I have all the opportunity in the world to not be doing all this, and yet here I find myself. And even that's another instance of the same issue. And so down I spiral, an endless ladder of self-loathing whose apprehension is just another rung.
I feel twisted up inside. It's like I'm made of razor wire, and every knot unfurled reveals ten more. It's like I'm vomiting up and choking on a hydra of broken glass. It's unpleasant.
And even this is an improvement! Even this feeling is so much better, so much more functional than I was before. I can at least say 'there is sometimes an I'. I'm not just a dandelion. I can choose to do something, and sometimes I later find myself doing it. It's amazing! It's incredible! It fills me with despair, and with hope. I can imagine being insufficient to deal with the problems of the world in a regular way, rather than being unable even to deal with basic survival. I can imagine actually being able to live the dream, a little.
It still feels like something I should hate myself for, thinking I could do anything of note or meaning, a little. How many people have believed they could meaningfully change the world? How many have been right? As a psychotic, what are the base rates on accuracy there? Why would you think you're not deluded? What evidence do you have? Why, if you believe this, are you unwilling to test it?
I will continue this thread, but it's long enough for the moment.
(adding to the header after writing this, this one is much longer, and talks about the details of my life. it's much longer than the first one, though less rich in self-loathing. I talk about my sexual history a bit, very directly, so be aware)
So, part of why I've been so avoidantly nonfunctional recently is that I've been back on injectable insulin. I have a transmitter for the continuous glucose monitor now, but I haven't been able to put myself together enough to go through the site insertion process. Injections themselves are nothing to me, really: they're not even unpleasant nowadays. I figure that's downstream of their being a component of everything I do: the traumatic associations I developed earlier in life have probably been dissolved into life in general, and the emotional weight they developed distributed onto whatever I'm most afraid of at any moment.
I have held (and still do) an incredible resentment of people who can localise and avoid the particular things they've been traumatized by. It's like... I wish I could say 'this is the thing that's bad' and know where it is.
I've thought the reason a blank and undifferentiated space is so scary is exactly because you can't say 'this area is dangerous' and so say 'this area is safe'. The most powerful fear is the fear of the unknown, as has been said, because you can't know how to deal with it safely. The unpredictable and so uncontrollable/unavoidable danger then keys on anything the person has that possesses a similar emotional tone, and trauma that's attached to the uncomprehending state of early childhood will have that character.
(I'm sitting/lying on a couch as I write this: my back and abdomen are making these jerky motions, and I'm getting tingling sensations in parts of my hands and feet. There's a warmth in my legs, and a tightness around my eyes, and down to my mouth. My thumbs hurt a little).
I feel bad for H.P. Lovecraft, relatedly. I figure he'd have a 'mixed but eventually redeemed' reputation if he'd not died as early as he did. He was improving, as a person: you could take "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" as his processing some part of his racism, and similarly "The Thing On The Doorstep" the misogyny/gynophobia. He'd probably have people headcanonning 'estrogen would have saved her', as well: 'demure and retiring man is forcefemmed via his wife's (secretly the father of his wife's body) swapping their minds' does really read that way, and it'd explain some of the affection held by queer people nowadays.
Anyway. I relate to fiction and the dead so much because they're safe: I can take them as what they are to me, and there's nothing wrong with that. Distant celebrities are similar. It's like... I remember (not well) reading Jeph Jacques (the author of the webcomic Questionable Content [and Alice Grove, probably others]) talk about how he could never get into eroticizing cartoon characters, because they weren't real. I remember finding this odd: most of the people in the world are as fictional to any person as fictional characters are. I'd never expect to know most of the real people I might see on the screen, and so they have the same character as someone who really doesn't exist.
Funnily, I lost my virginity to a fellow QC fan. A highschool friend I was interested in introduced us, and we met in a bar attached to a shopping centre someone else in that circle worked at. The centre was doing a 24-hour opening period over the Christmas shopping season, so many of us were periodically around to hang out.
