Many smart men are misogynists, and they are correct. you can be quite smart but still very emotionally stunted, and when you’re emotionally stunted the pattern that emerges around you empirically supports misogyny.
It’s a chicken and egg cycle; all women do their best to avoid frustrating and dangerous men. The even moderately smart ones invisibly avoid an emotionally stunted man before he ever see them coming; the only ones who actually enter his life are stupider or crazier than average.
These men then draw bitter and cynical conclusions about the nature of women, which are actually true ….within their hugely skewed dataset.
Sadly, they don’t realize they’re the ones creating the pattern they congratulate themselves on being “based” enough to see. They then double down on their self defeating worldview and succeed in driving sensible women even further away.
this is kind of an amazing parable about scientific materialism. it speaks for itself but i'm going to autistically overanalyze it anyway, for fun -
the question pretends to ask about what a person would do in a social situation but it is actually asking for the "right answer," and the "right answer" involves looking at the situation "objectively," which means completely ignoring the relational texture of the little brother being upset in favor of an abstract argument (which the teacher's comments leave implicit) that he "shouldn't" be upset because the situation is "actually" "objectively" fair even if he doesn't feel that way
this is a very specific way of looking at the situation which school trains you to think of as universally correct, not even a choice that you're making, just the way things "really are." the kid's answer ignores all of this to interpret the question literally as written, maintain focus on the relational texture, and see the situation as a relational rupture they can repair through kindness. instead of teaching the little brother to prioritize abstract concepts over their feelings he teaches the little brother not only that kindness is real and that his family has his back but also that, since the older sibling finds it easy to give up their cornbread, perhaps the cornbread doesn't matter that much anyway
@morallawwithin@bluehead42 i think this is a similar logic of action/inaction that informs differing responses to variations on the trolley problem (particularly the "pull the lever" vs "push the fat man" versions)
no moral judgement from me, just an interesting observation...
"Okay, so imagine a magic button."
"I'm imagining the button."
"If you press the button—"
"What color is it?"
"It's the only button. It doesn't matter what color it is."
"Nah, I ain't falling for that again. Last time there was a red button and a blue button—"
"That's a different thought experiment."
"—and I tried to be a nice guy and pick blue so I could save everybody, but it turns out ya'll a bunch of selfish motherfuckers and I died."
"It wasn't buttons. It was pills."
"Don't care. I'm out for me this time. What color is the button?"
"Ugh, fine. It's red."
"I press the button."
"You don't even know what it does yet!"
"And I pull the trolley lever."
"There's no lever!"
"Bias for Action."
"Just listen: there's a button that lets you save 10^100 shrimp, but it kills one random person. Would you press it?"
"What flavor are the shrimp?
"Flavor?"
"Yeah, you know: garlic, Old Bay, Korean BBQ."
"You're saving the shrimp, not eating them!"
"Saving them for what?"
"For nothing. They get to live their lives."
"What? Just doin' shrimp stuff?"
"Yeah."
"How long do shrimp live?"
"Uh, it depends on the species? 1-2 years?"
"And then what happens?"
"They die."
"That seems like a waste."
"How is that a waste? They got to live full lives."
"Weren't you just telling me last week that bees live in perpetual agony and we should commit insect omnicide to free from the suffering of the flesh?"
"Yeah, but that was last week. This week I read a new Snubstack post with a math equation in it and believe something totally different."
"Uh huh."
"It's called updating your priors."
"Okay, well here's my updated prior: I press the button, let the shrimp live for a year, and then I eat them."
"What?"
"All of them."
"You can't eat 10^100 shrimp."
"I freeze the leftovers."
"You would need a freezer bigger than the universe!"
"Really?"
"Yes! 10^100 is more than all the atoms in the observable universe!"
"Okay, then I have a freezer bigger than the universe."
"You can't just—"
"No, wait. Three freezers. One for each flavor."
"You can't just make up three freezers!"
"Why not?"
"It's a hypothetical!"
"Yeah I hypothetically have three big ass freezers."
"The point—"
"If you get to throw out a big ass number of shrimp, I get to have some big ass freezers. Maytag freezers."
