#ratsphere discourse

[centrally-unplanned]

Hate the ratsphere all you want no one generates ludicrous discourse like we do

[gothicprep]

i wish more people had the self-awareness to know that your ability to be a good parent trumps your desire to have kids and judge these things as honestly as possible. your kids, hypothetical or otherwise, are not toys. they're the most important responsibility you will ever have in your life, if you have them.

you may have heard of a ratsphere influencer named aella. her claim to fame is having no filter and asking weird questions like "would you rather eat a baby or have babies eat you?" and shit like that. a ~discourse topic~ around her has to do with a breakup of hers. she wanted children and her partner didn't. i sympathize with her on that. the toughest breakups you'll ever deal with are when you're deeply in love with someone and you run into an issue like this where compromise is impossible. that said, i don't think she should be a parent. that kid's life is going to be a funhouse mirror inverse of the fundamentalist religious terror she grew up under.

i could easily see another marion zimmer bradley situation there, and this isn't something i'm saying frivolously.

[spraxinoscope]

About me

I mostly just post jokes but there's other things here that I'm interested in. I'm reading a lot of discourse on tumblr but i just lurk that stuff so it doesn't show up on my blog. But now I'm more serious about getting to know mutuals, so I want to make myself a little more legible.

I am: some guy, 34, in socal.

I am above-average paranoid about keeping my irl/professional/internet lives separate, so I'm not gonna talk about my job on here. If my job was cool i'd brag about it. but it isn't so i don't.

Interested in leftist/socialist/antifascist politics and organizing.

Grew up in a majority white evangelical small town in a red state, and that experience informs my politics. Fuck christian dominionism. i'm an edgy internet atheist at heart, but i do not have the redditor soul, so i have to wander elsewhere.

Edgy internet atheism brought me to lesswrong in the early 10s, and that brought me here via Ozy, but a lot of core rationalist spaces are way, way too racist for me to want to hang out there. over the last 15 years i've found a slice of the rat adjacency that appeals to me. but, however carefully i select the blogs i follow, i'm still being exposed to tendrils of slate star codexian thought that pisses me off.

I have technically been on tumblr since 2012! but I wasn't paying much attention for most of that time. I made this account in 2020.

some larger politics blogs i like plus a rough percentage of how often i agree with them:

argumate 80% (do not disagree with his takes on chinese domestic policy, just don't really follow)

tanadrin 70%

quoms >90%

transgenderer ~80%

afloweroutofstone 70%

honorable mention: the former triviallytrue 95% but that last 5% was terrible. never figured out what was up with him.

Like quoms, i am a left unity guy; i care about antifascist/anti-imperialist coalition-building. I would not call myself a marxist or an anarchist but i am interested in those strains of thought. I think they're important and meaningful. In a better world I'd call myself a socialist, but what I am in reality is a subject of empire and it sucks.

i do not have the ratsphere trait of liking argument for its own sake, or the trait of seeking earnest dialogue with right-wingers on here. i don't believe that accomplishes anything worthwhile.

am i a doomer? i am a pessimist about some things, but i promise i am not going to put unfiltered expressions of grief or despair on your dash. It's bad out there but there's important work to do, and that provides a sense of purpose that negates feelings of hopelessness. I think a vital part of forming connections is having things to feel good about and sharing those good feelings with other people, even in dark times, but we can't ignore the dark times either. It's hard to find that balance but it's possible. This is all to say that I still enjoy talking about frivolous nerd shit with friends.

general interests:

science fiction, classic anime, bad movies, crime, printing presses

media interests:

(some of these are my real favorites, and some of these are more like things I'm a fan of, as in, I'm more likely to put fan content from these things on your dash. some are both! all of them are things I'd love to talk to people about)

books:

Seth Dickinson

Greg Egan

Charles Stross and Adrian Tchaikovsky, sometimes

Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams

The Expanse

Frankenstein

nonfiction about

cults

disasters

submarines

narcotraffic

burglary

gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is one of my very favorite books)

theory I've read at least a little bit of and liked:

