doctorpotatomd

phd in potato

[clockwork-col]

orchestra people of tumblr. i come to you humbly asking you send me your favorite orchestra songs. please. i just discovered something about myself and its that i really enjoy orchestra/classical music

so. uh yeah if you happen to really like orchestra or perhaps just a really specific song please yap at me. my inbox is there.

i’m listening to a playlist of apparently popular orchestra songs and this one is my favorite so far if you want to send similar ones it reminds me of a sunny day

tagging this with a bunch of shit so the right people find it

p.s. i’m very sleep deprived sorry if this post was nonsensical idk i just like music

[doctorpotatomd]

Haydn:

Symphony no 101 in D, "The Clock", all movements are good but I especially love the first movement (this album also has another of his symphonies, but I haven't listened to that one)

Trumpet Concerto in Eb, especially the first movement

Mozart:

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik first movement (you know this one, overplayed but great)

Symphony no 40 in G minor, another classic

Clarinet quintet in A, I only discovered this the other day and haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but the first movement was so good it made me kinda mad (?)

Schubert:

Unfinished Symphony, the second movement is absolutely gorgeous

Strauss II:

Blue Danube Waltz, cheesy and overplayed, but my personal favourite piece of music of all time

Kaiser Waltz, another great one

Waldteufel:

Les Patineurs (Skater's Waltz), I play timpani and there's a bit towards the end where the music stops and the timps go BONG which is one of my favourite things to do on timps (also can you tell I'm a waltz guy yet)

Grieg:

Peer Gynt Suite no 1, you'll recognize the first and fourth movements (Morning Mood and the Hall of the Mountain King, respectively), but the second and third movements are lovely too. Morning Mood definitely fits your "sounds like a sunny day" thing the most out of anything on this list.a

Liszt:

Un Sospiro, first piece of solo piano music on this list (I recommend watching a youtube video, the spectacle of the hand crossings is part of the fun of this piece)

Brahms:

Hungarian Dance no 5, what a banger

Chopin:

Nocturne no 2 in Eb, maybe the second-most famous piece of piano music ever written, you'll know this one

Nocturne no 20 in C# minor, this has some history; it wasn't published during his lifetime, but gained wide recognition when a Jewish-Polish pianist's live radio performance of this piece was interrupted by the Nazi bombing of Warsaw (Chopin's hometown) in 1939

Grande Valse Brillante, what a bop

Gounod:

Funeral March of a Marionette, I just think it's really fun

Leroy Anderson:

The Typewriter, it's just so incredibly fun (and it quite literally uses a typewriter as an instrument)

Debussy:

Claire de Lune, possibly the third-most famous piece of piano music ever written and absolutely gorgeous

Beethoven:

Piano sonata no 14 in C#m, "Moonlight", the second movement is forgettable on its own but it's a perfect palette cleanser between the first and third movements (this album also has his Pathetique and Appassionata sonatas, which I hear are incredible, but I specifically haven't listened to them yet because I know if I hear them I'll get obsessed with learning them and I'm not that good yet lol)

Symphony no 5 in Cm, you'll recognize the opening of the first movement immediately, but the rest of it completely holds up too. (Most people would recommend Beethoven's 9th symphony over his 5th, but I'd only recommend the 9th if you're going to see it in concert, so much of the effect is lost when you're not in the room. Plus it's really, really long, like over an hour in total IIRC).

Tchaikovsky:

Waltz from Sleeping Beauty, a beautiful piece of music that got arranged as Once Upon a Dream for the Disney film

Saint-Saens:

Carnival of the Animals, it's just so fun. Don't be intimidated by the fact that there's 24 movements, they're mostly really short. Highlights: Introduction, The Elephant, Aquarium, Fossils, The Swan, Finale

Poulenc:

Flute Sonata, I discovered this by asking our principal flautist who I should study to compose music that flutes love to play, the first movement especially is really great

Holst:

The Planets, especially Mars and Venus but all of them. Sounds like Star Wars (because John Williams was directly cribbing off Holst when composing the Star Wars OST, at Lucas's request, apparently he originally just wanted to use The Planets as the soundtrack)

[argumate]

this falls over for the obvious reason that even the smartest people aren't smart enough to be able to reliably override their own short-term self interest! consider doctors, who are presumably smart and rational given the barriers to becoming a doctor, and yet regularly advocate on behalf of their own interests in ways that harm others, and not just because they're forced to share a civilisation with people less smart than they are.

we can enumerate similarly smart subgroups of society that struggle to transcend their own interests, whether it's economists ironically or military generals or tech CEOs, who regularly act against each other and their workers and their customers to enrich themselves even as it makes us all poorer.

now this could be equivocation: possibly the most rational people don't exist yet, and when they do they will make everything better, but even they will face the core problem that rational people can still have diverging interests, and a strong incentive to mislead each other as to the importance of those interests, and as a result cooperation for mutual gain challenging to guarantee -- if it were not we would not have cancer, along with many other maladies.

being smart isn't enough! I mean it's good but nowhere near enough.

[soundlogic2236]

Where is this claim there that smart people are nicer to other people?

A world where everyone understands economics enough to say "no" when doctors selfishly propose those things you brought up is not better because being smart makes the doctors nice. It is a better world because they can't get away with it.

If other people get impressed by nonsense arguments made by someone intelligent such that said intelligent person manages to get laws passed that harm those tricked and me, I'm not wishing people were smarter because I think it will make that person nicer.

I'm wishing it because I don't want the population to drag me down into being hurt by that trick.

[argumate]

it's not so much about being nice but about the way a 20% boost to yourself is more tangible and easier to evaluate than a 2% boost to everyone, even if the latter brings more overall benefit, so people put more effort into it, and if a rational agent values their relative position over their absolute position then cooperation to raise society as a whole becomes even more difficult.

[soundlogic2236]

This argument seems dubious. Like, lets take a simple and not that impressive example:

Drunk driving.

Is at least 30% of drunk driving done irrationally or stupidly, rather than a rational and intelligent but selfish decision? This seems likely, it isn't like drunk driving doesn't put the person doing it at risk.

Would there be some equilibrial force such that if that 30% went way 10% or more would come back? There are equilibrial forces, yes, but it seems unlikely that there would be such a potent backfire here.

Would a 20% reduction in drunk driving result in a better world for innocent bystanders?

If you agree to my answers for these, this suggests at least one area where you would expect a world of more rational and intelligent people to be better.

This isn't because I expect the drunk drivers to be doing some careful reasoning about 2% gains to everyone vs 20% gains to themselves.

This is because there is no rule that one's stupid mistakes can't hurt other people who wouldn't make that stupid mistake.

And further, I claim that there are broader cases like that. For example, as I understand farmers and other selfishly benefiting people are taking advantage of people to get crazy water rules passed in California.

Without changing the farmers and such, if not making them nicer, nor even smarter nor more rational, not changing them at all, it seems like the case that if more of the public was like me in certain key ways, they would be unable to get those crazy water rules passed.

