Professor Thunder @ascholarlyengineer - Tumblr Blog

An evil clone duplicated my friend and everyone wants me to help figure out which one is the real one but I keep getting distracted because the way they grab at each other roughly hands on identical hands and insult each other so targetedly is actually really, really hot. Can't we just keep both of them? We'll just domesticate the doppelganger. It'll be fine.

crabussy

trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and everyone else being friends and holding each other close and falling in love and thinking of each other. I'm making this my future. let's all be okay together

madamejadex

Please remember that Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they’re better off dead than being themselves.

marzscreamz

i think with how many jokes we make about pride and how happy we are about it, we need to understand why we have it. to appreciate people who lost their lives or are currently losing their lives for being themselves. remember the people who fought to give us the rights we have today. there are still so many people who are homophobic or transphobic, and that is what we need pride for. it is our job to be proud of ourselves so the bigots don’t win. show them we’re not going away. pride month is about loving yourself and others no matter their sexuality

calciumcryptid

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

lady-of-vitreous-sight

I'm really excited to see how long this bit lasts. I wanna get to see the doppelganger slowly pick up more and more of the angel's mannerisms and style, slowly perfectly the craft and the performance, and slowly learning to be better and better at being the angel. Until when the next iteration occurs, well, it might as well just keep going right? What's the harm in continuing to play along a little longer? And longer, and longer, and longer. Until eventually everyone knows them as the twins, two fighter jets circling each other in the sky, two angels all but sharing a halo, and no one even remembers that one was ever a doppelganger at all. It's always been like this, right?

dreg-heap

God could you imagine how mad geologists must have been to slowly watch the "hey all the continents kinda fit like puzzle pieces :)" guy get proven right

henghost

someone's probably pointed this out before, but it's so deeply ironic (or maybe tragic) that worm caught on among rationalists, because taylor's recourse to rationality is so obviously pathological lol. taylor's cold intellectualization of her problems is another facet of her tendency toward dissociation: just as she "sees" through her bugs to escape the pain of her human body, so too does she grow to see people around her as so many manipulable objects in her pursuit of moral purity--which ultimately culminates, of course, in the catastrophe of khepri.

this way, taylor is a kind of critique of enlightenment thinking. through her highly rational consequentialist ethics, she comes to kill and violate an ever increasing number of people. this mirrors the inexorable movement from descartes to the atom bomb. but taylor's icy utilitarianism, again, is so clearly rooted in her inability to cope with trauma. this is why we see it valorized by the likes of yudkowsky and the zizians. very sad indeed.

ewingstan

I agree with you that Taylor's moral outlook comes from her trauma, and that Worm spends much of it's time exploring how scrupulously trying to follow your perceived moral duty will make you miserable. Amy seeing every moment she takes to herself as a life she could've saved also falls into this, as do the members of Cauldron turning themselves over to Contessa's path to victory. All of this critiques some of the ideas of ethical altruism that the rationalist community overlaps with.

I expect part of the reasons why rationalists and utilitarians see something in Worm is because the story has an outlook that views pain and misery as tragic regardless of who faces it or their relation to you that's especially characteristic of utilitarianism. I also suspect the text's criticism of characters like Miss Militia or Legend are easily interpreted by rationalists as criticisms of people who focus too much on personal virtue or negative rights over making things better, and I don't think they're simply seeing something that isn't there (though wildbow's perfectly willing to valorize such characters at other points, like in the Chevalier interlude).

I'm confused why you frame morality driving someone to justifying death and violation as specifically a product of Descartes and enlightenment thinking. You can put a lot on, say, Benthamite utilitarianism as justifying and producing horrible social policies such as the workhouse and the British famine policy in Ireland* (though Bentham's student Mill used utilitarianism to thoroughly critique said policy, and modern utilitarianism is infamous for demanding that we view helping famine victims as a strict duty rather than an act of charity). But it's not as if pre-enlightenment history wasn't full of efforts to kill and violate an ever-increasing number of people on the nominal basis of pursuing some great good, be it crusades justified as efforts to Christianize the East or Roman expansion justified as spreading peace (not to mention the later counter-enlightenment goals of Nazism). And moral justifications for policies of mass enslavement were common well before the enlightenment.

I'm not really trying to attack your point there; I get the sense that there's a whole tradition you're gesturing at that I'm unfamiliar with (and I'd be curious to hear more about!) But given the other characters the text criticizes, and how it suggests they're partially responsible for the systemic issues facing the world of parahumans, I don't think Worm is laying the blame for modern moral atrocities at Descartes feet.

*see Elizabeth Anderson, "The Forgotten Political History of Utilitarianism," (2026).

argumate

kind of true by definition, but plenty of people are just using it for stuff without making fear or loathing or boosterism their personality.

unalivejournal

always a little funny to me when filmbros are vehemently anti fanfiction but love to discuss film theories. Maybe my theory is that the 2 main guys sucked each other off. And swallowed

homoluigi

I do not care about boomers and their property tax. If you can't afford your property tax it's because your house value is too high, which means you're rich.

homoluigi

Oh no you might have to move (and make a million dollars in the process). As a renter I fully expect to have to move several times in the next few years, and I won't get to keep my old place's value