My Purposes Are Inherently Illegitimate @sapphiresonstrings - Tumblr Blog

Aside from residential zoning/real estate and farm subsidies my most distinctly libertarian instinct is probably pro sports teams. The industry makes how much? And they want how many million dollars from the city to build and upkeep their fancy stadiums? fuck off. Live by the market and die by the market.

the-grey-tribe

You know how leftists, social democrats, and even some centrists tell you that the mail and the welfare state and public infrastructure don't need to turn a profit? It's actually fine when the local library "loses money". It's for the people. It's a service paid for with tax money.

This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.

And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.

These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.

Maybe the way to get people to understand why we pay taxes and why we should have libraries is to make an analogy to sports arenas. Those are popular!

garmbreak1

This should be ridiculous and yet you're making sense.

Interesting.

sapphiresonstrings

Long before the concept of universal healthcare was anything but a joke, Roman politicians built sports arenas to pander to the masses. This predates the grain dole. They also built temples and public baths for similar reasons.

Building sports arenas for the plebians was one of the earliest social services.

isaacsapphire

Ok but did they charge admission of a week’s wages to watch a game?

sapphiresonstrings

No, but sometimes the cheap seats collapsed and killed hundreds of people. You get what you pay for.

st-just

Aside from residential zoning/real estate and farm subsidies my most distinctly libertarian instinct is probably pro sports teams. The industry makes how much? And they want how many million dollars from the city to build and upkeep their fancy stadiums? fuck off. Live by the market and die by the market.

the-grey-tribe

You know how leftists, social democrats, and even some centrists tell you that the mail and the welfare state and public infrastructure don't need to turn a profit? It's actually fine when the local library "loses money". It's for the people. It's a service paid for with tax money.

This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.

And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.

These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.

Maybe the way to get people to understand why we pay taxes and why we should have libraries is to make an analogy to sports arenas. Those are popular!

garmbreak1

This should be ridiculous and yet you're making sense.

Interesting.

sapphiresonstrings

Long before the concept of universal healthcare was anything but a joke, Roman politicians built sports arenas to pander to the masses. This predates the grain dole. They also built temples and public baths for similar reasons.

Building sports arenas for the plebians was one of the earliest social services.

alexanderwales

By the 16th and 17th centuries, Europe was gobbling up enormous amounts of wood. They were using it for their buildings, heating their houses, making ships, smelting iron, making glass, and all kinds of other things. Part of why steam power ever became a thing is that wood fuel prices were climbing higher and higher, and it started to make economic sense to push hard on coal mines. Many coal mines were below the water table, flooded, and the earliest steam engines were designed specifically for pumping the water out; the steam engine was hungry for water and coal, and those two things were right there if you had a flooded coal mine, needing no other infrastructure. Coal let England escape from the timber famine.

I've been trying to imagine what the opposite of steampunk might be, where coal deposits just weren't as large as they are on Earth, or where coal mines stalled out for some reason, and what it might have looked like for timber famine to sweep across Europe. There's be intensive forestry efforts, certainly, but also some innovations in fuel-savings forced by the heavy economic pressure, something that Europe was already going through.

There were already historical examples of forest fires set as a part of wartime tactics, or to otherwise control the supply of timber, even as late as the second World War. So that would intensify in this hypothetical lumberpunk setting, where most of the forests in Europe are carefully managed by forestry programs. Without coal and oil, every tank represents an enormous quantity of burned wood.

And while I don't think the economics would work out for transporting lumber across the ocean, the "untouched" forests of the New World would surely be a source of finished goods, because if you need lumber for ships, you can just build the ship in situ instead of putting the lumber onto a ship and making along voyage with it. And Russia, which is sitting on Siberian forests, can probably go much longer without being wood-starved than anywhere else, though I think it would need trains to transport the lumber east, and I'm not sure we'd have trains if all the iron had to be produced using charcoal, all the rail ties are lumber, and the trains themselves run on ... wood gas or something? I know you can convert a car to run on wood gas, something that was done during wartime when there were fuel shortages, but I think metal being semi-precious probably kills the dream of a car dead, even if I could see tanks working.