Which would be an improvement.

A world where a welfare cliff appearing in a policy gets met with "...you appear to have set the marginal tax rate here to fifty thousand percent. This only makes sense if this is an activity we really hate people doing, but you appear to be applying it to the activity of... having a job while disabled, which I personally don't feel is nearly as bad as murder, and in fact seems positive." by lots of ordinary people is one where it seems unlikely for welfare cliffs to appear.

Here I'm mostly listing negatives that wouldn't appear, because those are easier than trying to figure out what a whole society might invent as positive things, but it seems likely there are various positive things we have missed, the same way as we have missed "not having welfare cliffs".

[doctorpotatomd]

this falls apart when you realise that intelligence and rationality are not one-dimensional. person A might never drink-drive but vote for crazy water rules, and person B might vote against the crazy water rules but drink-drive regularly. and sure, you can say "well, our rational-topia will only take people who both vote against crazy water rules and never drink-drive", but then what if those people aren't able to identify welfare cliffs in a proposed policy? The list of criteria you would want for your rational-topians would be neverending, and these criteria just aren't as correlated or straightforward as you'd like them to be. And don't forget that you don't know everything, so there's stuff you won't be able to set a good criterion for because you and your fellow rational-topians don't have the requisite knowledge amongst you. (And that's before we even get to the practicality and ethics of actually doing the whole thing...)

Oh, and it looks like person A has a really bad day at work and knocked back a bottle of bourbon before getting behind the wheel and putting their car through a servo, despite never having drink-driven before in their life and being completely against drink-drinking and cognizant of the reasons why it's bad. And then person B flipped on those crazy water rules because their doctor, who they respect as an intelligent authority figure, made an offhand snide remark (that was motivated only by the prospect of their favourite golf course being forced to close, and not considered at all beyond that). Turns out people are messy and complicated, and that it's beyond unrealistic to expect every member of society to 100% understand every detail of every issue and policy.

yes, it would be good if more of the population were better at and more willing to use critical thought. the actual way to achieve this is through better education, more robust anti-lobbying and anti-propaganda laws, and probably stricter rules around political campaigns. And, importantly, 99.99% of people are capable of this type of thinking if they get the chance to develop it; I take issue with the framing of "more like me in certain key ways", it smacks of arrogance to my ear. the people themselves aren't the issue; there's no such thing as an unintelligent person, not really, only people who haven't been lucky enough to he given the tools and education needed to fully realize their intelligence.

[doctorpotatomd]

video games?

[prokopetz]

The three essential blasphemies of contemporary gaming:

First-person shooters where you gun down angels

RPGs where you kill God at the end

Metroidvanias where you fight the Pope

[chiropterearcanique]

I am not knowledgeable in the noble art of pope fighting and the only game I've played featuring it wasn't a metroidvania, but given the post's phrasing I take it this is a common thing?

[prokopetz]

Blasphemous (2019) is almost certainly responsible for popularising the trope via its final (non-DLC) boss fight (spoilers for the bad ending, if you care), though it's been imitated here and there since. The forthcoming Silent Planet - Elegy of a Dying World showcases a very promising Pope fight in its latest teaser trailer (skip to 0:38 if you're impatient), and the current demo for Being and Becoming features an excellent fight with an evil nun (gameplay footage – nun at 1:33), so I'm hopeful for a proper Pope fight in the full game.

[reddeckwinner]

Also what are some fps games where you fight angels? The only one that comes to mind is ultrakill. Most other popular entries like the New Blood fps catalogue and classic FPS games like Blood and Doom have you fighting demons pretty exclusively.

Just generally games in the FPS genre are far more often aligned with demon killing as opposed to angels.

[prokopetz]

Doom Eternal (2020), most obviously. Yes, the "angels" are technically alien cyborgs, but the demons in the Doom franchise are technically aliens too, so it counts.

(That one goes the extra mile blasphemy-wise by pulling a sort of reverse Gnostic thing and revealing that its Satan analogue is the true author of Creation, while the usurping demiurge who imprisoned him is theoretically the good guy!)

[prokopetz]

@meandering-monotreme replied:

honestly it's weird that you DON'T fight the pope in silksong

I agree that Silksong is a remarkably Catholic game for presently lacking a Pope fight, but I wouldn't rule it out just yet – Team Cherry have added major boss fights in DLC in the past, and we already have at least one DLC confirmed.

(Granted, Sea of Sorrow doesn't seem like a terribly likely venue for a Pope fight, unless it's... like, a pirate Pope, or something.)

[doctorpotatomd]

One could argue that the Unravelled, whereupon the primary thing you're fighting is the husk of a Conductor, constitutes a Pope fight (or at least a cardinal fight). I wonder if a zombie Pope fight is more or less blasphemous than a regular Pope fight?

[argumate]

funny how "unrelenting" and "relentless" are the same word

[argumate]

yaldabaothadeez said: Unrelentless. Relentful.

having an absolutely relentful evening

[katsdom]

I relented yesterday, I am relenting today, and I plan to relent tomorrow.

[argumate]

I'm quite stoppable I'm a Porsche with good brakes I'm convincible Yeah I lose every single game

[doctorpotatomd]

like a tiger obeying the laws of gravity

[doctorpotatomd]

the discourse around gender segregation in sports drives me nuts

"actually, most sports became segregated because a woman beat a man and the men got mad" cool, do you have a source or are you just regurgitating an anecdote you heard because it makes you feel validated?

"there's no biological or physiological basis for men to perform better than women in any sports" cool, have you ever been seriously involved in any sport of any type? have you ever experienced, say, walking into the gym and outbenching a serious female lifter of the same height and weight on your first day? have you ever experienced wrestling with a woman of a similar height and weight and experience and realising how much *easier* it is to overpower her than it would be one of the guys in your class? Because I've experienced both of those and things like them, many times.

"oh, at school there was this one girl who could beat all the boys with her hands tied behind her back" cool, do you think that a random collection of highschool kids is a representative sample without any outliers? do you understand what an anecdote is?

"oh, but women are taught to eat less and exercise less and stay small and quiet" cool, there's probably some truth in that, broadly speaking. do you think that possibly applies at all to serious athletes, many of whom were scouted when they were knee high to a grasshopper and put into serious training programs designed to maximise their chances of being a competitor?

"they should just segregate by height/weight/ability/etc." cool, do you understand that they already do this? do you realise that women have more essential visceral fat, and a female athlete in peak condition has something like 15-20% bodyfat compared to a male athlete's 8-12%, putting a female athlete at an objective disadvantage compared to a male athlete of equal height and weight? do you understand that the muscles of the upper body are much more testosterone-dependent than the muscles of the lower body? do you understand that no woman has ever been able to perform the iron cross in gymnastics, despite it being a "B-grade" skill in mens gymnastics?