"The point of the hypothetical—"
"I've always been a Maytag Man."
"The point of the hypothetical is to interrogate our moral intuitions!"
"Yeah well the only thing I want to interrogate right now is a Red Lobster menu."
"I don't think you're engaging with this in good faith."
"Wait, I got a new hypothetical. A counterfactual even."
"Oh really."
"You know what I would've done differently if I knew you were gonna hit me with this mouthwatering supper-time supposition?"
"What?"
"I would've had breakfast this morning."
"Fuck you."
No, this is incorrect. The key isn't finding a balance between blissful ignorance and painful awareness, it’s learning to find happiness in sources that don’t depend on the delusional belief that everything is fine.
It’s very possible to be both happy and well-informed. We live in an explosively beautiful universe, and getting to experience anything at all is amazing. The fact that our world is plagued by human butchery and degradation does not cancel out the majesty of a bird in the sky, or the ecstasy of the wind upon your skin.
It is true that we live in a civilization of unfathomable cruelty. It is true that our biosphere is being strangled while human and non-human beings are subjected to horrific abuses in a society which elevates the worst art, the worst values, and the worst people to the highest levels of prominence.
It is also true that getting to live even a single moment on this astonishing blue planet is a gift worthy of immense joy and gratitude.
These things are both fully true at the same time. They do not negate each other.
Don’t find your happiness in the belief that everything is okay, because everything is not okay. If you spend your life squirming around trying to avert your gaze from the truth and psychologically compartmentalizing away from reality, you will never know actual happiness.
Instead, find your happiness in that which cannot be corrupted by this fraudulent dystopia.
Your connections with your loved ones. That’s real and authentic.
The radiance of the natural world. That’s real and authentic.
The crackling aliveness of the senses. That’s real and authentic.
The boundless peace deep down at the heart of your being which reveals itself if you listen closely enough. That’s real and authentic.
These things can supply endless happiness, even as the world burns, and even as you weep at its burning. Because it is entirely possible to honor the grief and tragedy of this world while also delighting in its beauty.
You can weep for the dying oceans while marveling at the stars.
You can rage for Gaza while reveling in the earth beneath your bare feet.
You can open your heart to all the suffering and to all the wonder.
You can fall to your knees in both anguish and gratitude.
You can do these things because feelings move through you if you don’t cling to them. You feel them fully without resistance, you invite them in to have their say, and then you let them leave when they are done.
It usually doesn’t take long; a few minutes, maybe even seconds. Then you get up and go back to marveling at the miracle.
Feelings are meant to be felt. If you simply feel them all the way through when they come up instead of repressing them or trying to manage them, they move through fairly quickly without setting up a permanent residence in your chest.
But you’ve got to really let them have their say. You’ve got to give yourself fully over to them. This takes practice if you don’t know how to do it, and because of the way our culture conditions people it tends to be harder for men than for women. But it’s a skill like any other, and anyone can teach themselves how to do it.
Appreciating the beauty of this terrestrial experience likewise takes practice. Everything is crackling with beauty all the time, but we don’t notice it because our attention gets wrapped up in mental stories. Just make a conscious practice of noticing beauty at every opportunity, and your aperture for appreciating beauty will get wider and wider. You can learn to live your whole life in this way, from moment to moment.
If you can get the hang of these two skills—appreciating beauty and feeling your feelings all the way through—then there will be nothing stopping you from living a joyful and fulfilling life while also having an entirely truth-based relationship with reality.
@AnnaLeptikon i've been channeling this energy into my daily chores as of late
i'm not "cleaning the dishes", i'm a one man army defeating the universal force of entropic decay !!
@midnight_troupe@JeremiahDJohns@Aella_Girl yep
i think its about where you draw the line of "person-ification" (literally who you consider to posess *personhood*)
racism is absurd in 2026 bc anyone well-informed knows how similar all humans are
but perhaps in 2126, species-ism will be just as absurd..?
Before the victory speech and celebrations on November 4, there were hours of anxious waiting as we watched the numbers come in. Here's a glimpse of it all, stress and joy alike. Thank you to every New Yorker who believed in this fight for working people. I am so proud to be sworn in as your Mayor tomorrow.