And I'm just now remembering about peat production, which maybe throws a wrench in things for various places, though it's obviously not a true substitute for coal unless you have huge reserves of the stuff.

sapphiresonstrings

Britain actually did import lumber from Canada, although I think it might have been specialty lumber for shipbuilding that required particular types and ages of trees.

The earliest trains were pulled by teams of horses along wagonways rather than railways. Obviously this has disadvantages compared to using fuel, but if you've reached a pseudo-industrial era without a good fuel source then it still makes sense to use those kinds of systems because they allow the horses to pull heavier loads along those fixed routes.

socialjusticeinamerica

Greedy billionaire oligarchs own the Republicans which is why the deck is stacked against the common man.

robin-hood-for-freedom

I agree. Get rid of the income tax

lordascapelion

I like how this explanation makes it clear just how much of a retard OP is

thathopeyetlives

My understanding is that there's an approach one could use to tax loans made against a large asset with unrealized gains?

sapphiresonstrings

Abolish income tax and tax consumption instead. If someone takes out a loan on unrealized gains and uses it to buy a yacht, tax the money they spend on the yacht. If they stay in a 5-star hotel, tax the hotel.

The fundamental problem with income tax is that it's a tax on transferring money from one person to another, which is not an economically meaningful action. Two people could pay each other back and forth until it all gets taxed into nothing without ever exchanging a good or service.

Income tax can be easily evaded because it is a logically incoherent concept. Tax spending, not income. Problem solved.

brazenautomaton

have you seen the "you're evil unless you press the blue button" discourse on reddit. (two buttons, red and blue, everyone who presses the blue button dies unless more than 50% of people pressed it) I'm guessing you'd be a red button presser like myself but I'm curious if you have opinions on why reddit is pushing this really hard right now. so many subreddits are pushing "you're evil if you press red" and even "liberal" boards are calling red button pressers "retarded" for not risking themselves to save the blue button pressers. it feels like an op or an astroturf to me but not sure why.

Yes I have

It's an ethical optical illusion. The correct choice is red. Everyone would press red and has pressed red. But you know thst "risk yourself to save others" is the kind of answer you are supposed to give as a good and moral person, so people will bend over backwards and invent new elements to make it into the right answer. The social desirability bias will twist their brains up so that picking blue is a heroic moral stand expressing their faith in humanity. They'll say that since losing even 1% of the world would be so disruptive, we have an obligation to press blue to prevent it.

They say everyone has an obligation to press blue in order to save everyone, because some people will press blue recklessly. But they don't believe that logic holds. Nobody actually believes in endangering half of society in order to save the most reckless people in it. If they did, all of them would be as reckless as the most reckless people in society, because they'd be following them around everywhere! They'd hear the national weather service announce a tornado warning that said to stay inside, and would immediately drive outside to try and rescue the people who were too reckless to stay inside.

IIRC, the thought experiment was designed specifically so that the proper-sounding pro-social answer was the incorrect one, in order to illustrate exactly what it illustrated.

cookingwithroxy

It's even more obvious if you reverse the order of presentation. Because described from Red first, it's 'you push this button, you live. You push this other button and you will die, UNLESS over half the population also decides to push this button. Then nobody dies.'

By putting the blue button first, it makes it sound like the default and that choosing red is the choice of death. But blue is the choice of death, in all situations.

monochromaticchime

I learned about this problem from this Dev video:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HDUak4vAczk which also includes two details that you didn’t consider. 1: Polls, including a poll where the penalty was actually enforced (as a server ban not as literal death) reliably found that about 60% of people choose blue so voting red is effectively risking those people’s lives when blue was probably going to win anyways, and 2: There will always be some people who choose blue, children who didn’t understand the rules and chose a button at random, people who slipped and pressed the wrong button, or who wanted to save everyone and don’t know game theiry or who are blind or whatever. Those people will

From a game theory perspective there is no reason not to choose red. From an ethics perspective it’s much more complicated.