"women only don't win because they're not allowed to compete with the men" cool, do you realise how completely divorced from reality this is? Most sports have the figures as a matter of public record, for christ's sake, you can very easily look at the records and say "hmm, 20 is lower than 22". And if you desegregate sports and force the women to compete with the men, the women who were previously winning their divisions—even world champions!—just start losing, and quit their sport because they'll never be competitive, and then young girls don't get inspired to get into sports and nobody wants to foster their talents, and now you just have no women in sports at all!

idk it just really bugs me. it's not un-feminist to acknowledge these well-documented physical differences, and even if you do take the (absurd) stance that they're entirely due to social factors, desegregating sports would be just about the worst thing that you could do for women in sports.

[isaacsapphire]

It’s kinda nuts how apparently nobody can remember that Title IX was a feminist movement win.

[theresponseblog]

There have been studies of physical characteristics, but the studies haven't tried to relate the measured physical characteristics to athletic performance.

[doctorpotatomd]

There have been some studies (e.g. this one), that seem to indicate that the main indicators of athletic performance (e.g. VO2 max, grip strength, vertical leap) are around the same in post-HRT trans women as they are in cis women, but nothing really robust and conclusive yet; the sample size for trans people in sports is just too low. (And from the studies I've seen trans men seem to perform better than cis women but worse than cis men—which makes sense, since physiologically there's no real difference between a trans man and a cis woman on low-dose steroids—but that tends to get glossed over. I guess nobody really cares if a trans man competes in the men's league and loses.)

[isaacsapphire]

If a guy broke into someone’s house and beat them up and killed half their family, then lived in the house, would it be making it better or worse if the guy let some (sympathetic, deserving, of course!) other people move in too?

@morlock-holmes

[morlock-holmes]

Countries aren't houses, so I'm not sure what process this is supposed to be an allegory for.

Me, I rent, so I've always been quite aware that I don't own the land I reside on, although a lot of other people don't seem to know it.

If you're asking me if I should be expelled from the city I live in (Since I am the sympathetic person who was let in in this allegory) then, uh, no I would prefer not, thank you.

[isaacsapphire]

It’s whether being pro immigration makes a lick of sense to combine with land acknowledgments.

If you’re an invader, a thief, an Oppressor, well of course you don’t want to lose your ill-gotten resources, but why would anyone gaf about the opinions of the villains? Like, come on, we all know that the randos Murderpants invited in get evicted when the law catches up with events in this scenario, maybe they dodge the criminal charges Murderpants is getting, but they’re still getting evicted.

[str-ngeloop]

you sound like you're looking for a fight

[isaacsapphire]

Not specifically, no.

I am trying to bait someone into providing an explanation for how “The United States is an illegitimate country built on stolen land! Landback!” And “The United States has a moral obligation to accept mass immigration” go together logically, vs inherently are in conflict with each other.

[generallemarc]

@str-ngeloop He's specifically looking for the nutjobs who can no longer comprehend ideas like "what the US did to the Native Americans is bad but you can't undo the past" and "all US citizens have a right to live here and so does anyone else who enters legally", because they're so far up their own asses that they'll simultaneously argue that white Americans whose families emigrated decades if not centuries ago have no right to live here but non-whites("minorities" to them, since they're so Americocentric that everyone who isn't white" being the global majority doesn't occur to them) who just got here have a sacrosanct right to be here even if they entered illegally and were already wanted for other crimes on top of that.

[isaacsapphire]

Might be what I am most likely to find, but I do still dream of finding some brilliant mind who actually makes me believe the stuff that I am required to act l believe.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean, theory of mind-wise it's not fundamentally very difficult, you just find a group which contains both native Americans and some proportion of immigrants and decide that the ruling class in America maintains its power by exploiting both of them and therefore owes something to both of them.

Could be "People of Color" or BIPOC or the proletariat, whatever. The US has built its power by exploiting that group both in and out of the country, and it therefore owes that group some sort of restitution whether they be in or out of the country.

I don't put much stock in such views but they don't strike me as particularly incoherent on that level, at least if the people espousing them have even a modicum of sophistication.

Personally, I happen to think that if you were to bestow a large amount of Capital on Native American citizens, they would pretty quickly adopt to the incentive structures of capital ownership, which is that foreign tourist money spends just as well as local money, and good workers can be found in any country.

[isaacsapphire]

You understand that “lump Natives into a larger category that they have only tenuous ties to and no political or influence and minimal shared interests with in reality, then declare that an action that empowers the larger category must be good for Natives” sounds either insane, so stupid that at least some kindergarteners will see through it, or intentional bullshit laundering anti Native intent, right?

If Settler Colonialism is bad, how are additional settlers good?

[doctorpotatomd]

I think it's facetious to conflate immigrants with settlers.

Besides, even if you look past that, a land acknowledgement is still perfectly congruent with being pro-immigration; the two issues are orthogonal. if the land was wrongfully stolen from the indigenous inhabitants, allowing more non-indigenous people to live there doesn't make it any more or less stolen.

Even if you move up a step to land back, to argue that being pro-immigration conflicts with being pro-land back requires the land back stance to be an extreme one; one that includes the dismantling of cities, towns, governments that were built on stolen land. Whoever's in charge of administering the land in question should be trying to make the best choices they can w.r.t. administering that land as it exists today, not as it might have existed if it hadn't been wrongfully stolen in the first place, and that includes decisions on immigration policy. There are certainly some undeveloped areas where there wouldn't be much or any dismantling of colonial structures required to return the land to a (mostly) pre-colonial state, but these areas aren't ones that are going to be affected by immigration; immigrants primarily live in metropolitan areas, ones where the dismantling of colonial structures would be catastrophically harmful to all inhabitants, including any indigenous ones.

Put simply, the fact that it was wrong to colonise a given area doesn't really change anything about how that area should be administered in the present day.

[isaacsapphire]

The question is sincerely asked; what is the distinction between a (good) immigrant and a (bad) settler?

Is it year they or their ancestors entered “Turtle Island”? Their country of origin? Their religion, language, or ethnicity? Their motives for emigrating? The conditions of their transit presumably matter as it’s rather hard to see a person who was kidnapped and brought against their will to a place (ie enslaved African) as an invader rather than another victim.

I expect that a real life Land Back would involve at least some cities and towns being dismantled and it definitionally involves dismantling governments. I wasn’t under the impression that any argument about possible results being “catastrophically harmful” to settlers was considered relevant in this discussion, because it’s not for them and it’s not about them. The new government by the Natives would be setting the standards for residents, preexisting or incoming, in whatever way they choose and settlers would be expelled or taxed or whatever the Natives chose to do, and quite likely different tribal governments would have significantly different policies.

If “the fact that it was wrong to colonize a given area doesn’t really change anything about how it should be administered in the present day” why are you defending landback at all? Are you actually a supporter of landback? If not, are you a supporter of land acknowledgments? If yes, why?