Even more funnily... (I edited out some content that'd be doxxy for her). Let's call her Eve. She'd broken up with someone a week or so earlier, and I was a rebound guy (I didn't understand that was what was going on at the time). She had herpes, and was ashamed of that. Most people have herpes: I probably do, given that I've shared a lot of food with relatives that have recurrent cold sores. She was vulnerable when I ate her out: she'd said it was something she didn't expect, because of the herpes. I was like 'anyone who's reticent there is biologically illiterate', which attitude I understand to be uncommon. The relationship didn't last: I didn't perform well otherwise, and as time passed she got over the breakup. It was nice, seeing someone so happy to see me: I think she's the nicest person I've dated. I enjoyed being desired like that.
That's been a recurrent problem, being able to notice if I'm desired, and being able to believe it. I remember going to a New Year's party with a friend and later long-term partner: a friend of hers I met there kissed me as the year changed. I figure I wasn't getting the hint earlier in the evening: I kissed her back when she kissed me, but I didn't take any further action immediately afterwards. She then asked if I'd like to kiss again: I got it at that point, and we spent a while making out on the host's couches. That was enjoyable: it was maybe the first time I felt an internal heat as people usually describe as a component of arousal. There were only so many bedrooms, and they were all occupied, so we fucked in the shower and bathroom. It went poorly: there weren't any good places to position ourselves, partially because I was really inflexible and/or constrained in positioning, and didn't have the physical strength to hold her up. Neither of us came: at the end of it, she tried blowing me for a while, which also didn't succeed. She asked that I reciprocate, which I interpreted as a request to go back to penetrative sex, and which I refused by saying I was tired. I wouldn't have had any issues eating her out if I'd been sober enough to catch her meaning, but my having established myself as a selfish and incompetent sexual partner ensured it was a one-time thing. I do regret that, really. She was cool.
I suppose I'm extremely cynical about the relationship between sex and emotional engagement: a while ago, I was tempted to post something like 'people go on about the emotional character of a relationship affecting the sex, but in my experience if you're bad enough in bed the emotions follow the performance'. Of course, enjoying sex and being a good partner for someone to have sex with requires you not be spectatoring so heavily, as is necessary if you're performing (ceteris paribus, many sex workers can be totally disengaged and still provide a good experience to the person hiring them, though the only person in the industry I've known well enough to talk shop with described their approach as like method acting: it's like anything else, there are all sorts of ways to go about it), so this attitude produces the negative outcomes that produce it, many such cases.
I gained a nickname from that last story, at least: I didn't notice at the time, but being on tiles, I damaged my knees enough that I couldn't run for a month or so. I'll sometimes still get called "Shagger" by people in the circle associated: it's a bit of an ironic nickname. I'm not actually very sexually active: at some point it stopped feeling like something worth seeking. Part of it's that many of my partners haven't been particularly attentive: you would hope they'd notice how I wasn't giving any positive feedback when they'd go for masculine-flavoured expressions of attraction, though given I was both ignorant of *why* I didn't enjoy that and otherwise pretty flat in affect, it is ultimately a problem whose source is me.
I think I'd be less bereft if I still had the kind of social circle I used to, though it was inevitable that would stop being so. Many such cases, right? It's not rare for people to look back at their early adulthood and see how valuable the dense and interconnected sociality was.
This is another part of the general psychopathology (to move away from sex particularly). Most of the people I know have moved on in life, and it's a task to see anyone more frequently than every second month. They're still friends, but adulthood has separated us somewhat, and they're busy with their jobs and relationships.
