you think I couldn't eat more than $400 worth of cheese in one week?

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this post is from 2019? what do you mean, this round?

Map of the last election each county voted against the presidential election winner

is this meant to illustrate how much land area in the country corresponds to people who don’t agree with the current president or does it illustrate that there are some dudes in Washington State who pollsters should be paying a LOT more attention to?

Some people name their child after themselves, and some people say they think of their pets as their children, but rarely do you see a pet owner name their pet after themself. "Hi, I'm Dave, and this is my dog, Dave" -- you just don't see that a lot.

Hi I’m Mike, this is my son Mike Jr., and this is my pet, Mike Dog.

and this is my cat mike at

neighbours unexpectedly handed me watermelon after a minor act of helpfulness on my part so now I feel compelled to reciprocate in some way like a twisted fruitarian gift economy 😒

thanks! get fruct!

oh, FRUITarian

you keep getting me excited and then it's not what I thought

“I cannot wait for Metroid Dread”

(context: these images were made before Metroid Dread was released)

And yet they still seem pretty accurate.

Everyone was coming up with headcanons for what Samus did in her spare time, because it has to be as awesome right?

No. She’s antisocial. She probably sits in her ship in her underwear playing video games.

That was actually my headcanon. More or less.

No, she hangs around in cities and goes to bars.

Seriously, the endings for Zero Mission, which are the only endings that show what she does between missions, show her walking around a city, going to a bar, or standing presumably a cliff overlooking the city.

Normal or hard difficulty over 2 hours 100% of items

Normal difficulty under 2 hours 100% of items

Hard difficulty under 2 hours 100% of items

I will ask this again

in the second picture, why is her bartender Scarmiglione, Elemental Fiend of Earth?

It would have been more accurate to reality if the girl wasn’t white.

The girl was called Marta Cabrera and played by a Cuban-Spanish actress, so I don’t think she was as white as you remember.

People just see non-black POC and go “WHITE!” Don’t they

Wasn’t there a whole running Thing where all the rich people thought she was from a different country in Latin America. How do you watch that and think the character is white

I don’t think they watched the movie if they think Marta is White.

yes, this family of people who are all blood related because they are a family of people descended from the father who just died, they definitely are aligned with each other because of class interest. there’s just no other reason for a family of people who are all related to each other to view others as outsiders not entitled to the inheritance they believed they would get by virtue of the fact they were family.

Regarding this thread:

The thing I am talking about is not good nor bad; it can exist in a supportive community or in an authoritarian cult.

I keep trying to figure out exactly how to put what I'm trying to say, but fundamentally the big issue is fungibility.

That is, how easy would it be to exchange me, or an idea, or a building, or an institution, for a different one?

The cult doesn't care about you as a member. The cult cares that nobody ever leaves. You don't have to be a member, nobody has to be an ex-member. If you stay, good. If they kill you, also good.

This doesn't seem like anything about capitalism. I can think of very, very, very few examples of your concept of non-fungubility (outside your personal relationships) in history and ALL of them are very bad.

For the past ten thousand years, people who know you as a person have viewed you as non-replacable, and nobody else did. They would all view you in terms of what you can DO, and those can be compared to other people. The thing you provide that nobody else does is your individual personality and identity, which they aren't considering, because they don't know you.

This isn't a development of capitalism or modernity. This is a development of "living in groups larger than 150 people." There's no other distinction and nothing about this relationship has changed other than "there are no longer extremely valuable positions tied to individual people you don't know, which is good, because if you don't like who is in an identity-locked position you generally kill them."

I feel like I must be exlaining this wrong, because I have said over and overagain,

"Cults don't care about you as an individual, but they care deeply about keeping you in the cult"

And the top rebuttal I hear from all corners is,

"That's absurd, cults obviously don't care about you as a person, they just want you to stay in the cult."

How is it that a rephrasing of my own argument keeps getting thrown at me as though it contradicts what I am saying?

Here's my question: given that the cult only views you as a replaceable asset, why does it spend so much effort trying to recruit you back into the cult if you leave?

Why are the two choices "Stay in the cult and survive" and "Stay in the cult and die?"

Why is "leave the cult and the cult doesn't care?" not one of our choices?

Could part of the psychological appeal of cults be precisely the fact that the third choice is so prevalent outside the cult and so completely rejected as a possibility inside of it?

To state it for the milllionth time, in some groups the dynamic is "Because you have certain skills, you are part of the group" and the unspoken corollary is "And once you no longer have them you won't be part of the group."