[doctorpotatomd]

I don't think it's useful to look at settler vs. migrant at the individual level. Colonial settling wasn't done by individuals, it was done by countries and empires. Perhaps that's the difference; a settler was empowered by a foreign government and came with the intention of displacing any locals, a migrant comes without any governmental backing and with the intention of integrating or at least coexisting. And note the past tense: colonisation happened, it's not happening today, even if the effects linger.

I expect that a real life Land Back would involve at least some cities and towns being dismantled and it definitionally involves dismantling governments. I wasn’t under the impression that any argument about possible results being “catastrophically harmful” to settlers was considered relevant in this discussion, because it’s not for them and it’s not about them. The new government by the Natives would be setting the standards for residents, preexisting or incoming, in whatever way they choose and settlers would be expelled or taxed or whatever the Natives chose to do, and quite likely different tribal governments would have significantly different policies.

I don't think that this type of extreme land back is seriously in consideration by anyone, and if anyone was seriously considering it I'd call them stupid and reckless. Two wrongs don't make a right, and an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Maybe I'm just sheltered from the discourse, though, it's been a while since I've been accosted by someone with an alt soc pamphlet on a university campus.

If “the fact that it was wrong to colonize a given area doesn’t really change anything about how it should be administered in the present day” why are you defending landback at all? Are you actually a supporter of landback? If not, are you a supporter of land acknowledgments? If yes, why?

Ehh, on a case-by-case basis, perhaps (and I should caveat here that I'm Australian, and the circumstances of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans aren't identical). If a government is considering returning ownership of a given area to the indigenous people who traditionally owned it, they should consider much more than simply "was this land stolen from these people". Undeveloped land, sacred sites, natural resources? I'm generally in favour of returning ownership, although in my opinion it would be prudent to ensure the traditional owners have the capacity to administer the land in question first. But for, like, Melbourne? San Francisco? That ship has well and truly sailed, and ceding ownership and control to the traditional owners would either deny millions of innocent people their right to democratic representation, or straight-up force them into homelessness. Any land back stance that doesn't take into account the people actually living on the land today because it's "not about them", I'd dismiss out of hand.

Re: land acknowledgements, I don't particularly like them, only because I think they're often empty platitudes that don't do anything except make white liberals feel a bit better about themselves. If (Australian) governments did more to support and empower the indigenous population, I think I'd be more in favour of land acknowledgements. But on the flip side, the few indigenous opinions I've heard of land acknowledgements trend positive, so I'm happy enough to bite my tongue and accept that they're not for me.

[isaacsapphire]

“Migrant” is a specific term with a specific meaning, which is different from “immigrant” in ways that are important to this discussion and do not match your definition. Also “migrant” is a racial and class coded term in the US. Are you poorly informed on this topic or intentionally moving the goalposts?

Are you trying to draw a distinction between legal, government endorsed immigrants and “illegal” immigrants who have not received authorization from a government? Because that’s the only way that makes a lick of sense.

Individual human beings with names moved to the New World intending to live, work, reproduce, and practice their culture and traditions, knowing full well that they would be entering a land with natives they would displace. Some came specifically to engage in physical violence towards those Natives or knowing that they might need to do so to secure the resources they desired. These people are referred to in American history textbooks as “colonists” and “colonials” frequently.

There is essentially zero ill will towards the British today for the many many of their former territories (eg. USA, Canada, Israel, Australia) despite that being the “foreign government that empowered” among the leftlib land acknowledgment “decolonization is not a metaphor” people. I don’t see evidence to support your interpretation of the real villains to decolonization movements being the long ago expelled and retreated European powers rather than their current day diasporas.

I don’t think you are very familiar with the history of the Americas and should perhaps become more familiar before you continue. You appear to be stumbling into several concerns about land back that I share, but fail to understand that yes it really does mean that the government of San Francisco would change and the opinion of expelling the population and destroying the city would be available. No idea if that’s what the new/old management would choose, but it would be their right to do exactly that if they chose. Here’s an incident of Native land government dispute/reoccupation from San Francisco since you appear to be speaking without any context.

[doctorpotatomd]

migrant vs immigrant

Fair enough, I misspoke there, it should have been immigrant.

Individual human beings with names moved to the New World intending to live, work, reproduce, and practice their culture and traditions, knowing full well that they would be entering a land with natives they would displace. Some came specifically to engage in physical violence towards those Natives or knowing that they might need to do so to secure the resources they desired. These people are referred to in American history textbooks as “colonists” and “colonials” frequently.

Yes, and I'd use "settler" and "colonist" interchangeably there.

There is essentially zero ill will towards the British today for the many many of their former territories (eg. USA, Canada, Israel, Australia) despite that being the “foreign government that empowered” among the leftlib land acknowledgment “decolonization is not a metaphor” people. I don’t see evidence to support your interpretation of the real villains to decolonization movements being the long ago expelled and retreated European powers rather than their current day diasporas.

That's not my interpretation, and I'm not particularly interested in assigning blame or "villainy"; I was merely trying to draw a definitional line somewhere between "immigrant" and "settler". Certainly individual settlers were at the very least complicit in, where not directly responsible for, various atrocities enacted upon various indigenous peoples during colonial times; and certainly the nascent governments of colonial powers had more direct responsibility for those atrocities than the distant European powers that originally empowered them.

[...] but fail to understand that yes it really does mean that the government of San Francisco would change and the opinion of expelling the population and destroying the city would be available.

That's patently ridiculous, and I'm skeptical that anyone genuinely takes that stance. If there is such a person, asking if their stance on land back is coherent with their stance on immigration is a waste of time, because it's already incoherent standing alone.

[phaeton-flier]

rap about dark wizards and spells and shit

cringe

based

fine but it honestly underuses the genre

good but only if it's bad

worse than chaphop

Voting ended onMay 26

[phaeton-flier]

Discussion IRL about this has made me curious about people's justifications

[doctorpotatomd]

all art is based; genuine art is more based than less-genuine art; nobody in their right mind would rap about dark wizards and spells and shit unless they genuinely thought it was cool; QED

[vinceaddams]

It's nice that loud noises don't stick to clothes like smells do. That would be really bad if they did.

[doctorpotatomd]

imagine: your kind, loving partner arrives home from tuba practice

[isaacsapphire]

If a guy broke into someone’s house and beat them up and killed half their family, then lived in the house, would it be making it better or worse if the guy let some (sympathetic, deserving, of course!) other people move in too?

@morlock-holmes

[morlock-holmes]

Countries aren't houses, so I'm not sure what process this is supposed to be an allegory for.

Me, I rent, so I've always been quite aware that I don't own the land I reside on, although a lot of other people don't seem to know it.

If you're asking me if I should be expelled from the city I live in (Since I am the sympathetic person who was let in in this allegory) then, uh, no I would prefer not, thank you.

[isaacsapphire]

It’s whether being pro immigration makes a lick of sense to combine with land acknowledgments.