You'd hope being in University would ameliorate this somewhat: I did, when I went back the first time. I was still on antipsychotics and quite overweight, and still ignorant of the gender stuff, so I was pretty alienated. I remember looking forward to it, thinking 'perhaps I'll meet some people I'll get along with: I'm older than the school-leavers, but they aren't the only people there, and I'm not so much older I'd feel weird befriending people. Much like the first time, I was disappointed. I made a friend who may have been interested, and an acquaintance who was similar, but there wasn't anything like a persistent social circle that developed. I didn't make any efforts that way, so it's not a surprise, but still. In retrospect, I don't really understand how I came to have friends earlier in life. Perhaps I was more impulsive? Everyone I've dated I met while I was at least slightly manic, so it seems likely that that was an element, also. That's yet another reason it's hard to decide being manic is bad: the state of being is so much smoother, and it's so easy. The fearlessness! This is part of why I use/used drugs. I've been cutting down on everything that's bad for my health over the last month or so: that I've been quitting smoking (I've decided to delay that until the end of term, because it's probable it's beyond my ability to manage at the moment) is actually a great candidate for why I've been so irritable. A drug is a tool you use to alter yourself, and being less fearful has been necessary for not sitting paralyzed.
Why am I so fearful, or avoidant? Well, obviously, childhood trauma. "Bad childhoods: we've all seen them." But aside from that. It's... I cannot recall being helped usefully by anyone local. It's like I was talking about with @present-prophetic a couple of days ago: I have been helped by people giving me resources, or to be more exact, by giving me money. This isn't what people usually mean by help, though.
Now that I consider it, it's wrong to say I haven't been helped by people. Some friends *have* been helpful during parts of a mental crisis, and some acquaintances have at least been accepting in a way they didn't have to be. I'm not the only person who's occasionally manic in the circle I'm in presently, and a friend I'm close to and one more distant (the partner of the other bipolar) did come to check in on me when I was living in this terrible shithole that didn't drop below 30C with high humidity overnight in the summer (I had a homebrewing thermometer I left in a full glass of water on a table, and it was positioned such that I'd see it whenever I opened my bedroom door). At the same time... The amount of support they can give is limited: if I'm in a genuine crisis situation they can help, but for anything that's not in the 'maybe being hospitalized' zone is less available. They have their own concerns and their own lives, and I will survive, so it's whatever, but it would be nice were they more available. I'd take even just seeing them all more often: I have tried to organise things and reach out more, but the demands of adulthood make it difficult.
I don't think I've been to a party in years. By that, I mean 'a party where there are people I haven't met before'. I've been to several weddings, which were full of new people, but none of them I could expect to see again. I spoke at a friend's wedding maybe two years ago: I was the second member of the groom's party: the wedding was symmetrically arranged, and iirc there wasn't a best man or maid of honour. I say second member because I gave the second speech. I remember being amazed hearing a member of the bride's party call a wedding photo 'totemo kawaii' (this woman was white) and then I remembered the bride's not a competitive FPS player because her internet service was slow and intermittent when the tryouts she was angling for were being held: her statistics were better than people who succeeded, IIRC.
Why was I amazed? Well, several reasons. The husband is the friend I see the most often, and he's maybe a subscriber to the belief in the chudliness of anime fandom. He's a mod on Something Awful (as is the other groomsman), and the acculturation to the site as it is now leans in that direction. I suspect he's further left than he would have been if he didn't know me, though on the other hand I'm much more of a libertarian than him, and his general attitudes are more in line with the culture of general leftism. I think max(1461) said it well: libertarians are too libertarian, but most other ideologies could stand to start from a libertarian base and then shift from there (rather than from liberal centrism). That general idea has been a throughline of my politics, actually: if you want to understand things and then change them, you need to be able to take on and metabolize the perspectives and critiques of all people, rather than declaring some sector the evil baddoers who are responsible for things being not as you desire. Vulgar feminists often do this, for example: you see it all the time around here. Like, I can't imagine why young men aren't lining up to support people who make a competition of displaying their contempt for them: no, no, those people hold the views they hold because of their fundamental orcish penishaver nature, and anyone who thinks it's possible to get young men onside in general is just trying to appease Hitler with the nubile bodies of our most vulnerable objects, not understanding that policing the boundaries of this politics fandom is the only thing preventing bad wrongdoers from doing entryism.
That was uncharitable! I try to be better than that. The way that most political scenes at the moment are just fandoms with delusions of grandeur and so fundamentally as fascist as the MAGATs (with better policies, the rules of the game in those fandoms are less incoherent and at least *less* about cruelty and aesthetic for themselves) is something that needs an actual piece and isn't best-served by being part of a stream of consciousness.