Judith Butler

Fanon

Popper

Gramsci

Deleuze

tv:

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, my favorite show ever not even close.

classic tokusatsu. Ultraseven, Kamen Rider Black, Jetman

Gundam

Better Call Saul

i keep a mostly-up-to-date anime log with reviews here: anilist.co/user/spraxinoscope/

movies:

MST3K

dadcore crime thrillers, especially Michael Mann

games:

Metal Gear

Finals Fantasy 7-13

Armored Core 6 and Sekiro

neo XCOM

Kerbal

music:

00s electronica

Gustavo Cerati

Yoko Kanno soundtracks

neo-y2k aesthetic experimentation

grouptherapy.

internet:

the Abnormal Mapping / Ranged Touch / Friends at the Table podcast sphere

holly hollowtones

the Normal for Girls collective https://www.youtube.com/@lynnedrum

Homestuck

maybe still Wildbow a little bit

other interests:

gunpla

video editing

sketchin'

ridin' trains

for mutuals:

If we are mutuals and we never interact that is fine, but in general I would like to make connections that will outlast this website! I would be happy to give any mutuals an alternate way to reach me! I am often hanging out on Discord on sunday afternoons. dm me about it.

I only follow blogs I really like. So even if I don't interact with your posts much, if I follow you, you can assume I'm a fan of your whole deal.

[mourning-again-in-america]

as bad as rats are about it, sometimes I see dating discourse outside of the very broadly defined ratsphere and usually want to puke.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

But it was. At least. An attempt. To do. Materialistic analysis!

Why are all published Marxists so bad at this.

chief I'm gonna guess it has something to do with the part where (to my knowledge) basically zero ratsphere norms of discourse - like trying to separate premises from conclusions at all, or ever explaining in explicit gears-level terms what your working model is, or publically making testable predictions and ever changing your mind when you're wrong - and (importantly) having your readership acknowledge all of this as a valid/valuable sort of argumentative tactic - have made their way into the ortho-Marxist left, where discourse norms are closer to "point out valid flaws in the US-led international order" and "have fun and be yourself :)"

what I'm saying is if Karl showed up to a CPUSA meeting he'd be expelled in short order

Discourse knows, there have been too many articles in the UMC publications about polyamory, and I apologize for adding to the bonfire of think pieces. At least this one linked above is less obnoxious than most of them.

(The most obnoxious one is referenced in this article, the Atlantic piece saying that polyamory is bourgeois identity politics distracting from material change.)

And what gets me is that for a bunch of supposed Marxists decrying how polyamory is just cultural superficiality irrelevant to the superstructure of material conditions.... none of them can bother to write a Marxist analysis of polyamory! It's just throwing different names at each other, no discussion of material incentives.

And it's so fucking easy to write one, isn't it. Here's our starting points:

Marriage (and the relationship models that lead to it) is an economic institution.

The change in modern polyamory fads is, like most fashion, coming from the upper-class.[1]

I think we can all agree on these basic premises, and they provide a great deal of grist for economic analysis.

For instance, the middle class in America is falling apart. Especially if you are a recent college graduate. It's easy to get an internship that might be on track to a very lucrative career, especially in a big city. It's a lot harder to start a stable middle-class job somewhere between the coasts. So you can't really start planning for baby until you're 30 and after 5 different careers you maybe have one that will last more than a year, and can put a down payment on a home at maybe 35. (Housing costs rising, especially in cities, has really exacerbated that.

Does this apply to everyone? No. Does it apply to more people that in the past? Big yeah. So, what does a young educated something do in their twenties and early thirties?

But the upper class - I suppose we are supposed to say upper middle class, but c'mon programmer earning $250k you're fooling no one - is booming. It's easier to enter it, especially if you're smart, than ever (note that increasing from 1% mobility to 10% mobility is a big change, even if on the absolute scale it's still unfair.)