brazenautomaton

see, you have to add elements to it to turn it into a heroic moral stand. the question specifies that it is only presented to people who understand it. but people have to add in "what about all the people who don't understand it?" so you can include children and the blind.

there is absolutely nothing that is ethically complicated about not endangering yourself to save the most reckless people in the world. period. no ambiguity. if the most reckless people in the world pushed the Commit Suicide Button the proper response is "wow, they really should not have done that" the way you react to literally every other instance of suicidal recklessness.

in fact, you can remove the red button and literally nothing changes! the red button does nothing in the scenario. so the scenario actually is "a man walks up to you and, after determining you can understand the offer, presents a blue button that, if pushed, will kill you unless more than 50% of people total pushed the button. you can also just, like, leave." this scenario is identical in every way and yet the answer is even more screamingly obvious.

this is not an ethical or moral question. this is a question of if you can see the obvious when social desirability demands you do otherwise.

monochromaticchime

I feel you missed the point. If enough people are given the buttons then some of them will choose blue, that may be stupid but I don’t think it’s deserving to die levels of stupid. I do think the situation changes slightly if you remove the red button and just make it “press blue or walk away” although it’s subtle and more psychological than real. The addition of the red button makes it feel more like a choice between two equal options which I do think psychologically influences people in this situation. Also the version I saw wasn’t “only people who understand it get the question” but maybe that was the one you saw.

That’s besides the real point which is that there are plenty of people I know who I do think are likely to choose blue. I don’t want them to die and studies on this question indicates that blue has decent odds of winning so therefore I should choose blue.

If you ask me the question isn’t really a matter of game theory although it can be framed that way, it’s actually individualism vs collectivism.

brazenautomaton

I think choosing the option that will explicitly kill you when explicitly told this option will kill you instead of not doing that is, in fact, a central example of "deserve to die level of stupid." Reckless people do things that result in their own deaths that are far less objectively stupid, like riding motorcycles without helmets.

Their recklessness does not create in any other person the obligation to endanger themselves to save them from that recklessness. Reckless behavior results in death all the time and you are capable of seeing that. When presented as a hypothetical, the social desirability bias can't let you see that, and you have to make it a historic moral stand instead.

sapphiresonstrings

There is a degree to which pressing the blue button is a mistake, and you're actually saving people from mistakes rather than recklessness. The person who pressed blue got confused and thought it was the right choice.

The thing that makes it worse is that they really believe they're being self-sacrificing. You aren't running into a tornado to save people who recklessly stayed outside, you're running into a tornado to save people who ran into a tornado to save people. The only way to save everyone is for everyone to run into the tornado!

Compare OSHA. If everyone just does what's best for themselves, then a tiny fraction will die and the rest will live. If everyone follows the plan, then nobody will die.

All that being said, I would press the red button. I would not, in fact, run into a tornado to save someone who ran into a tornado to save someone.

However, I would like to point out that the reason pushing blue is intuitive is because all of our ancestors who would have pushed red in a real situation died out a long time ago. Saving yourself is not selected for by evolution. Charging into the enemy, massacring them in the rout, and taking their women for yourself is what was selected for.

Genghis Khan is the ancestor of 0.5% of the population of the world because he would have pressed blue. Pressing blue isn't a moral decision, it's what you do when you see the people in the front line charging and decide to follow them into either life or death. Whichever side has more blue-pressers will enslave the losers and the descendants of the blue-pressers will inherit the Earth.

The blue button is the charge button. Charge into the tornado to support those who charged in before you. People resist red because it resembles cowardice, and people hate cowardice because it was selected against in the ancestral environment.

During WW1, women went around Britain handing out white feathers to men to shame them into enlisting. WW1 was a senseless waste of human life. The point of the blue button is to shame people into throwing away their lives by accusing them of cowardice.

invertebrateinvert

sapphiresonstrings

I think it's representative of a deeply rooted fear of replacement instilled by evolution. "Army of men from more powerful culture invade, displace the local men, and take the local women for themselves," is a pattern that has actually happened so many times that it is undeniably part of our evolutionary history. We can see the legacy of these replacements in our DNA. It's not surprising we have instinctive feelings about it, in the same way that it's not surprising that we have instinctive feelings about snakes because so many of our ancestors were killed by venomous snakes.