Back to the friend whose wedding I spoke at. We went to see the Konosuba movie, on my initiation. To me, Konosuba can be funny if you're high and drunk but wears out pretty quickly: the rest of the author's stuff seems like worse Konosuba. If he were broader (let's adjust his sliders 30% in the Wildbow direction) he'd maybe be good sober. The show and movie was carried by the animation and general 'anime trope ensemble effect', I'd say.
Anyway, he was like 'I expect the audience for this to be Chuddy neckbeard otaku', and he felt mildly uncomfortable going to the theatre. He was surprised to see more women than men waiting for the opening, many of whom were cosplaying. That has often been an issue for him: progressive in direction, but with an attitude to things that's more from an earlier era, which is probably why he's able to engage with SA.
This post contains descriptions of real war and violence that readers may find disturbing.
This was originally going to be a reply to a conversation between @. keysmashslushy and @. dickgraysonsptsd. (Breaking the @'s because I don't think this is a fun read to get notified for). As I was writing, it ballooned in scope, and I decided to make it a standalone post.
When I talk about sexual assault, I like to hide behind statistics. That's more difficult for me to do here, so I have to get more personal to make my point. Forgive me.
A constant refrain I hear from people who oppose descriptions of sexual violence in fiction is that "sexual violence is just so much more real than killing." More real to whom? I have a family member who was murdered. Two different people have tried to kill me three times. People are sometimes surprised to hear that, but I don't think that makes me extraordinary. Growing up, I swear everyone I knew had at least one story of how someone they knew got killed. I only had the one, but some of my classmates had two or three.
I said before that I had trouble with statistics for this post. That's because most of the statistics I did find had one of three problems:
- They included vehicular homicides by drunk drivers, which I'm less interested in as a manifestation of a culture of violence
- They measured only gun violence to the exclusion of other means and weapons, and/or included suicides with homicides
- They cited no sources, or cited only studies conducted by partisan think-tanks.
I wanted to find an answer to "how many people know someone who has been murdered by another person," and I don't think I'm equipped to find that number. Regardless, the statistics I did find paint a far grimmer picture than what these fandomites must imagine. 17% of Americans have seen someone get shot. 20% know someone who was shot. For Black Americans, those numbers rise to 34% and 31%, respectively. Murder is the #4 leading cause of death for Native American men and #5 for Native American women. It is the leading cause of death for Black Americans ages 10-24, and the #2 cause of death for those between 25 and 34. Now, the United States has a high murder rate, but it has a lower murder rate than 60 other countries. And American civilians are not among the two billion people, fully one quarter of the world's population, who are currently in or fleeing active war zones.
If murder, legal or illegal, isn't real to you, you're privileged. There's really nothing more for me to say about that.
Pivoting to fandom. I am not going to argue that murder in fiction is realistic or representative. Fictional killing's unreality actually has some overlap with fictional rape's unreality. Fictional murder victims, like fictional rape victims, are mostly nameless and faceless. The violence exists to show the reader the power of the perpetrator. Focusing on the dead, the survivors, and the grieving friends and families is useless to that end.
But there is another unreality that isn't shared between the two. A large portion of fictional murder is presented as justified. Fictional violence is often part of a power fantasy. Audiences want to see hypercompetence. We want choreographed fight scenes where one man gets jumped by ten men and leaves all ten on the floor. We want to see people narrowly dodge bullets. For cape fans, we want this power fantasy to be even more fantastical, to see people fly through the air and punch each other through walls.
Most people with these fantasies also want to be good people. Thus, the physical hypercompetence must be complimented by moral hypercompetence. Fictional vigilantes have perfect discernment. They always know who's guilty, always know how to find them, and always give them what they deserve. In the same way nobody wants to see John Wick throw out his back, nobody wants to watch a movie about a WhatsApp vigilante stoking himself into a fervor and then killing an innocent person. It would be too real. When leftist cape fans see the Punisher skull on a cop car, usually the only critique they can muster is that Frank Castle would kill the cops, too. It's a bridge too far to wonder if they themselves have the discernment of their favorite heroes; to wonder if cops and WhatsApp vigilantes love these stories for the same reasons they do; or to wonder if their favorite stories still carry some of the themes of their progenitor.