Polyamory - or extramarital sex - has always been popular among the rich. Because marriage isn't really an economic necessity for them. If a couple splits, well there's enough money to go around for all the kids to live in nice houses. Mormon bigamy flourishes when a male breadwinner is so ultra-successful they can support for 5 wives, and geek group poly houses flourish when one systems engineer can pay for the whole house on their own too (maybe there's one kid everyone chips in babycare for in the house, but no one is even thinking about enough children in the group house for a fertility rate close to 1:1.)

So if you cut out the ladder from the middle-class-monogamy path, and widen the highway for upper-class-laissez-faire-culture, then cultural norms are gonna flow from the former to the latter.

The thing about relationship norms that makes the change really noticeable is their NETWORK EFFECTS. Being the only polyamorous person in a monogamous community is basically irrelevant, right? Who you gonna date? Similarly if you are in an entirely polyamorous community, my sympathies if you happen to be monogamous and so everyone you want to date has incompatible norms.

But once you start getting away from the edges, they S-curve up real fast because there's finally the option to try the minority relationship style, and for the agnostics who are okay poly or mono, they start seeing people they think are cute in the other camp, and hey, why not try it out.

So combine the collapse of the middle class, the proliferation of upper class hedonism, and network effects and a poly-explosion seems almost inevitable, doesn't it?

...

Of course, I haven't presented any hard evidence, this marginal change at most applies to less than double digits percentage of the populace, and this isn't even how the story feels from inside my head (as a poly converted person.)

But it was. At least. An attempt. To do. Materialistic analysis!

Why are all published Marxists so bad at this.

--

[1] Polyamory, or extreme family/relationship/household flexibility has always flourished in the underclass. But the NYT isn't going around interviewing trailer parks in Appalachia to ask them about their exciting new lifestyle.

[loki-zen]

so re all the HBDer discourse that’s been going around (and i’ll call it HBDer discourse rather than HBD discourse bc to a significant extent it isn’t about the ideas but about whether or not it is cool and right that people should be distrusted for entertaining them/their possibility), i have a few Thoughts

one of which is where was this attitude when it was men and women? bc in ratsphere back when i saw loads of people looking at and speculating about conclusions from population-level trends found in various datasets between men and women, including with reference to IQ, and somehow people had a totally different and a million times milder response to that.

secondly, why is nobody talking about the existing populations with widely-known variance from the baseline in IQ distribution? because they exist. hell, half of you are autistic yourselves.

if you think that speculating on this shit is inevitably an overture to mistreating people - which, one wouldn’t blame you for concluding such after looking at how we deal with neurodivergence in general and intellectual disability in particular - how do you think we should reform the science around neurodivergence?

if you think it doesn’t have to be because all humans should be treated well regardless of any membership in categories deemed more likely to possess, or indeed actual possession of, lower-than-average IQ, how does the current state of affairs wrt the neurodivergent affect your estimation of what needs to change in order to enable that?

does anyone else think that like the real problem is how monkeys (that is, we humans) don’t understand statistics?

i personally don’t have a lot of confidence in ‘IQ’ as a measure possessing the importance and coherence it is implicitly afforded in these conversations. Additionally, i happen to think it’s incredibly unlikely that differences-on-average between ethnic groups in this particular measured attribute (that has some link to but possibly doesn’t quite encompass ‘intelligence’) that are big enough to matter exist.

i also think it’s unlikely that protracted research on the topic would find actually zero variance, in a way that is pretty agnostic to the cause of said variance-on-average, but which doesn’t discount the possibility of it being something that isn’t just environmental or about how we measure IQ (even though I do think that every observed difference in this area that i’ve read about in depth so far was one or both of those things). lots of things like height and hairiness and myopia and age-at-puberty have some differences-on-average between ethnic groups so why not? but it would be the sort of thing where if it even is a real effect, it would be such a very small one that you can’t identify without vast amounts of data.

