isaacsapphire - Tumblr blog

[isaacsapphire]

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.

[isaacsapphire]

I've gotten to observe a Lot of men screaming in reaction to suddenly finding something like a mouse or raccoon or a mannequin.

Like, I understand that screaming like a little girl is embarrassing and unmanly, but that's what a Lot of people do.

we still get immediately shoved out of our immersion in tv shows or films when The Girl find a dead body and immediately shrieks - we just don't find it realistic because we're pretty confident most people would gasp rather than shriek (i.e. sharp inhale rather than sharp exhale) and it also feels unnecessarily (and predictably) misogynistic too, as men encountering corpses almost never do the same on screen

also of course please do tell us if you've actually encountered a corpse unexpectedly, because tumblr is absolutely a place where some people have done this thing and we love a good anecdote

suddenly imagining "burst into song" as a potential response

[isaacsapphire]

Ok, it Really depends on what you replace it with. Water or seltzer water? Probably would help you lose weight. Might not be huge for you though.

Lemonade? Would be worse. Orange juice? Would be worse.

Carbonation is fine. Sweeteners are the problem. Also, you may need to relocate your caffeine consumption to quit soda.

So i am kind of addicted to diet soda, flavored/fizzy water, diet sports drinks etc (American needs large beverage etc). The regular ones are too sweet for me but i know even the diet shit contributes to weight gain. So, if i were to say cut my consumption of those down to 2/3 or half of what i drink now (replaced with water, oj, lemonade, etc), would that hopefully get rid of some belly fat? Is 'hard fat' from drinking carbonated beverages really a thing or is it just pop-nutrition woo?

[isaacsapphire]

Have you talked to anyone who anticipated retiring soon since the pandemic? Because I have never encountered a retirement-minded person in that situation; either they always planned on "aging in place" or they're currently moving south on the profit from selling the family house. Like, houses today cost more than people dreamed they could five years ago!

The more I think about it, the more I'm certain that there's been a sociopolitical "papering over" of a decades long economic decline. There's been a lot of borrowing again the future for decades, and eventually the piper is going to come calling. Fucking boomers.

[isaacsapphire]

Are you expecting the housing market to collapse soon? Because that's what you are describing.

And that's not entirely the opposite of what I am talking about, but the housing shortage that is keeping prices up is a big part of the mortgaging of the future I am talking about.

The more I think about it, the more I'm certain that there's been a sociopolitical "papering over" of a decades long economic decline. There's been a lot of borrowing again the future for decades, and eventually the piper is going to come calling. Fucking boomers.

[isaacsapphire]

Baby Beluga is from 1980.

the beatles are an infuriating band to me as a relentless contrarian. liking them is cliche, hating them is cliche, being indifferent towards them is cliche. it's impossible to have an novel or interesting take on the beatles in current year. like how am i supposed to win here?

[isaacsapphire]

do you think that in the 1800s and shit when it was all steam trains and scrooge flavored business guys in the stock market, and shit, that people went to their rich grandmas house from the 1700s french revolution times with roccoco and so on and it was like floral curtains and 1950s lamps and other grandma shit to them? i think it was

[isaacsapphire]

Man, not only are they all White, they're all the exact same skin tone, even the ginger. Like, it definitely looks like the ethnic ratios still need jiggering.

Tag yourself, i'm Asheliigynne

[isaacsapphire]

am i just sleep-deprived or is holy week milkshake duck for jesus?

I'm sleep deprived myself, but that checks out for me.

[isaacsapphire]

I'm fairly certain that many to all of the "big stomach/big boobs" kinks are related to the attraction to pregnant women* and arguably distortions of the evolutionarily selected for desire to bond with and care for pregnant females.

Feederism (and the damsel/housewife thing as well) has another explanation too though: the goal of making the partner unable to leave, socially and physically. The impulse of fearing abandonment is not bad, but actions taken based on that fear can be very bad. Do not ignore the dark side of your kinks, because that's the errors you need to avoid, the errors that you are vulnerable to.

The funny thing about Feedism is how it puts in stark contrast the contradictory nature of altruism

Being a Feeder is at its core, a altruistic compulsion, food is a precious resource, giving it to someone is one of the oldest and most universal courtship rituals ( not just in Humans, but present in Many other animal species, all over the tree)

But in the real world, In modern society at-least, being the Feedee is the far greater sacrifice you lose social status as you gain weight, treated worse at the doctor etc, pestered by family, theirs the potential health problems, and this is on-top of the basic core of changing some else body to suit your preferences, generally iversably in an meaningful way ( look at the poor success of weight loss attempts longterm), being a gainer is the one kink you can’t really leave in the bedroom, your stuck living the fantasy. Being someone’s Feeder is an enormous privilege.