Not everyone cares so much about being good. Given the theme of this blog, I can't resist shining a light on Deathstroke and his fans. During my career as a Tara Markov backstory canonicity defender, many times I've pointed out the bizarre double-standard Slade fans have, being okay with him killing kids but not okay with him touching them. Slade fans have some canned responses to this. Some of my favorites are "that was an OOC hitjob by some writers who didn't know what they were doing" ("some writers" there means Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two people who created Deathstroke, in one of his earliest stories and the story that established his supporting cast, motives, and other lasting elements of his characterization); "Tara was actually manipulating him" (Tara being a fifteen-year old who related to Deathstroke as her lover, her employer, her guardian, a man who monitored her constantly with contact lens cameras, and the only person she could trust with any true details about her life); and "Deathstroke is Literally Me, and I wouldn't do that, so he shouldn't either" (I think this one speaks for itself). I've seen all these dealt with multiple times on better blogs than mine, but I do want to get into one more argument they give me time and time again: "Deathstroke killing people is fun, but him being a rapist is too real."
What about Deathstroke isn't real? Mainly, his hypercompetence. As a comic book antihero, Slade has been blessed by the narrative with supersoldier serum, precognition, accelerated healing, superhuman strength, and the rule of cool plot armor worn by all action genre protagonists. He's also a genius tactician and gets away with schemes that have way too many moving parts to work in a more grounded setting.
Deathstroke is also a mercenary. He is revered by his fans as a killer with a code of honor, even though he's employed in the most dishonorable business in the world that's still legal. This, to me, is not at all unreal.
To start, mercenarism is in vogue. We in the 21st century are living through the "second golden age of mercenaries." For-profit companies are the industrial half of the military industrial complex. During the GWOT, the ratio of private contractors to regular soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by the US peaked at 3:1. In 2023, Wagner nearly captured Moscow with little resistance. PMCs operate in just about every conflict zone in the world. Wagner and its post-integration successor Redut torture and kill civilians in Ukraine, Syria, and Central Africa. Western PMCs conduct "anti-terrorism" operations the world over, and occupy mines for blood minerals in the DRC. Abu Dhabi based PMC Global Security Services Group is currently are helping Sudan's RSF conduct its genocide in Darfur. And all of this for good money.
Some real mercenaries are also cultivating followings similar to their fictional counterparts. After he was assassinated, shrines cropped up across Russia in honor of "Father Prigozhin." Today, bronze statues of his likeness stand in St Petersburg, Krasnodar Krai, and the Central African Republic. If you're American, you might remember not too long ago being browbeaten to support or vote for Graham Platner, two-time US Armed Forces veteran and one-time Constellis contractor who, in his own words, joined the force because he "wanted to have an adventure and kill some people." Platner's campaign only died because a survivor came out and said he raped her; for the left-wing imperialist, neo-nazism, killing for fun and money, and campaigning on revitalizing the US military are all well and good, but rape is too real.
I have had the misfortune of interacting with ex-PMCs, both Russian and American. Given the state of the world, they're not difficult to find if you live in either country. In my experience, they are universally small men with fragile egos. They were all motivated to join because they had bad prospects elsewhere, and they wanted to do something that made them feel important, powerful, and masculine. Despite that, they'd all defend their choice as just another job, and they all believed that they had some personal code of honor that made them noble men despite their ignoble work. And all of them were totally callous to the people they killed. "If they didn't want to be beaten to death with hammers, they shouldn't have deserted. Really, they were in the wrong. Was he afraid to die? Should've been a man." "The guys behind the Nisour Square massacre deserved Trump's pardon. Any one of those people could have been terrorists." Likewise, those who glorify men like this do so because they're macho men, honest and rough around the edges. And their fans also never think about the people they've killed.