If you’re an invader, a thief, an Oppressor, well of course you don’t want to lose your ill-gotten resources, but why would anyone gaf about the opinions of the villains? Like, come on, we all know that the randos Murderpants invited in get evicted when the law catches up with events in this scenario, maybe they dodge the criminal charges Murderpants is getting, but they’re still getting evicted.

[str-ngeloop]

you sound like you're looking for a fight

[isaacsapphire]

Not specifically, no.

I am trying to bait someone into providing an explanation for how “The United States is an illegitimate country built on stolen land! Landback!” And “The United States has a moral obligation to accept mass immigration” go together logically, vs inherently are in conflict with each other.

[generallemarc]

@str-ngeloop He's specifically looking for the nutjobs who can no longer comprehend ideas like "what the US did to the Native Americans is bad but you can't undo the past" and "all US citizens have a right to live here and so does anyone else who enters legally", because they're so far up their own asses that they'll simultaneously argue that white Americans whose families emigrated decades if not centuries ago have no right to live here but non-whites("minorities" to them, since they're so Americocentric that everyone who isn't white" being the global majority doesn't occur to them) who just got here have a sacrosanct right to be here even if they entered illegally and were already wanted for other crimes on top of that.

[isaacsapphire]

Might be what I am most likely to find, but I do still dream of finding some brilliant mind who actually makes me believe the stuff that I am required to act l believe.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean, theory of mind-wise it's not fundamentally very difficult, you just find a group which contains both native Americans and some proportion of immigrants and decide that the ruling class in America maintains its power by exploiting both of them and therefore owes something to both of them.

Could be "People of Color" or BIPOC or the proletariat, whatever. The US has built its power by exploiting that group both in and out of the country, and it therefore owes that group some sort of restitution whether they be in or out of the country.

I don't put much stock in such views but they don't strike me as particularly incoherent on that level, at least if the people espousing them have even a modicum of sophistication.

Personally, I happen to think that if you were to bestow a large amount of Capital on Native American citizens, they would pretty quickly adopt to the incentive structures of capital ownership, which is that foreign tourist money spends just as well as local money, and good workers can be found in any country.

[isaacsapphire]

You understand that “lump Natives into a larger category that they have only tenuous ties to and no political or influence and minimal shared interests with in reality, then declare that an action that empowers the larger category must be good for Natives” sounds either insane, so stupid that at least some kindergarteners will see through it, or intentional bullshit laundering anti Native intent, right?

If Settler Colonialism is bad, how are additional settlers good?

[doctorpotatomd]

I think it's facetious to conflate immigrants with settlers.

Besides, even if you look past that, a land acknowledgement is still perfectly congruent with being pro-immigration; the two issues are orthogonal. if the land was wrongfully stolen from the indigenous inhabitants, allowing more non-indigenous people to live there doesn't make it any more or less stolen.

Even if you move up a step to land back, to argue that being pro-immigration conflicts with being pro-land back requires the land back stance to be an extreme one; one that includes the dismantling of cities, towns, governments that were built on stolen land. Whoever's in charge of administering the land in question should be trying to make the best choices they can w.r.t. administering that land as it exists today, not as it might have existed if it hadn't been wrongfully stolen in the first place, and that includes decisions on immigration policy. There are certainly some undeveloped areas where there wouldn't be much or any dismantling of colonial structures required to return the land to a (mostly) pre-colonial state, but these areas aren't ones that are going to be affected by immigration; immigrants primarily live in metropolitan areas, ones where the dismantling of colonial structures would be catastrophically harmful to all inhabitants, including any indigenous ones.

Put simply, the fact that it was wrong to colonise a given area doesn't really change anything about how that area should be administered in the present day.

[isaacsapphire]

The question is sincerely asked; what is the distinction between a (good) immigrant and a (bad) settler?

Is it year they or their ancestors entered “Turtle Island”? Their country of origin? Their religion, language, or ethnicity? Their motives for emigrating? The conditions of their transit presumably matter as it’s rather hard to see a person who was kidnapped and brought against their will to a place (ie enslaved African) as an invader rather than another victim.

I expect that a real life Land Back would involve at least some cities and towns being dismantled and it definitionally involves dismantling governments. I wasn’t under the impression that any argument about possible results being “catastrophically harmful” to settlers was considered relevant in this discussion, because it’s not for them and it’s not about them. The new government by the Natives would be setting the standards for residents, preexisting or incoming, in whatever way they choose and settlers would be expelled or taxed or whatever the Natives chose to do, and quite likely different tribal governments would have significantly different policies.

If “the fact that it was wrong to colonize a given area doesn’t really change anything about how it should be administered in the present day” why are you defending landback at all? Are you actually a supporter of landback? If not, are you a supporter of land acknowledgments? If yes, why?

[doctorpotatomd]

I don't think it's useful to look at settler vs. migrant at the individual level. Colonial settling wasn't done by individuals, it was done by countries and empires. Perhaps that's the difference; a settler was empowered by a foreign government and came with the intention of displacing any locals, a migrant comes without any governmental backing and with the intention of integrating or at least coexisting. And note the past tense: colonisation happened, it's not happening today, even if the effects linger.

I expect that a real life Land Back would involve at least some cities and towns being dismantled and it definitionally involves dismantling governments. I wasn’t under the impression that any argument about possible results being “catastrophically harmful” to settlers was considered relevant in this discussion, because it’s not for them and it’s not about them. The new government by the Natives would be setting the standards for residents, preexisting or incoming, in whatever way they choose and settlers would be expelled or taxed or whatever the Natives chose to do, and quite likely different tribal governments would have significantly different policies.

I don't think that this type of extreme land back is seriously in consideration by anyone, and if anyone was seriously considering it I'd call them stupid and reckless. Two wrongs don't make a right, and an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Maybe I'm just sheltered from the discourse, though, it's been a while since I've been accosted by someone with an alt soc pamphlet on a university campus.

If “the fact that it was wrong to colonize a given area doesn’t really change anything about how it should be administered in the present day” why are you defending landback at all? Are you actually a supporter of landback? If not, are you a supporter of land acknowledgments? If yes, why?

Ehh, on a case-by-case basis, perhaps (and I should caveat here that I'm Australian, and the circumstances of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans aren't identical). If a government is considering returning ownership of a given area to the indigenous people who traditionally owned it, they should consider much more than simply "was this land stolen from these people". Undeveloped land, sacred sites, natural resources? I'm generally in favour of returning ownership, although in my opinion it would be prudent to ensure the traditional owners have the capacity to administer the land in question first. But for, like, Melbourne? San Francisco? That ship has well and truly sailed, and ceding ownership and control to the traditional owners would either deny millions of innocent people their right to democratic representation, or straight-up force them into homelessness. Any land back stance that doesn't take into account the people actually living on the land today because it's "not about them", I'd dismiss out of hand.

Re: land acknowledgements, I don't particularly like them, only because I think they're often empty platitudes that don't do anything except make white liberals feel a bit better about themselves. If (Australian) governments did more to support and empower the indigenous population, I think I'd be more in favour of land acknowledgements. But on the flip side, the few indigenous opinions I've heard of land acknowledgements trend positive, so I'm happy enough to bite my tongue and accept that they're not for me.