and if you thought that knowing it told you anything at all that you could usefully use to make predictions regarding real actual people that you might come into contact with, you would be wrong.

the problem is that while in theory a perfectly logical being could believe that there is a statistical difference at the population level between the chances of men and women excelling at Physics and not have that affect the way he treats women who walk into his physics classroom because he understands that they are neither a cross-section of the population nor a big enough group for the effect to show up in, humans basically cannot do this. Certainly the majority of humans cannot do this. the majority of humans would struggle to even understand how it could be possible for the broad population level effect to exist, but also untrue that they can derive any useful information from it in their lives.

And ig that’s my steelman/2c on the impulse to treat this in ways we wouldn’t normally want to act around the Pursuit of Knowledge or whatever. that doesn’t explicitly or implicitly rely on race being Different, but which rather implies that if we do decide it makes sense to treat this in certain ways there are other areas you’d want to apply the same principles to, perhaps.

[aflyingcontradiction]

My strategy of blocking-on-sight to stop myself from reading noxious discourse is perhaps working a bit too well. At this point I have at least half of the tumblr ratsphere blocked for either being incorrigible arseholes or perfectly fine people who talk a lot about stuff that makes my brain cry. (Nope, not specifying which one applies to whom.)

Which means I keep running into "Oh, this rat-adjacent person I follow has made/reblogged an interesting post that has a double/triple-digit number of notes. I wonder what's happening in the comments."

"NOTHING IS HAPPENING IN THE COMMENTS, YOU SELF-DESTRUCTIVE MOTHERFUCKER! THERE ISN'T A SINGLE COMMENT! AT LEAST NOT FOR YOUR TYPE! GO BACK TO LOOKING AT PRETTY PICTURES!"

... I know it's good for me but fuck, my curiosity hurts.

[tanadrin]

@transgenderer

i feel like there was a weird period of a lot of right-flavored cultural criticism in the ratsphere like right before i got into it, cf sublemon, i think theres some other ones. cultural criticism sucks, its like 90% jbp nonsense

For sure, and a lot of it carried forward by that very basic “we are speaking daring truths to power!” that is the exact sort of thing you find in very normie political discourse too. The appeal of cultural criticism to a group that is often very good at bringing discussions back to data has always bemused me, but I think the appeal is the exact same appeal it has to everybody: cultural criticism is a form of identity politics (morally neutral, analytic sense) that anybody can use to feel smug and/or put-upon as the situation demands.

[tropylium]

this is really pretty close to a thing I have been meaning to write about! since diversifying over to also twitter recently, even just in mainly professional capacity, it's been great at not just highlighting what it is I like in places like this, but also, how other places have other strengths

and one of the things that turns out to have been. mm. not the best word but, microaggressing me about the discourse blog ecology around here is just how unserious it is on the median. it's not that there merely is shitposting or irony, it's that for too many people who otherwise per se display a great amount of interesting thoughts, the shitposting and irony, the performativeness of the discourse, completely drown out any attempts to coordinate around anything, to state meaningful goals, to execute projects. (imo OP included; and tbqh, myself included, if maybe yet more for lacking often the energy for longposting and preferring aestheticsblogging instead). maybe excluding activism shit, though then as we know, barely anyone online cares about whether activism accomplishes anything, not even when it "is coordinated"

around here on tumblr dot com, the social consensus just seems to be that you "have to" put on a kayfabe of detached irony or haughty armchair philosophy, sometimes indeed from the notorious "viewpoint from nowhere" but perhaps more often other variants like "from mere collection-of-identities" or "from atomized individualism", or else — I dunno, what? cringe culture eats you? maybe if you're allergic to blocking copiously. but we could do better, could be more personally serious (textual seriousness in our longposts is probably already doing more than well enough).

not that twitter's doing all that much better either and we may well be indeed on an overall civilizational seriousness slump, but there I've at least found some small number of people who are serious about some things and actively bouncing ideas off of each other