To wrap up, I'll deliver the original idea I wanted to write, before I wrote fourteen paragraphs to justify it. It is damn near impossible to write a character for whom being a serial killer is in character, but being a rapist is out of character. The overlap in motives is too big. We're talking about characters who are always convinced that their violent outbursts are justified, and who feel a need to stave off insecurity by asserting their power and dominance. That is why people rape. And that's why, in real life, so many serial killers are also serial rapists, and rape is handwaved away as a "tragic but inevitable" part of war. It's not about sexual gratification.
It's not out of character. It just forces you to actually think about the character and what he's doing. That's why murder is okay and rape isn't. Dead men tell no tales. We can write them off as criminals, as terrorists, as "the enemy," say they deserved it, ignore them completely - they won't complain. It's too hard to do that with rape. When the story has a survivor who gets to have a name and a face, the audience can't ignore it. When fans make excuses for why sexual violence is deserved or "doesn't count", when we choose to ignore or demand retcons of canon sexual violence by our favorite honorable serial killer, we participate in a culture that glorifies and seeks to empower real rapists and serial killers, real vigilantes and real mercenaries. Our culture is already up to its neck in power fantasy. It's not worth it to erase representation of victims and survivors, so you can have just one more.
I think you should have moral principles outside of who's currently being mean to you. I think that this is a pretty fundamental aspect of existing as a moral human being.
mournful reflection? I don't know what the exact tone is: it's more a diary entry than most things I've posted, and more an llm-style self-prompting or stream of consciousness. I usually write the section before the readmore before I write what's below, so you might consider this part the prompt.
I'm often angry and assholish on the internet, in a way that works against me and sabotages my goals. I'd like to have equanimity, or poise, or at least to be harnessing the anger in a way that's not self-sabotaging.
Why do I find that so difficult? There are many reasons. Recently, my lifestyle's totally fallen apart. My housemate's moved out, and I'm living by myself for the first time. I like having the space to myself, but I don't know that it's been good for me, spending so much time alone. I'm encysting in my own perspective, and given how that's not a sane one it's not surprising that I've spiralled. As much as I resent so much of anyone I've met or imagined, talking to people is grounding, and I'm able to recall their positive parts more easily. If I'm just wandering through the world by myself, it's so easy to be sickened by everything I see.
It's like... by my own values, I wouldn't even need much more money to spend on myself to be happy, I think. I'd like to travel, and to have musical instruments, and to take some classes, but all of these are cheap enough. If I were capable of earning, I'd be earning to give in the effective altruist fashion, splitting it between global development and ai safety (with ratios and exact directions to be determined at that time, in that if I were functional enough to earn a decent wage or found a company I expect I'd be functional enough to engage with the fields in enough depth to have a position on the priority ordering).
So, when I look at the world, almost everything reminds me of human depravity. My phone stopped working recently: in retrospect, having music to listen and dance to as I walk was a load-bearing part of my being able to tolerate the world when I'm in a state of heightened sensitivity.
Australia has fairly unaffordable housing, so there are many homeless people. As I've mentioned at some points in the past, I find it difficult to not give people money if they seem to need it. When I walk through local places, I see people sleeping on the street, I see empty lots and storefronts, and I see real estate agency places. As has been said, it's not the best way to be, to look at people and feel disgust and contempt: even so, it's something I find myself doing almost every time I leave the place I live.
What can be said of these people but that they look away? That they choose to abandon people, and spend their riches gilding a life already blessed?
And then, each time I spend more on myself than the absolute minimum I need to survive, I think "don't you too deserve to suffer, putting your own comfort over that of those who need it more?" and I can't really see that I'm wrong in that assessment. Of course, being homeless myself, subsisting on beans and rice cooked over recycled cardboard and giving the rest of the disability pension I receive to the Against Malaria Foundation would be trading off some small amount of immediate impact against the possibility of having more impact in the long term, so I don't do that, but when I lack hope for any long-term improvement I hate myself more for not doing so.