Ironically, Africa has been on the receiving end of this treatment more often than the giving end. The Arabs mass-castrated the black slaves they brought in, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It's ironic that the main fear being expressed seems to be a reversal of fortune. The peoples who have been most prone to carrying out this kind of culturally coercive male replacement are the Europeans, the Chinese, and the Arabs. The Europeans do it to everyone else (WMAF relationships being a traditional sore spot for the men of the ethnicities on the receiving end), the Chinese do it to everyone except the Europeans, the Arabs have institutionalized it into law with their traditional rules banning Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men but not vice-versa.

nightbringer24

It's amazing when you look at the Middle Ages, and when it comes to monarch's power, there was actually a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between a king and his vassals on a lot of things.

A king had to rely heavily on his vassal lords to pay homage to him, due to how fragmented and decentralized the Middle Ages was, so lesser lords could get a bit of wriggle room in various ways.

King wants to go on campaign abroad? Okay, so he's calling up muster from your lands, but you don't want to get rid of all the men of fighting age. You live in an agrarian society after all; you need to keep some men back so they can work the fields. So you haggle the amount of men you will send on campaign in your name, either under your own personal banner or sending a knight banneret to fight in your name.

King needs food? All right, but obviously you've got your own manor to support and feed too, so you can't send him all the bushels and cattle and pigs he's requested. But you can send some.

This obviously doesn't mean a king was powerless: the response to the Hotspur Rebellion in 1402/03 against the new Henry IV shows that just because some lords might chose to fully withdraw their support from their king doesn't mean that all would.

Because a king's power is as much about the projection of physical and political power and strength, through armed forces loyal to the king and also through laws, but there's also that a lot of the king's power comes from a place of reputation and trust; about a vassal keeping faith with his king because said king, who he has met personally, has bestowed upon him his rank and title, deserves his support and his trust.

overfedvenison

Yeah. I feel like a lot of people have this perception of a feudal monarchy as like "This is the king and he has absolute power and these are all the people he owns and tells what to do :)" without really understanding how this system actually worked at all or any of the logistics involved at like every stage, but as with anything, the more you look into it the more complex it gets Like there are so many moving parts and it seems kinda fascinating. I'm half-remembering this, but supposedly, you also needed to worry about these kinds of meetings at the lower ranks of society as well. So like a Serf family was entitled to periodic meetings with the lord of their land to discuss matters such as the management of work and taxation, marriage and if the lord would approve of them (since Serfs were tied to land and the like,) to seek aid and charity in times of famine, etc. Obviously the power was generally more with the lord here, but there is management and negotiation and relationship management going on with that even so. So like... I dunno. A feudal monarchy seems like it's sort of a constant balancing act of meetings and negotiation and continued good relations at like every level of society you could possibly interact with. It's neat to think about it like that.

nightbringer24

Someone on Twitter did a meme that describes EXACTLY this:

brazenautomaton

Is it true that if the holy roman empire went to war with the roman empire, they'd lose despite technological superiority?

As I heard it, the advances in warfare technology reduced the size and readiness of armies simply because you could not have a standing professional military any more, a standing professional military was 100% going to rebel and unseat its lord.

sapphiresonstrings

When the Holy Roman Empire goes to war, who shows up to fight the war? Depending on your time period it could be the Franks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the Habsburg Empire including Austria-Hungary plus Spain and the Netherlands.

I think technological superiority would play a big enough role to render everything after the Franks into a one-sided rout. Charles V's army had guns, crossbows, pikes, and better armor than the Romans. His army was also semi-professional. I think a Roman legion probably would have melted in the face of a Spanish tercio.

The Holy Roman Empire existed for like a thousand years, and in all that time it never really had an army. I have no idea how to even approach the question tbh.

centrally-unplanned

would improving public transit at the national level, as US president, meaningfully impact gas prices?