I even keep wondering, is it just because I'm here and the actual seriousness only happens on other platforms? e.g. the ratsphere has EA sites and LessWrong and Wordpress blogs and so on. but it's then unclear to me about many other people if they have any interest in being serious, in the sense of having skin in the game and goals not yet achieved, anywhere at all. Argumate Disease, I could call it — he's clearly the most prominent example, even if probably not the most egregious. also fwiw the most prominent counterexample that occurs to me might be Mitigated Chaos, they've a style that's still shitposty at times but at least not making it their main axis and clearly trying to achieve things even here. (but in the end, I wouldn't know, nobody ever tells me anything; which I kinda resent but I'm not sure how much I should exactly, if it's me specifically for some reasons, or the same for most of us)

— to do still a bit more visakanv canvassing (visakanvassing?): he frames "shitposting" as the practice of the axis of Friendly:

Sermonposting without shitposting gets you pedestalized, which is dehumanizing Shitpost too much and nobody takes you seriously, which is also kind of dehumanizing You can nerdpost forever quite happily, but it can be a lonely and frustrating experience The flow is the point

and that's an interestingly different version compared to my experience: shitposting as understood around here seems to do nothing for making friends, it's cheap notefarming and potshots, opposed to meaningful openness. if we continue to consider Visa's golden triangle of Friendly Ambitious Nerds …

…it's deeply familiar to me on the latter two axes already, but the notion of being Friendly, it seems just — on one hand obviously desirable once articulated, but so so far away from any serious social milieu I've experienced or witnessed, to the point of making my entire life feel chronically socially malnourished, that it just as well could be considered alien. maybe that is what's generally holding back seriousness around here too; we have curiosity, we have some productivity, but we do not seem to treat each other with kindness for any of it

Thought for a moment in the 2010s that we were entering a new serious era (e.g. 1920s, 30s, 40s), but it seems that we're instead in an increasingly tacky era (50s, 60s, 70s). Like look at the change in YouTube. Well you all are textheads you don't do video, I know that. But like. In 2017 there was ContraPoints. Agree or disagree with her opinions, what she was doing was conceptually and aesthetically serious. Even her early, low-production-value stuff. She was talking about incels and other internet shit, but the internet is part of the real world, that's fine. In fact that's what gave me hope for another serious era, people were finally talking about internet stuff the way 1920s German intellectuals or whatever talked about the cultural trends of their day. Maybe because Contra has half a philosophy PhD and was explicitly influenced by those German intellectuals.

Another example from a totally disjoint cultural niche was Digi a.k.a. Trixie a.k.a. Ygg Studios or whatever they go by now. Drunk, smelly, and unkempt—yes. Or at least so went the persona. Talking seriously about anime—also yes. When they claimed they were the only good anime reviewer on the internet it made a lot of people mad. But they were right!

There were thinkers, we had thinkers. My generation, or roughly my generation, had thinkers. To be clear, when I include Contra here I'm not including all of her ilk, I'm not including the leftist-theory-regurgitators and so on. But Contra herself was a thinker! Digi was a thinker! We had thinkers.

But that era is over now, on YouTube at least. I go on there and it's all algorithmic drivel. I look for anime content and as I've explained it's all about #hype and #epic and how the new season of whatever #hits different and other empty meaningless bullshit. No analysis, no thought, fundementally unserious bullshit. Tacky! It's tacky! The the YouTube thumbnail O-face is fucking 70s-ass fake wood paneling tacky bullshit!

MrBeast. I've never seen a MrBeast video but I hate him for what he represents. I used to watch this channel called Wranglerstar, he made videos about different types of axes and forest fire fighting equipment and various other stuff. "Modern homesteading" I believe was the tagline. And it was always evident that he was a far-right guy but who gives a shit, his videos where good. Serious videos about interesting topics, that a fucking normal guy might watch. Well around 2020 he basically started flooding his channel with covid conspiracy bullshit and "the Chinese are going to attack us any day!" bullshit and other unserious crap. And I had to stop watching. How could I find any of that compelling? It's vapid nonsense.