Ha! And even the above is contemptible, and in some ways a lie: I want to be comfortable. I want to enjoy life. I want to see beautiful things, and make beautiful things, and love, and be loved, and to drink, and smoke, and to take drugs, and to see the world, and to eat tasty food, and to have power, and to be respected, and to be awarded, and to be qualified, and to have children, and to be comfortable, and to look good, and to transition, and to sleep in a soft bed, and to be held, and to listen to music, and to make music, and to have interesting conversations, and to meet people I admire, and to have many kinds of sex.
And when I look at those desires, I think... These are things that anyone might want, and things that are less possible for so many through the vagaries of fate. How pathetic, that I somehow believe I deserve them more than anyone else, and that I bring myself closer to living that life rather than choosing to make others more able to do so: as so many are further from that life, the marginal impact of a dollar goes much further for them than it does for me. By what right might I say I don't deserve to burn, knowing this and still choosing to prioritise my own trifling comforts? What colossal arrogance I must possess, to look down on anyone else, to think less of their moral character when mine is so blighted.
And then looking at the above, it's a classic case of moral scrupulosity. I've thought this way for as long as I can remember, really, though the intensity and implementation are more recent ideas. I then proceed to despise myself for continuing to fall into a failure mode I've seen outlined in such detail, and whose exhibition I well know is sabotaging my ability to execute on the prospective longer-term impacts I might be capable of having.
And then looking at the above, I despise myself for despising myself like this, because I *know* it's a kind of childhood-trauma-induced psychopathology, where I'll look for any excuse to hate myself, and even in knowing that I find I cannot stop myself. It's pathetic, isn't it? I have all the opportunity in the world to not be doing all this, and yet here I find myself. And even that's another instance of the same issue. And so down I spiral, an endless ladder of self-loathing whose apprehension is just another rung.
I feel twisted up inside. It's like I'm made of razor wire, and every knot unfurled reveals ten more. It's like I'm vomiting up and choking on a hydra of broken glass. It's unpleasant.
And even this is an improvement! Even this feeling is so much better, so much more functional than I was before. I can at least say 'there is sometimes an I'. I'm not just a dandelion. I can choose to do something, and sometimes I later find myself doing it. It's amazing! It's incredible! It fills me with despair, and with hope. I can imagine being insufficient to deal with the problems of the world in a regular way, rather than being unable even to deal with basic survival. I can imagine actually being able to live the dream, a little.
It still feels like something I should hate myself for, thinking I could do anything of note or meaning, a little. How many people have believed they could meaningfully change the world? How many have been right? As a psychotic, what are the base rates on accuracy there? Why would you think you're not deluded? What evidence do you have? Why, if you believe this, are you unwilling to test it?
I will continue this thread, but it's long enough for the moment.
If you're using flour to absorb the oil from your hair as an alternative to shampoo & conditioner, don't put the flour in a container, incrementally add water to create a suspension and mix. This develops the gluten: when you put it in your hair, it'll clump as dough and be difficult to remove.
like people want to think any disabled person who is after money is morally suspect some way, because they're not asking for "treatments" or "accommodations" like a lot of our issues can be fixed way more easily with money. can't drive? paying for a taxi is often one of the more accessible alternatives. can't cook? you can pay more to have prepared food delivered to you. food restrictions? that food straight up costs more money. can't clean? you can pay for someone to do that. house inaccessible? having (lots) of money can help with that, you get the gist.
having money won't make us abled. it also won't stop our symptoms from being distressing, painful, or debilitating. but there's a huge gap in experience between the average poor disabled person and someone who's actually wealthy. you can buy your way out of some of the difficult situations most disabled people are left to rot in. wanting money, needing money, asking for money is pretty natural when it's such a useful tool. why get so weird about disabled people wanting money like i'm pretty sure everyone wants money anyway
I'm in this unfortunate mental situation. What was the actual series of events over the last month or so? A lot of what I understood to be the case turned out to be delusion of reference, but there were a couple of things that happened physically and locally. What were those, really? How did they come to be? It doesn't help that a lot of the things I'd use to check my memory aren't still accessible. Like, what the fuck, you know? Usually, resolving a delusion makes the world make *more* sense.
unironically thought to myself "its weird that imagining something i want to happen, which isnt happening (even particularly soon) can make me feel good. whats up with that?" but like. it is confusing. surely it should just remind you of the lack?