In any realistic scenario, not by much? Oil usage is diverse, and while transport is the number one usage personal car transit is mixed in there with shipping & industrial applications. Meanwhile, people like cars and like living in the suburbs. We undersupply urban living vis a vis the demand for it, but not by such crazy numbers; and people in cities will still drive cars, transit is often about optionality.

It would make some impact of course, everything does. And if you are less realistic in your proposals - San Francisco just becomes Tokyo overnight, zap - then sure you can get more. As the impact on narrow consumption becomes larger, though, note that "price decrease" isnt the only mechanism - consumption substitution comes into play too. Now that gas is cheaper, can we build gas-dependent manufacturing centers that werent economical before? Can we ship more goods now that it is cheaper to do so? Etc. Energy is arguably the most valuable good on the planet; it always finds a use.

sapphiresonstrings

Even if it had no effect on gas prices, improving public transit would have the different-yet-related effect of reducing transportation costs for the working class and middle class.

People who drive everywhere would still pay the same amount for gas, but many people would drive less if public transit was better.

the-grey-tribe

They say good sci-fi doesn't predict the automobile, but the traffic jam. Well, I think science fiction didn't predict LLMs. They predicted computers, they predicted AI, they predicted sentient robots, humanoid robots, talking robots, stupid robots.

But they didn't predict AI psychosis.

If in 2005 you wrote a science fiction TV show episode predicting AI psychosis, i.e. a codependent relationship or folie à deux between a person and a computer, you'd have sounded like an idiot. Is this a big problem? That somebody who's prodromal, manic, psychotic, or delusional will only talk to a computer, and the computer will reinforce the mental illness or mirror the symptoms? It sounds contrived!

If in 2005 you wrote sci-fi episode about a sycophantic computer, critics would have rightfully called you out for using lazy tropes from fantasy and fairy tales, like the "monkey's paw", instead of cool tropes from sci-fi, like lasers.

If a writer had predicted the traffic jam in the year 1900, somebody could say in 2019 "Yeah, but that's what they said about cars, too."

understatedocelot

Why doesn't the movie Her fit this standard?

the-grey-tribe

I think it predicted a lot of the current LLM world, and if I hadn't specifically said "AI psychosis", then you would have a point. I think AI psychosis in particular is really different from everything else. You can imagine all the other things, but not the dynamic state of one brain and one neural network feeding back into one another and reinforcing a dysfunctional dynamic.

sapphiresonstrings

The introduction of strong alcohol into a population unused to its effects tends to cause a wave of chaos that weeds the vulnerable out of the breeding pool. The effects of gin in England and whiskey in Ireland are classic cases, but the stand-out example is what happened to the Native Americans. Just as Smallpox devastated a population with no natural immunity, alcohol devastated a culture with no natural resistance to alcoholism.

Which is to say that, like with Smallpox, Europe had already been devastated by alcoholism. The gene pool had already been narrowed. The blood tax had already been paid. Those vulnerable to alcoholism had already succumbed and their genes had already gone extinct.

Technological progress always alters the environment and triggers evolutionary change. The mechanism of evolution is that some who would have survived and reproduced fail to do so - either because they did not survive or because the social and psychological mechanisms that lead to reproduction failed to activate.

The victims of 'AI psychosis' are simply those who happen to be vulnerable to a threat that did not exist until recently, just as the victims of gin and whiskey were those who were vulnerable to alcoholism. That clock cannot be wound back.

centrally-unplanned

Curious how the strategy of "blanket Tehran in a toxic sludge of burnt oil clouds, threatening the lives of anyone who goes outside" interfaces with the admin's plan to have the people of Tehran rally in the streets to overthrow the regime, for freedom?