[isaacsapphire]

If a guy broke into someone’s house and beat them up and killed half their family, then lived in the house, would it be making it better or worse if the guy let some (sympathetic, deserving, of course!) other people move in too?

@morlock-holmes

[morlock-holmes]

Countries aren't houses, so I'm not sure what process this is supposed to be an allegory for.

Me, I rent, so I've always been quite aware that I don't own the land I reside on, although a lot of other people don't seem to know it.

If you're asking me if I should be expelled from the city I live in (Since I am the sympathetic person who was let in in this allegory) then, uh, no I would prefer not, thank you.

[isaacsapphire]

It’s whether being pro immigration makes a lick of sense to combine with land acknowledgments.

If you’re an invader, a thief, an Oppressor, well of course you don’t want to lose your ill-gotten resources, but why would anyone gaf about the opinions of the villains? Like, come on, we all know that the randos Murderpants invited in get evicted when the law catches up with events in this scenario, maybe they dodge the criminal charges Murderpants is getting, but they’re still getting evicted.

[str-ngeloop]

you sound like you're looking for a fight

[isaacsapphire]

Not specifically, no.

I am trying to bait someone into providing an explanation for how “The United States is an illegitimate country built on stolen land! Landback!” And “The United States has a moral obligation to accept mass immigration” go together logically, vs inherently are in conflict with each other.

[generallemarc]

@str-ngeloop He's specifically looking for the nutjobs who can no longer comprehend ideas like "what the US did to the Native Americans is bad but you can't undo the past" and "all US citizens have a right to live here and so does anyone else who enters legally", because they're so far up their own asses that they'll simultaneously argue that white Americans whose families emigrated decades if not centuries ago have no right to live here but non-whites("minorities" to them, since they're so Americocentric that everyone who isn't white" being the global majority doesn't occur to them) who just got here have a sacrosanct right to be here even if they entered illegally and were already wanted for other crimes on top of that.

[isaacsapphire]

Might be what I am most likely to find, but I do still dream of finding some brilliant mind who actually makes me believe the stuff that I am required to act l believe.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean, theory of mind-wise it's not fundamentally very difficult, you just find a group which contains both native Americans and some proportion of immigrants and decide that the ruling class in America maintains its power by exploiting both of them and therefore owes something to both of them.

Could be "People of Color" or BIPOC or the proletariat, whatever. The US has built its power by exploiting that group both in and out of the country, and it therefore owes that group some sort of restitution whether they be in or out of the country.

I don't put much stock in such views but they don't strike me as particularly incoherent on that level, at least if the people espousing them have even a modicum of sophistication.

Personally, I happen to think that if you were to bestow a large amount of Capital on Native American citizens, they would pretty quickly adopt to the incentive structures of capital ownership, which is that foreign tourist money spends just as well as local money, and good workers can be found in any country.

[isaacsapphire]

You understand that “lump Natives into a larger category that they have only tenuous ties to and no political or influence and minimal shared interests with in reality, then declare that an action that empowers the larger category must be good for Natives” sounds either insane, so stupid that at least some kindergarteners will see through it, or intentional bullshit laundering anti Native intent, right?

If Settler Colonialism is bad, how are additional settlers good?

[doctorpotatomd]

I think it's facetious to conflate immigrants with settlers.

Besides, even if you look past that, a land acknowledgement is still perfectly congruent with being pro-immigration; the two issues are orthogonal. if the land was wrongfully stolen from the indigenous inhabitants, allowing more non-indigenous people to live there doesn't make it any more or less stolen.

Even if you move up a step to land back, to argue that being pro-immigration conflicts with being pro-land back requires the land back stance to be an extreme one; one that includes the dismantling of cities, towns, governments that were built on stolen land. Whoever's in charge of administering the land in question should be trying to make the best choices they can w.r.t. administering that land as it exists today, not as it might have existed if it hadn't been wrongfully stolen in the first place, and that includes decisions on immigration policy. There are certainly some undeveloped areas where there wouldn't be much or any dismantling of colonial structures required to return the land to a (mostly) pre-colonial state, but these areas aren't ones that are going to be affected by immigration; immigrants primarily live in metropolitan areas, ones where the dismantling of colonial structures would be catastrophically harmful to all inhabitants, including any indigenous ones.

Put simply, the fact that it was wrong to colonise a given area doesn't really change anything about how that area should be administered in the present day.

[prokopetz]

I sometimes get pushback when I describe Warhammer 40K Space Marines as eroticised figures, usually on the grounds that canonically, Space Marines can't fuck – then you look at the source material and it's like:

The text frequently dwells on long, luridly detailed lists of the various ways in which Space Marines' bodies have been modified. A disproportionate number of these modifications involve bodily fluids and/or the mouth.

The text tells us that Space Marines' power armour actually makes them less scary to other humans, because the mere sight of a Space Marine's unclothed body causes unenhanced humans to experience primal terror – and sure, you could interpret this as a body horror thing, but it's really not framed that way.

The text tells us that the only way to make a new Space Marine is to cut out part of an existing Space Marine and put it inside you, and that each chapter has a specific guy whose duty is to pick over battlefields and harvest the "gene-seed" of dead Space Marines so that their lineages might carry on.

Frankly, at this point, the fact that they're biomechanically incapable of fucking only makes it more horny.

[prokopetz]

(My actual controversial 40K opinion is that the whole "heavily marketed brand-flagship faction of genderless-in-theory-but-exclusively-male-in-practice eroticised caricatures of butch masculinity who are as a matter of explicit canon biomechanically incapable of fucking" thing actually pops up twice, because this description applies equally to 40K's interpretation of Orks, and that the distinction between the two hinges entirely on whether you prefer your blue balls upper class or working class.)

[atmosphericradar]

I think that's an oversimplification of the Orks. If the Space Marines are unexpressed masculine homosexuality, then the Orks are expressed masculine homosociality.

Orks are derived from English football hooligans, and they intentionally inherit the particular masculine competitiveness of factionalized sports. Orks are an eroticization of that combative/competitive masculinity, to the exclusion of sex as a practice.

Orks collapse the masculine connection between fighting and fucking into a single point. War is their orgiastic release, in contrast to the repression surrounding Space Marines. Orks want to fight because fighting makes them feel amazing! Ork societies revolve around fighting to such a degree that I would say Orks resemble a globalized fetish fiction; it's just not a fetish based in sexual pleasure.

[doctorpotatomd]

I don't think the Space Marine's homosexuality is unexpressed. Space Marines also collapse that masculine connection into a single point, it's just more formalized and ritualized. War is the Space Marine's sexual release as much as it is the Ork's; you can't really call it orgiastic for the Space Marine, but that's just a different flavour. Space Marines societies also revolve around fighting to such a degree that you could say they resemble a globalized fetish fiction for a fetish not based in sexual pleasure; it's just that they have layers of ritual and formalized structures that spread the eroticism from combat itself to combat-adjacent things: both things that are already erotic like maintaining weapons, male camaraderie between squadmates, and military/monastic hierachy; and to things that weren't already erotic like logistics and tradition.