And I don't know if it's a shift in the algorithm or people becoming more savvy to the algorithm or what, but all of YouTube is like this now. Vapid clickbait empty meaningless bullshit for another tacky commercialized bullshit era.

And you know, I felt like it might just be localized to YouTube for a while, but I started to look around, and it just feels like everything is like this. Backsliding to the tacky times. God I hate tackiness. I hate unseriousness. I'm having a little meltdown. At least SMW kaizo hacks are having a renaissance. People are doing serious shit in that space, serious shit that is also not anachronistic, you know, it's kept up with the modern world. It addresses modern concerns (fun to play hard Mario). But it's serious. People are serious. One of the few serious things happening in my orbit.

Even in science it feels like people aren't serious anymore. You know, standard Sabine Hossenfelder complaint about particle physics. But I don't really know enough about that to say. Get the vibe that biology is still serious these days.

To be clear, everything I'm saying here is pure vibes. I'm just saying shit. I'm just saying shit that I feel. But I'll be deeply disappointed if I have to live my youth in another tacky era, god damn it. Even the 80s seem like they were better than this.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

So, what’s been going on in the ratsphere lately?

Random tumblr idiot: “uhmm, we should kill people because of their heritage haha”

Response: Oh my God! We’ve found a no-name dimwit who’s said something stupid and evil! That definitely matters in the real world! Let’s all pile on them to declare our moral superiority, because after all we know better, it’s not as if our ingroup would ever, ever, advocate something like th-

Member of the ingroup: “uhmm, we should kill people because of their heritage haha”

Response: Jeez, that’s a little coarse :/

Both these messes of discourse, as if you need telling, were going on at about the same time on the same day.

[transgenderer]

i think ratsphere discourse norms are far better than average but the best thing about them is that their failure mode is so endearing, like, its debate team nonsense mixed in with condescension and very intense emotions.

[tototavros]

(kind of vagueblogging, kind of discoursey, definitely personal, maybe nsfw)

so like, i've gotten into a lot of relationships with people >5 years older than me, some >=10 years older than me, and i don't really keep track of it

and it feels like whenever people are talking about age-of-consent discourse, they're just on the edge of looping me in to having relationships that they think might be unacceptable, and it's just on the edge that often i really want to ask for specifics about their opinions

and the specifics work out to basically the opposite, connotationally, to relationships i've been in that have been age-gappy

i don't think this is a ratsphere specific thing, i think this might be a general thing even more so, idfk, but it's my most concrete thing of wanting someone to think of like, what the relevant categories and ways of thinking about it should be with there being some clarification of like, how to decide what's "in" and what's "out"

it also feels sorta like feeling that there's some "be nice until you can coordinate meannness" thing happening and whether or not meanness should happen is being coordinated and i'm not yet considered a target but might be?

[lunachats]

i’m not usually that great at forming original opinions on complicated subjects (especially on social/political issues) so i have a workaround i use

instead i expose myself to as many arguments and counter-arguments as possible on a given topic, usually by reading discourse and watching debates and also via blog posts that take one side or the other and comment sections on any of these. in general some people will make actually good arguments that i can float to the top of my selection process.