Idk maybe that is Step 3 and there is a surprise Step 2 in there.

argumate

the time is fast approaching! a cynic might suggest that this is setting up the conditions to blame the Iranian people and justify Iran War 2.0 in five years time.

phaeton-flier

Well, you know the old chestnut: "The best time to develop conditions that allow you to blame the Horrid Enemy for the unjustified terror you shall rain down on them is twenty years ago; the second best time is now"

phaeton-flier

"Society grows great when old men start wars whose War Crime Tribunals they shall never sit before"

morlock-holmes

I am fascinated with the way the people in both these administrations just don't try to fit facts together in any kind of way whatsoever. Both Israeli and US officials have said that there won't be any nation building, that they absolutely don't care what happens to the people of Iran one way or another as long as their military is broken, AND that they are amazing allies to the Iranian protestors and are in it for the long haul to create a democratic Iran free of previous tyranny.

I genuinely have no idea what they think they are doing.

Both with the war but also, like, I have no idea what the purpose of the words they say is.

centrally-unplanned

I don't think this is fair to them - they are mainly just lying. Like it is *true* that war goals are ~loose, that Israel & America don't agree, and that a notable part of why the US is involved is that flexing military might is an end in itself. But there being multiple war goals is pretty common; allies disagreeing over them is the same. Both sides want to degrade Iranian mil capacity; both sides would ideally like to kill off the current leadership. Trump would be happy with a compliant islamist regime that allows him to flex victory and probably get stakes in the oil/gas industry, Israel wants more lasting change, but both sides will settle for roughing them up a bit.

All of this is *coherent*, they arent as stupid as all that (stupid in other ways ofc). They just also have a comms strategy of - on every single possible issue - lying constantly about everything. That strategy is also stupid in many ways - but it has served them well in other ways, and that intentionality should be respected. Like in this case - Trump can just declare victory at any time! As long as some complete disaster like a sunk fleet doesn't happen, he just say they achieved their goals because their goals are ~anything and they have built a parallel truth ecosystem via the endless lying. And most Republicans will even go along with it because its normal for them now. This is authentically effective, Bush could never, and took skill to pull off.

fnord888

I agree with you that at least some of the apparent incoherence is just lying, but I'm not sure Trump really can just declare victory at any time. If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, people will notice!

(Though I could believe he believes he could. Maybe part of how we got into this mess.)

centrally-unplanned

My assumption would be that such a victory declaration would include Iran opening up the straits again after the US indicated it was not gonna bomb anything anymore - I do think Iran would do that in exchange for peace, they know they kinda have to. Obviously there are a ton of ways for all that to go wrong, that was just beyond scope! But yes "the straits long term closed' is as bad as a fleet loss.

sapphiresonstrings

If the USA stopped attacking Iran, Iran would look pretty stupid if it kept its own strait closed out of spite. They are the primary beneficiaries of opening it up again.

moniquill

taavicleric

My personal experience with being asked this question and then given that line, is that the neurotypical person expected you to feel shame. I have some slightly less anecdotal evidence to back up this anecdotal experience. I took substitute teacher training once, and we were told that the best thing to do with middle schoolers "acting up," was to shame them, to figure out how to draw attention to them and this negative attention in front of their peers would shame them into good behaviour, or at least silence. I raised my hand, having already distinguished myself as the "weirdo" of the group, and said, "Is this the reason I spent a lot of time in the principal's office for truthfully, loudly, and clearly answering questions like, 'would you care to share your thoughts with the class?'" And was told yes, that was a perfect example, but I was the rare case where it backfires.

Since then, I have responded to that type of question with, "Do you want an explanation, or was your intent simply to indicate that I need to feel inferior, right now?" and it does tend to turn the tables a little bit.

brazenautomaton

in theory the difference between reason and excuse is "this is why it happened" vs "this is why it doesn't count"

but nobody really uses it like that, they just mean "you need to feel inferior"

sapphiresonstrings

The true meaning is this: If you like the explanation you call it a 'reason' to legitimize it. If you don't like the explanation you call it an 'excuse' to delegitimize it.

finishercar

PLEASE for the love of god read this

sapphiresonstrings

A while ago I said that I would do a full writeup on exactly why this is bad writing.

The first reason is that it takes two pages to convey one paragraph worth of meaningful information:

"I have a poodle named Toto. I am a teenage girl living on the Upper East Side in New York. I am a 'supa divette-in-training'. I painted my nails to make a good first impression for my first day of high school at Fashion Industries High. I met my friend Chanel, who is also going to the same school as me."