Justified anticipation of desirable things is enjoyable? I mean, imagine you tripped over a gambling machine such that your purchasing object/s fell onto/into it and bought you a lottery ticket and later you discovered you'd won several million dollars. Even before the money was spendable, you'd be pleased, right? And everything else is like this, if you can expect with some certainty that a pleasant experience is in your future.
I think it only reminds you of the lack if you can't imagine or recall the positive feeling of the anticipated thing: that's been a problem for me, in that I can reasonably expect improvements in life quality downstream of actions I'm taking at the moment, but the sensations of the anticipated things are alien enough that I'm using willpower and a commitment to doing predictably good things to motivate myself rather than a visceral image.
The motivational coach and hypnotherapist pjeby (P.J. Eby) posted about this on LW before the relaunch: he recommended a visualisation exercise that leveraged this, where you would look at your (presumed-to-be-disorganised) desk, then close your eyes and spend a minute visualising as hard as you could how your desk would look were it clean and organised. He claimed it was difficult to *not* clean your desk after doing this, and I found myself endorsing that description after I tried it.
or why DeepMind's long term failure is GCP's short term gain
For all intents and purposes, we believe DeepMind is no longer a frontier lab. We said as much a few months ago to our Tokenomics clients due to large numbers of departures from their reinforcement learning teams and poor compute allocation. Google will continue meandering on and releasing models, but their odds of reaching SOTA again have dropped to zero.
just increases the chance of Google eventually taking over Anthropic when they hit a funding crunch I suspect
"Google taking over Anthropic" is one of those extremely unlikely scenarios that feels like it fundamentally misunderstands the strategy, priorities, and economics of both companies
Anthropic has committed to paying Google $40 billion a year from 2027 to 2031, right? so it's on the hook for $200 billion, while at the same time Google has invested (up to) $40 billion in Anthropic, so it has an ownership stake in the customer that will be making up what, 10% of its revenue? it's a pretty close relationship!
admittedly it's not an exclusive relationship: Anthropic is also paying SpaceX and Amazon and Microsoft billions for compute, but it seems like Google is decisively aiming to provide AI infrastructure for leading models and it certainly seems like the relationship will only get closer if Anthropic needs more capital in the future.
The origin point for $200 billion in 5 years is an unnamed source in this article and is directly contradicted by Anthropic's stated projections (also cited in that article). We won't have hard numbers on this until the Anthropic IPO, but it seems likely that Anthropic has spent more with AWS than Google Cloud, and Amazon owns more shares than Google does. The whole "Anthropic and Google have a special relationship" thing seems hallucinated - at best, it seems coequal with Anthropic's relationship with Amazon.
And of course, all the other reasons why it wouldn't make any sense - Google had a frontier lab in the form of Deepmind and made the conscious decision to underinvest in them. Clearly they want to be in the business of selling shovels and not gold.
Anthropic, meanwhile, has put in provisions explicitly forbidding Google and Amazon from exercising influence - they have no voting rights or board seats, despite their large ownership stakes. A big part of Anthropic's pitch, to its employees and to the public, is that it's an independent entity with a special corporate governance structure in place. The leadership of both Anthropic and Google are aware of how much value they would be destroying with anything resembling a takeover.
Meanwhile, all the fears about "running out of money" seem to elide the fact that demand for frontier AI is still massively outstripping demand and Anthropic and OpenAI can simply choose to make more money at any time by redirecting compute that they are currently using for research and training towards serving customers. They don't do this because it would put them at a serious disadvantage when the next generation of their competitor's models came out, but if Anthropic had to choose between "pause research and make more money" and "get taken over by Google", I suspect they would be willing to make some hard calls!
Of course, if you think demand for frontier AI is going to collapse, then sure, all bets are off. But I look at where we were a year ago and I look at where we are now, and it certainly doesn't feel very likely.