(definitely need to expand my media diet and include more primary sources though)

scott alexander has a post on epistemic learned helplessness in which he describes how he finds it really hard to defend a stance when it comes to debates on complicated historical topics, and each rebuttal he reads is able to push him in a completely different direction, and this is very relatable stuff because that was actually me a few years ago, except on things like feminism and trans rights and the left-wing progressive movement in general as well as the ideologies that opposed these things

and there is of course a significant gulf between trying to understand the bronze age and the slightly more straightforward question of whether high male suicide rates and high rates of male worker deaths mean that men are actually way more oppressed than women and feminism is bad in fact

(they don’t mean that but feel free to @ me)

but after enough iterations of reading rebuttals to rebuttals to rebuttals, and after enough resolving to track individual arguments and to have at least an inkling of awareness of where the data that backs up individual claims is, i reached a point where i can now hold my own on many of my political positions better than what is apparently a majority of people i’ve engaged with who either agree or disagree with me on something specific

(not as much in the ratsphere though, some of you guys are intense)

and there are general principles i can glean from this process, techniques that can be recycled and reused. watching theunitofcaring’s “but what is the thing for?” mental motion or watching a Twitch.tv politics debater harp against using individual anecdotes to draw conclusions on broad social trends means i eventually can add some extra tools to my kit and can approach new arguments in new ways. this is how i improve my critical thinking skills.

but the other side is that i still have to maintain awareness of my limitations, because i find that i’m ill-equipped to address arguments that are completely novel to me on a variety of topics. someone might make a case to me about why NIMBYism is a real problem in such-and-such region, and while i won’t necessarily disagree, if i choose to then adopt their position, it is tentative, it has to go under the epistemic heading of an opinion that is bound to need multiple iterations before i can hold it with confidence.

but i’m at a point where i understand that to essentially be my process. at least for now, only part of my general-purpose rationality toolkit is things like consequentialism, or identifying logical fallacies, or asking if there are any alternatives to a given normative claim, or (on a much more basic level) trying to distinguish an actual argument from a bare statement of how-things-are. the rest of my rationality is the process of adopting and testing various positions, and understanding that the less i’ve tested a given position, the less counter-arguments and criticisms i’ve read and engaged with on that position, the less weight and certainty i can give it.

so in a way i see myself as helpless on a variety of complicated topics, still. but i can sort of identify now which things i’m helpless on and where i can instead have some level of certainty, and i have a process for becoming less helpless over time.

[lookwhatilost]

I’d rather spend time in the ratsphere than discourse twitter because the conversations tend to be a bit more nuanced, but I hate how dogmatic they can get sometimes

Isn’t the point of this space to, like, not do that?

[locally-normal]

A random question for the discourse: what makes libertarians so anti-NIMBY, particularly in the ratsphere.

It's obvious why people would be YIMBY, but with the ideal of "voting with your feet" these need not be opposed. It seems like everyone could get onto the same page: leave the NIMBYs to stagnate in their regulation-ridden cities and go somewhere else. Heck maybe the NIMBYs could even agree to pay people to leave SF, if it's substantially cheaper than unending legal battles against YIMBYs. Moving has costs but perhaps these could be paid.

Impractical sure but at least this points to not hating NIMBYs. Sometimes people have fundamentally different goals and that's gotta be ok, no? When it comes to something as innocuous as housing policies anyways

[loki-zen]

I think the picture would be incomplete if you leave out the part where the ratsphere is a huge attractor for people who are somewhere around a certain cluster of brainweird.

In other contexts, people who have reason to suspect that they experience one or more of the things referred to by the word ‘empathy’ differently to or less than other people tend to get defensive around arguments that empathy is a necessary component of morality.

I didn’t have an issue with your post(s), but it can pattern-match, in the way that things do in Internet Discourse, to arguments that have been used to justify some pretty fucked up stuff.

Another type of brainweird you see a lot is EA circles is overly scrupulous people. It’s a lot easier to be *certain* that you donated to a charity you did your homework on enough for them to probably save a life than it is to be *certain* that you felt enough of an emotion towards someone. Especially if you’re also alexithymic.

Long story short I think these things serve an important function to a lot of people, and they shouldn’t have bit your head off because your way wouldn’t work for them perhaps, but I think that the strength of the reaction is explicable without resort to ‘it’s a cult’, at least based on what I have seen (which I acknowledge may not be all of it).

If I had a nickel for every big name Harry Potter fanfic writer who started their own cult, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.