I think the key point is that neither Space Marines nor Orks are erotic at all in-universe, they're only erotic to the audience. A Space Marine is not sexually repressed, they canonically don't fuck and don't want to fuck, just like an Ork. And from an out-of-universe viewpoint, they're both hunky beefcakes who love Gun like it's dick and spend all their time in close, sweaty proximity with a bunch of other hunky beefcakes who love Gun like it's dick. The only real difference is the "football hooligan" vs. military/monastic source materials for the male homosociality, and the resulting flavour thereof; they even both reproduce by fighting, it's just that the Space Marine's reproduction is, again, more formalized and ritualized. So I think that the "upper class or working class" thing definitely holds.

[tpwrtrmnky]

The moral argument for allowing transition is trivially simple: Bodily autonomy is one of the most important human rights. No ifs, no buts.

On the social side, preventing transition is an enormous overreach with regard to freedom of expression. Legal gender change is a necessity to protect privacy.

This is all downstream of the simple idea that you should treat trans people like a type of people, an idea that a lot of people get really offended by, as they do with women, racialized people, disabled people, gay people, pretty much any marginalized group in history.

Because the moral argument is trivially against them, bigots will try to frame themselves as a rational, scientifically-minded group trying to rein in the naive optimism of their opponents. They will insist that the science is on their side, and by doing so handwave the moral argument because their point of view is "true".

It is not.

The playbook of these groups is old, reliant on a few rhetorical tricks that play on confirmation bias, and generally tries to do one thing: Engineer talking points that are wrong in ways that take scientific competence to debunk, so that a fully accurate debunking loses general audiences.

That's why it's important to get ahead of them and attack the foundations they're building their rhetoric on.

It's tempting to just fall back on the moral argument, it really is, because these shitheels are arguing positions that are pretty fucking heinous. That should be enough. Unfortunately, it gets you liberal "allies" who seem genuinely embarrassed to be on your side, because they're not confident that their position is empirically correct in addition to being morally correct.

That's why stuff like debunking "concerning" scientific results about trans youth in Finland matters.

Don't cede rhetorical space that belongs to you.

[doctorpotatomd]

"Legal gender change is a necessity to protect privacy"—this rings true to me but I'm having trouble articulating the argument, would you mind expanding on this a little?

[pulpchamber]

I don't know if this is exactly how Op would put it but the simple answer is: because transition being illegal necessitates enforcement, and everyone has a body and medical history the privacy of which must then be violated to investigate and enforce that ban. Presto - nobody has meaningful privacy because it's trivial to accuse anyone of something illegal [transitioning] and force violation of their privacy to prove they *haven't* transitioned. So if transition is illegal, you have a ready-made accusation to justify violating literally anyone's privacy.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Oh nah I meant in the sense that changing your legal gender marker is a necessary thing to protect a trans person's privacy, because if the marker is very noticeably different from how you present yourself, anyone who sees your ID will know you're trans.

[pulpchamber]

Also true! And even if it just violated trans people's privacy it would be egregious - that being said it also seems all-but-inevitable that it would also impact everybody's privacy to the point of nullification because 'illegal' also means 'OK and even mandatory for authorities to investigate.' Even if the documents match, it's trivially easy for whatever authority is demanding them to go 'Well, I thought they might be fake because of course criminals will fake documents to get away with it!' That level of intrusion and compromise on privacy is just sorta standard and expected when an act is criminalized, so it necessarily passes through the old Nothing To Hide logic and applies to every person.

[doctorpotatomd]

this all makes sense, thanks to both. privacy both in the small-scale, individual sense of "your government ID, which you need to show to members of the public from time to time, shouldn't contain private personal/medical information" and also the larger, more abstract sense of "don't give the government a pretext to invade a person's privacy, because they'll take it".

[processes]

the Civ6 mod we need

[argumate]

Chile pretending to be Australia, let's make this happen

[processes]

[argumate]

much less perverse, also perhaps the only way to fix the Commonwealth by artificially creating a bunch of new states

[doctorpotatomd]

I think I prefer the first option by simple merit of it putting a significant geographical barrier in between civilization and Sydney, I simply cannot in good faith support a project that comes within a hair's breadth of destroying Alice Springs but chooses not to.

[youzicha]

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI art turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On its own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[doctorpotatomd]

(scattered thoughts, hopefully I figure out what I'm trying to say)

I don't think that AI could write Chopin or Bach, not really, but not because of some ineffable human spirit thing. Rather, I think it's because music is incredibly context-dependent, and the contexts that Chopin and Bach wrote music for are gone or calcified in 2026.

I think a Beethoven symphony is a clearer example, so I'll use that. A Beethoven symphony is written for the concert hall, and it's dependent on that context to function; the way we interact with music today is broadly incompatible with a Beethoven symphony. We listen on headphones, in the car, pausing and restarting and having music in the background while we wash the dishes and fold the laundry and eat brunch. To hear a Beethoven symphony the way it was written to be heard requires you to sit and listen for an hour or more, giving the music your undivided attention; that's just not how people listen to music today. Pretentious music snobs often complain that modern pop songs have boring, predictable chord progressions and musical structures, but what they're missing is that this actually makes them better at being music in 2026 than the intricacies of a late-Classical symphony would.

Not only that, but there's also dynamics; orchestral music can use the softest quiets and the loudest louds because the concert hall allows it to do so. Modern music has to have flattened dynamics, without much contrast, because anything too quiet will get drowned out by ambient noise, and anything too loud will be physically painful to someone listening on headphones (especially if they've just turned the volume up to hear the quiet bit). And the other acoustic and physical consequences of hearing an orchestra in a 3D space translate poorly on recordings, like the way a loud, low tuba note makes your guts vibrate as much as your eardrums. And the social aspect of the concert hall, as well, is important; if listening to music is an Event that you have to Go To, you hear it very differently.

Of course there are still orchestras that put on concerts in concert halls, but the classical music tradition is calcified and not very relevant to the everyday person today. Which means that a large part of the reason people go to hear an orchestra play a Beethoven symphony is because it's Beethoven. If they just wanted to hear some music, they'd listen to a Sabrina Carpenter track, and she'd do a better job at being the right type of music for that context than Beethoven would.

So I don't think the question of "can an AI write a Beethoven symphony" is coherent, because a human in 2026 can't write a Beethoven symphony either; the human or the AI might be able to put notes on the page or generate the soundwave in such a way that a magically objective music-grader would call it as good or better than Beethoven, but without the context of the concert hall it doesn't matter, it will fail at being good music in the zeitgeist of today. And for the people who do go to orchestral concerts, it will fail because it doesn't have the social context of having Beethoven's name on it or of being something that people who are into classical music discuss the minutiae of endlessly. Even if you resurrected the man himself and got him to write a 10th symphony, gave him hearing aids and taught him the ins and outs of modern instrument technologies (aside: a Beethoven concerto for electric guitar and orchestra would fucking slap), unless you put his name on it nobody would care, and so it would fail in the classical world too.