[isaacsapphire]

The more I think about it, the more I'm certain that there's been a sociopolitical "papering over" of a decades long economic decline. There's been a lot of borrowing again the future for decades, and eventually the piper is going to come calling. Fucking boomers.

[isaacsapphire]

Interesting. Appears to have a relationship with reality at first glance at least.

[isaacsapphire]

Does this seem like ultimately an economic problem to anyone else? Like, it feels like a lot of people are papering over systemic economic weakness with a personal race to the bottom suckup project.

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.

[isaacsapphire]

If the owner isn't going to eat the cost of safety himself, he is not going to care about safety. If a company is stupid and don't realize that it will eat the cost of a fuckup, it's not going to care about the risk of a fuckup.

Those Pakistanis aren't going to get workers comp or settlements if they are injured on the job, so why would the shop owner gaf about the risk of injuries? The Japanese workers have workers comp, will get payouts if maimed or killed, and have the local equivalent to OSHA waiting to force safety compliance on the company.

I think I've mentioned the first security company I worked for was really bad. Someone died on the job at one of their sites for a major contract while I was there. The company did not give a single shit that a man was dead. They did care that it was very expensive to have a workplace death though, so we got some safety equipment and rules to use it that weren't enforced though, to better defend against the settlement if someone died again.

In a case that's probably better known, a worker died on Black Friday at Walmart when a stampede occurred. This was both expensive and very bad PR for Walmart, so the next year for Black Friday, Walmart paid a lot of money for crowd control experts and crowed control barriers and set up new policies to avoid that type of PR and liability disaster repeating.

@poipoipoi-2016 posted this, and I have thoughts that are entirely unrelated to the context it was originally reposted in.

First, I don't like the way it assumes that capability is a sort of set metric, that some workers are just good enough to do O-Ring work and some aren't, because process design and environmental factors will also play a role.

In an uncontroversial environmental design example, I think it's quite likely that even good workers make more mistakes at the end of a 100 hour work week then they do at the end of a 40 hour work week.

So who decided on those 100 hour work weeks?

Second, process design; there's an apocryphal story I heard about nurses plugging IV tubes into the wrong ports, no matter how thoroughly they were trained, until somebody gets the smart idea to redesign the shape of the ports so that you can't plug them in wrong anymore.

I also have a real life example from my brother, who works in safety. His employer was a crucial industry that had to stay open during the pandemic, and so HR came up with a very complicated worker's comp scheme for people who had COVID symptoms and needed to stay home. Part of the policy is that people who stayed home got paid 60% of their salary.

My brother told them, "Hey, a lot of the people covered by this policy are working paycheck to paycheck, and if you tell them that they have to take a 40% pay cut every time they sneeze, they are going to come in to work anyway and pretend to be healthy"

From what he's told me, HR's response was essentially that tweet where the 911 operator says, "He can't kill you, that's illegal!"

So I know a lot of you know math, and I've been thinking a lot about the psychology of certain choices, in particular choices where you have two paths:

In path A, you definitely pay a moderate cost.

In path B, one of two things happen. Most of the time, you pay no cost at all. But occasionally path B creates catastrophically high costs.

I'm curious how people think about situations like that mathematically.

I feel like there's a point at which the moderate cost of path A gets high enough that, when presented with the choice, most people will choose path B, even though the expected cost of constantly choosing path B works out to be much higher.

[isaacsapphire]

Most American parks close at night physically in the form of a single bar gate blocking vehicle traffic, if they have anything physically closing the park at all. The whole "closed sunset to sunrise" or whatever thing just means that the cops can run you out for partying there in the middle of the night.

Really though, like we've made our cities so uncomfortable even for housed people, just in an effort to hurt the homeless. Parks and beaches close at night so homeless can't sleep there. Loitering is illegal so homeless can't sleep there. No bench at the bus stop because someone might sleep on it. No overnight parking because someone might sleep in the car there.

These laws aren't even beneficial to housed populations of the city, and they purely exist out of a) hatred for the homeless and b) an attempt to make your city look "presentable" to tourists. And it just sucks all-around.

[isaacsapphire]

I'm pretty sure that Beatles rpf is just historical fiction now.

What happens to RPF when the real person dies? Does it become "historical fiction"? Do you suddenly get a lot more options when blessed with "death of the subject"?