tothewhirlwind

[tothewhirlwind]

It would be pretty cool if humans had an aquatic larval stage

[tothewhirlwind]

I am not having a moral panic. I am engaging in recreational mutual misunderstanding with my internet homie Max one thousand four hundred and sixty one. Of everyone in this thread you are the most agitated. Now grab me a beer from the cooler

So like, it's obvious to me reading the comments on my post that anti-porn people are largely like, afraid of porn. Like the concept of a sex video is really spooky to them. They're not making thoughtful critiques of the porn industry, which is genuinely a really fucked up industry, they're mostly just spooked by the concept of a sex video and what it could Do To You If You See It.

I said this in another post, but it's like, the difference between "a ton of coffee is produced using slave labor" (valid, important criticism of the coffee industry) and "coffee turns people into raving coffee addicts who forget how to interact with anyone because they're so obsessed with their coffee" (objectively not true, insane viewpoint).

It's literally just sex videos. They really cannot hurt you.

[tothewhirlwind]

even now i don't have to kill myself

[tothewhirlwind]

I kind of disagree with you on porn in part because I think you're making a mistake about the structure of the pleasures you're drawing into analogy. The coffee example and the hamburger example both rely on the true idea that ordinary pleasures, even supernormal ones, don't typically put one on a hedonic treadmill that makes them seek out more and more potent versions of the source of pleasure.

But the mistake that I think you make is that you aren't seeing that sexual pleasures are slightly more mediated than food pleasures, most visibly through the orgasm. Let's stick with food. The pleasures of eating are basically immediate and relatively well-anchored to the particular food (there are exceptions, such as eating after brushing your teeth. The general case holds). there's no situation in which, having chewed a piece of celery in just the right way for about twenty minutes, it suddenly tastes absolutely phenomenal for a short while. But sex does have this feature, so sexual pleasure exhibits a little more autonomy from the source of pleasure than many basic pleasures do.

If you think an associationist view of pleasures and desires is a model that's close to the truth — that is, the idea that learning to associate great pleasure with certain things leads one to desire those things more — then you can imagine why this could make porn worrisome. But it's a different problem than the claimed supernormal stimulus. Rather than addicting someone to porn as such, the problem here would be that particular porn could lead to self-reinforcing enjoyment of more instances of that sort of porn.

But a problem with this is that it's actually not specific to porn videos at all. This same thing could happen with reading porn, masturbating over something you saw, or even just imagining scenarios. So it's not like mediated pleasure + association problem = a harm caused by porn as such.

I think a worry that sounds more reasonable is that the above combination of factors combines to give whatever specific mechanism of delivery for erotic content online predominates an undue influence over the desiring psychology of users of those delivery mechanisms. And this just leads to a particular instance of the general concerns about opaque algorithmic content delivery that others have already written about.

The nutshell version of this post is that maybe sex videos can hurt you, not because they're sex videos but because the structure of sexual enjoyment has self-reinforcement potential that could lead to bad results in the wrong content delivery environments.

So like, it's obvious to me reading the comments on my post that anti-porn people are largely like, afraid of porn. Like the concept of a sex video is really spooky to them. They're not making thoughtful critiques of the porn industry, which is genuinely a really fucked up industry, they're mostly just spooked by the concept of a sex video and what it could Do To You If You See It.

I said this in another post, but it's like, the difference between "a ton of coffee is produced using slave labor" (valid, important criticism of the coffee industry) and "coffee turns people into raving coffee addicts who forget how to interact with anyone because they're so obsessed with their coffee" (objectively not true, insane viewpoint).

It's literally just sex videos. They really cannot hurt you.

[tothewhirlwind]

really funny how in Cure (1997) they have the whole scene where they reveal the suspect's writings in his house but instead of like a manifesto or satanic ravings it's a normal psychology thesis.

[tothewhirlwind]

It's commonly said that having bad experiences can help one fully enjoy good ones. The idea is something like this: your experience of bad things (say, a schlocky slasher movie or a shitty beer) draws out by contrast the great features of good things (an absolutely dread inducing horror film or a really nice craft beer).

But I have the opposite experience too. Sometimes I can go back to something I didn't like, having now experienced a great version of it, and actually enjoy the bad version more than I used to. I think what's happening is that the exemplar is like an educational experience, showing me what's so great about the best versions of some type. Then when I experience other instances of the type, I'm primed to find those features where I wasn't before. So like, in this reverse version of the phenomenon, having drank the really delicious beer acquainted me with precisely what I like about beers, and then going back to drink the shitty beer I can detect the weak relatives of those properties in it.

[tothewhirlwind]

god I love a movie where a detective has some freaky bullshit happen to them

[tothewhirlwind]

The impression I'm getting is that one of the benefits of the RCV process was minimizing intra-left conflict and resentment. Apparently Brad Lander showed up at a Mamdani victory party to a chant of his name. Nothing like that would have happened if people had spent the whole primary compelled by strategic considerations to fruitlessly, bitterly argue about which candidate to converge on.

[tothewhirlwind]

My colleague asked me to leave so they could work on the thing they have due tonight before I had the chance to excuse myself and show that I'm not socially stupid. Infuriating

[tothewhirlwind]

Frequent strategy error that I've seen far leftists make for the last ten years at least is thinking that your opponents not winning is already a good outcome. Perhaps forgetting that your opponent can lose in a way that's still catastrophic for you and all your plans.

[tothewhirlwind]

seems a little far fetched to me

[tothewhirlwind]

one way I would explain a lot of Marx’s social theory, especially his later social theory, is “the tool wields the hand.” that is to say, at some point in history, people designed a tool to fulfill some end, and the design of the tool was informed by a social situation that had need of that end (for good or ill).

the way it was designed in turn shapes not just human behavior, but the automatic comportment of the body and the mind; repeated use through time and space and social processes makes us shift the way we move through the world until it becomes second nature, socially developed instinct, to make use of the tool and to do so in particular ways. to adjust ourselves *to* the tool. even if through some means - education, self-reflection, political activity - you become conscious of the tool and how it affects you, that doesn't necessarily mean you can stop using it, as long as your social existence still depends on it.

meanwhile, the end which the tool was meant to achieve takes on a life of its own, it appears as the actual agent in the situation, and human beings themselves are just the motor for ensuring the meeting between the tool and the end.

this is, for Marx, what value and money and machines and factories are: social technologies that were designed for some purpose - perhaps good, perhaps bad, but our dependence on their social existence makes condemnation, if not irrelevant, at least limited in scope and utility. but these technologies have become fetters, expressions of domination not just by other people (managers, bosses, capital-holders, politicians and lawmakers) but by a social situation that assumes its own perpetual self-expansion is a virtue. human potential expands - cooperation, new scientific advancements, the proliferation of certain forms of knowledge - but because that expansion is always turned towards one particular end, the actual horizon of human action and capabilities contract, as the whole world is turned into a giant factory in which human beings are its raw materials

[tothewhirlwind]

getting to know my mutuals and followers: if you had to sing karaoke on the spot RIGHT NOW what would your go to song be reply in the tags

[tothewhirlwind]

Last night we let the primary sources talk

[tothewhirlwind]

Last night was a 500 page treatise on Central European industrialization

[tothewhirlwind]

It's not a run on sentence, I'm stroking thoughtfully in the middle of it

no one would question my constant use of em dashes if we paid the proper respect to them, as the Germans do by calling one a "Gedankenstrich" ("thought stroke")

[tothewhirlwind]

no one would question my constant use of em dashes if we paid the proper respect to them, as the Germans do by calling one a "Gedankenstrich" ("thought stroke")