The rest is all filler. This is bad writing for the same reason that bread made with 25% flour and 75% sawdust is bad bread.

This is not to say that all prose should be written in maximally-efficient point form. However, if you're going to write flowery prose, then you should be clear about what you mean and you should be going somewhere with it.

This brings me to my second reason, which is that the writing is unclear.

Everyone is referred to by multiple names. 'Galleria' is also 'girlina', 'Chanel' is also 'Chuchie', 'my mom' is also 'Momsy-poo', Toto the poodle is also 'big brother.' You should never refer to the same character by multiple names unless you have a good reason. It's an expensive decision. You're demanding that the reader parse and remember an extra name. Does the story absolutely require the additional name? Does the plot hinge on it? If not, pick a single name for the character and stick with it for the entire book. The audience is not going to get bored of the character's name.

It's not just characters, either. Every action is talked around instead of being described clearly. Toto isn't biting her feet, he's 'trying to sneak a chomp-a-roni'. Chanel isn't a sneaky person, she's 'sneaky-deaky through-and-through.' Random words and phrases are given pointless flourishes: Awright, hostess with the mostest. Again, it's demanding more brain power from the reader to parse what's being said, and it's offering nothing in return.

And that brings me to my third reason, which is that if you are going to do something like this you should be offering something in return for the audience's extra investment of brain power. In other words, you should be going somewhere with it.

If you use two names to refer to the same character then you should have a compelling reason for it.

Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, but referred to by two different names. What does the audience get out of this decision? Well, Lois Lane can refer to Superman and Clark Kent in the same sentence without realizing that they're the same person.

You could also do this without giving Clark Kent a second name. Lois could say, "Clark, where were you? I was rescued by the flying man in blue spandex again. I can't believe you missed it." The difference in having a second name is that you can shorten it to, "Clark, where were you? Superman rescued me again. I can't believe you missed it."

In other words, by adding a second name you're demanding the audience use extra brain power to remember that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. However, since Superman is talked about often, you're lessening the burden of understanding who is being talked about when Lois refers to the flying man in blue spandex. You're spending brain power in one area to save brain power in another. It's worth the cost. If Lois Lane only mentioned Superman once and then never again, it would not be worth the cost.

Likewise, if you have a character talk in flowery language, it should be worth the cost.

Snow Crash starts with a long rambling description of someone called 'the Deliverator'. How he wears a suit of hi-tech armor that's as black as activated charcoal, how he drives a car so powerful that its battery could launch a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt, how he once pulled his gun on someone who wanted a delivery but didn't want to pay. After about two pages, comparable to this section of the Cheetah Girls book, it's revealed that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas.

So, what's the difference? Both the Cheetah Girls and Snow Crash are using opaque language to talk around what they're saying instead of being clear. But Snow Crash is good, and this is not. Why?

Point A, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Namely, it's leading up to a punchline. Humour is subjective, but there's still a structure here. It's deliberately unclear at first, but then after the punchline it becomes clear that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas. The punchline takes the unclear lead-up and recontextualizes everything up to that point into a joke. If you re-read it after reading the punchline, it makes perfect sense. Cheetah Girls just keeps muddling forward. It never becomes clear. There is no punchline, and if you re-read it a second time it's just as hard to parse as it was the first time.

Point B, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Didn't I just say that, you ask? It's going two places at once. Multitasking is the mother of great art. You ask for one up-front investment of brain power from the audience, and then you give them a punchline in return. Then, just when they think they've cashed out, you give them a bonus prize. The bonus here is worldbuilding. Snow Crash is set in a wacky near-future anarcho-capitalist hellscape where pizzas are delivered by Deliverators in superpowered cars and hi-tech armor. The book is spent exploring the world, and so this worldbuilding has value in and of itself.

Worldbuilding exposition is tough because it's a long-term investment. The audience has to sink in brain power, but it might be a while before they reap a reward. By combining a joke with worldbuilding, Snow Crash is able to simultaneously entertain the reader and build its world in preparation for the main plot.