Chopin, additionally, has another dimension: the physicality of playing the piano. Chopin's piano music is gorgeously ergonomic to play in a way that I don't think I can properly articulate, for me the physical experience of playing a Chopin piece is almost more important than the sound of it. I think this is where Chopin gets his staying power from; he's truly the pianist's pianist, and he's stayed around only because so many composers and conductors and the like are pianists. (And it probably helps that his style is more compatible with headphones, radio, and being on in the background than Beethoven or Mahler or whichever beeg-orchestra composer's styles are.) So I don't think an AI could write a Chopin piece, not one that will succeed at being a Chopin piece for me at least, because that physicality isn't something that's really compatible with being tokenized.

This is just music, though, I don't think any of this applies to visual art or literature; the contexts that you look at a painting or read a novel in today are broadly similar to the contexts in which you would have done so in the past, so an AI-generated impressionist painting can succeed at being a good painting simply by virtue of being able to be looked at.

Anyway, my submission for a fallback philosophy is to recognize that artistic merit is separate from technical mastery and aesthetic pleasingness, while not diminishing the value of any of those three; and that the way people interact with art is more complex than simply looking or listening. I call this the My son's drawing of 'safe'. principle.

[darkspaceboytoy]

Insane how much the idea of a sexual fetish has morphed on here into a carte blanche to do whatever you want. Such a bizarre childish relationship with sexuality and human interaction. Just saw someone say misogyny is bad unless you are doing it for a kink, in which case that’s fine and it’s like. Well I think we should unpack that actually. Can there actually be a “harmless” misogyny and is sex really the domain it exists in?

[lumsel]

Insane how much the idea of acting has morphed on here into a carte blanche to do whatever you want. Such a bizarre childish relationship with art and playing pretend. Just saw someone say misogyny is bad unless you are acting in a movie or stageplay, in which case that’s fine and it’s like. Well I think we should unpack that actually. Can there actually be a “harmless” misogyny and is acting really the domain it exists in?

[darkspaceboytoy]

Yeah man wouldn’t it be fucking insane if we had critical discussions of misogyny, depictions of it, and performances of it in art and media. That would be a fucking insane and crazy thing to do. Thank you for proposing this frankly shockingly silly idea as some sort of simpleminded take down of the very basic thing I said.

[society-with-men]

when a horny man actually physically beats a woman in a house, that's okay. because it's like when another real man fake beats a real woman on a stage. the fakeness transfers somehow. it becomes art. and that's okay. art is okay, especially when the art is about beating a woman, because it's actually so okay, it makes it okay when a real man does it for real.

or it's like when a real man really beats a real woman in front of a camera. the realness is caught in the camera. so its okay, its a fake beating now. anyways the point is. men need to beat women. and they are tired of making up excuses for it. so women need to pick one. because it doesn't matter. they're all the same excuse. they're interchangeable. as demonstrated by lumsel. they come after the fact (fake & madeup) of a man beating a woman (real, good, ok).

women can say anything they want after. about any domain, any method, any manner. as long as men get to do it. at home. on stage. in a video. in a game. on the train. in the rain. in a car. in a tree. in a house. on the street. for pay. for free.

[doctorpotatomd]

You're conflating kink play and stage acting with actual domestic abuse. This is a false equivalence because of consent; when a horny man actually physically beats a [horny] woman in a house, with enthusiastic informed consent and within mutually-agreed-upon parameters chosen for both of their safeties, this is okay because they're consenting adults within the privacy of their own home and can thus do whatever they like. (And you're also missing the point that straight women are more likely to be into misogynistic kink play than straight men are.)

[society-with-men]

"It's ok because everyone signed the papers, and for realzzzz she wanted it. She wanted it MORE than him actually. Also how are you even seeing this? It's PRIVATE???" Wow I have never considered or heard of any of this before. I will think about it very deeply. Thanks!

[doctorpotatomd]

It's ok because everyone signed the papers

Yeah, that's consent. That's, like, the most basic and fundamental principle of sexual ethics. Are you arguing that women can't meaningfully consent to that type of play, or just that they shouldn't? Just want to make sure I understand your stance correctly.

Also how are you even seeing this? It's PRIVATE???

Not private as in hidden from view, private as in "their own private lives which aren't anybody's business except their own".

[darkspaceboytoy]

Insane how much the idea of a sexual fetish has morphed on here into a carte blanche to do whatever you want. Such a bizarre childish relationship with sexuality and human interaction. Just saw someone say misogyny is bad unless you are doing it for a kink, in which case that’s fine and it’s like. Well I think we should unpack that actually. Can there actually be a “harmless” misogyny and is sex really the domain it exists in?

[lumsel]

Insane how much the idea of acting has morphed on here into a carte blanche to do whatever you want. Such a bizarre childish relationship with art and playing pretend. Just saw someone say misogyny is bad unless you are acting in a movie or stageplay, in which case that’s fine and it’s like. Well I think we should unpack that actually. Can there actually be a “harmless” misogyny and is acting really the domain it exists in?

[darkspaceboytoy]

Yeah man wouldn’t it be fucking insane if we had critical discussions of misogyny, depictions of it, and performances of it in art and media. That would be a fucking insane and crazy thing to do. Thank you for proposing this frankly shockingly silly idea as some sort of simpleminded take down of the very basic thing I said.

[society-with-men]

when a horny man actually physically beats a woman in a house, that's okay. because it's like when another real man fake beats a real woman on a stage. the fakeness transfers somehow. it becomes art. and that's okay. art is okay, especially when the art is about beating a woman, because it's actually so okay, it makes it okay when a real man does it for real.

or it's like when a real man really beats a real woman in front of a camera. the realness is caught in the camera. so its okay, its a fake beating now. anyways the point is. men need to beat women. and they are tired of making up excuses for it. so women need to pick one. because it doesn't matter. they're all the same excuse. they're interchangeable. as demonstrated by lumsel. they come after the fact (fake & madeup) of a man beating a woman (real, good, ok).

women can say anything they want after. about any domain, any method, any manner. as long as men get to do it. at home. on stage. in a video. in a game. on the train. in the rain. in a car. in a tree. in a house. on the street. for pay. for free.

[doctorpotatomd]

You're conflating kink play and stage acting with actual domestic abuse. This is a false equivalence because of consent; when a horny man actually physically beats a [horny] woman in a house, with enthusiastic informed consent and within mutually-agreed-upon parameters chosen for both of their safeties, this is okay because they're consenting adults within the privacy of their own home and can thus do whatever they like. (And you're also missing the point that straight women are more likely to be into misogynistic kink play than straight men are.)