So, while both Snow Crash and Cheetah Girls use ten words to describe events that could easily be described with two, one is good and the other is bad. That's because Snow Crash is using the other eight words to tell a funny joke and build an interesting world, while Cheetah Girls is using the other eight words to fill space on the page because it doesn't have anything interesting to say.

As for concrete writing advice, here's a rule of thumb: If you have something to say, say it clearly. If you have something to say that can only be expressed unclearly, like the lead-up to a joke where the punchline reveals an ironic reversal, that's OK, provided that you absolutely had no choice but to be unclear in order to convey what you wanted to convey. If you have nothing to say and you're using unclear language to cover up the fact that you have nothing to say, then you should stop, think of something interesting to write about, and write about that instead. Fanciful prose is not a substitute for good ideas.

magnusth

Imagine being this bad at understanding writing. For one thing, it establishes a lot more than is in those sentences - it's actually extremely information dense! It establishes her voice, character, how she thinks of social status, her interests, her personality, it situates her socially, her relationship with her mom, and a very clear mood! Like, if you think this could be condensed to a list of bullet points you don't understand writing.

Second, uh... This isn't at all hard to follow? It's a little quick but, like, no part of this is all that complex or difficult, and the "factual" information is very neatly divided, clearly separated into different topics. This is not a worrying level of information density, and a lot of the information is used rather elegantly. (E.g. Girlina as a nickname is her mom's nickname. What do you think it means that she uses it for herself?)

And also... So what if it was brain taxing? The job of writing is not to write the least difficult possible text. Writing can be flowery or difficult just for voice, style, poetic beauty, etc, and that's entirely valid.

sapphiresonstrings

I often wonder what motivates the quality-isn't-real people who always come out of the woodwork to explain why absolute trash is ackshually good.

Unclear writing isn't bad or good, just a style choice? Is a 4-year-old's clumsy handwriting also a style choice to make us all contemplate the true meaning of clarity? Because I think that this is a skill which one can be good or bad at. Not all things are equally good. The Mona Lisa is better than a child's scribble, and if you say that's subjective or a matter of opinion then that proves you're just playing word games and you don't give a shit about art.

Is it possible that your art teacher gave you a bad grade for drawing anime characters in art class when you were fourteen and you've never gotten over it?

magnusth

No one is saying that quality isn't real, I'm saying your idea of what "quality" is is terrible.

Writing is a skill one can be good at, but being good at it is not simply a question of maximising clarity, it's a question of being skilled at prose, at knowing what you want to communicate and how, at having a clear voice, at making appropriate trades, etc. And again, this writing is not unclear! it's really straightforward! It's really not a difficult text (which you would expect, it's for teenage girls), and it's very competent at what it does. It is communicating a lot of things - the character's personality, voice, relationships etc - in a very compact amount of space and tells jokes all the while. this is not "unclear" at all! it's a very very clear picture of exactly what the author is trying to say. You think those things aren't worth saying, so you think it's just noise, but this is entirely a you issue. If you had written a first-person perspective like this and didn't let the character's personality, linguistic quirks, internal names, and so on shine through the text, you would have failed to convey the personal perspective that's the whole point of first person writing. Am i claiming this is great literature? No, of course not. It's disney channel pulp for teen girls! Would i read this recreationally? No! it's not for me. but it's not objectively bad because it's got a very strong teen girl voice, and it's not "75% fluff." It is, in fact, extremely efficient! I don't have to personally enjoy it to note the competent writing.

sapphiresonstrings

Would i read this recreationally? No!

This should have been your first clue that it is actually bad.

Much (not all) writing for children or teens is quite bad. The reason it is so bad is precisely because it is so inefficient. It uses a lot of sound and motion to distract the audience from the fact that it means nothing. Children are easily amused by nonsense, which is why they're willing to watch Cocomelon and read the Cheetah Girls.

Roald Dahl wrote dense books for children which are also enjoyed by adults. Some of my favorite books are children's books.

This is not that. This is mass-produced trash designed to be sold to children with no taste.