In other groups, the dynamic is, "Because you are part of this group, we will ensure you have certain skills".

Now, the unspoken corollary is "And if you can't display those skills we will punish you until you do, or maybe just kill you."

But that second dynamic has an appeal to people, it is very attractive to many of us and it *has* been eroded by processes of capitalism and bureacracy.

Why do I attribute this to capitalism? Because every job works on a "Our relationship lasts only as long as you have certain skills and then disappears."

This kind of thing is not, no matter how often people say it, the only kind of social relationship that has ever existed in large organizations.

I've admitted, again and again, that the kind of non-fungibility I'm talking about is not inherently good, but that does not demonstrate that it has no meaning to people and that it can simply be excised from us without negative consequences.

The cult views you as a replaceable asset. There is a nonzero difficulty in replacing you as an asset, and part of the process of replacing you is killing you. They don’t care about you as a person. They care that none of their assets leave the cult, even if they don’t get to use the asset any more. If people got to leave their cult, more people would leave their cult, and then they would lose a lot of assets. It’s not you they care about, but the aggregate of all the people who would want to leave if they saw you do it.

This is also the first time you bring up skills as part of non-fungibility -- being the king has NOTHING to do with it nor do any of your other examples in that post -- and it’s also just not true. There are groups that will ensure you have certain skills, obviously so, any trade union at bare minimum is going to try and do this.  Any kind of proprietary tech and a lot of other IT jobs do that. Because part of their use for you is that you have a certain set of skills they teach. They try harder to keep you because it is more of a hassle to replace you, but they can replace you. And it was just like that in the days of feudalism.

If you join a tradesman’s guild, they ensure you have training in the trade they -sman. That’s what they do, they are in large part a skills training system. Your identity is only valuable in that you have the skills they teach and it is a pain in the ass to get someone else with those skills they teach; that’s not you being individually important that’s you taking a very long time to train. If you fucking suck at -smaning, they cut you loose. Your relationship is completely contingent on your usefulness up until you get to like retirement age where they place benefits to incentivise people staying longer and thus not making them have to train more people because it’s a pain in the ass. And the guild is only willing to do all that because the primary purpose of the guild is to keep people out of it. 

Like, do you just mean by non-fungibility that you have built up a specific relationship and training that makes you difficult to replace? Because that is exactly the same dynamic. You will always be replaceable to any organization to some degree, because they will have to replace you. People die. If you die, they need another dude who does what you do. They have to have a way to get that dude.

h Your narative about how trade organizations act is completely different from you narraive about how cults act and I don't understand why you are insisting that they are actually exactly the same.

Like, you've mentioned a bunch of ways in which the cult fundamentally differs from the trade guild (e.g. the cult wants people to join, the guild wants to be exclusive; the guild will fire you, the cult will kill you; the cult wants people to stay in at all costs, the guild will cut you lose if you cost too much) but for reasons I can't understand you're asserting that they both have exactly the same reasoning and exactly the same psychological effect on members.

What if those differences are actually, like, important to people and not just irrelevant cruft that doesn't matter?

But the cult does things that are bad and they aren't interested in your personality or overall well-being!

Yeah I've said that like a million times now.

See also my other reply about how people often prefer negative attention to no attention.

I’m not talking about the cult being bad. You’re saying that fungibility is the opposite of your relevance to someone being contingent on the utility you provide to them, and I am pointing out they both have the effect of “their relationship to you is contingent on your usefulness to them.” plus you’re not comparing similar situations

the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leaving is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that, or they kill you. they just don’t often do that because cultist labor is very cheap so there’s SOMETHING you can do.

the guild fires you when you want to stay but they want you to leave. you get fired for being a bad -sman who is a waste of resources, because you’re a net drain. if you want to leave the guild and the guild wants you to stay, they do a similar thing: they try to keep you from leaving but at least instead of killing you they make you agree not to ply your trade where you’d compete with them.

in both cases your relationship with them is contingent on the skills and resources you provide. the only difference from normal is that the cult loses a lot of utility by letting ANYONE leave no matter what skills they have, and the guild puts a lot of investment into its members so wants to ensure they are not wasted.

"the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leavng is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that,"

But they *really* do not want to do that an consider it an enormous step, far more enormous than the company you work for would consider it.

In fact, as you yourself say, they'd rather keep *you specifically* on doing unskilled grunt work even though the supply of outside grunt workers is enormous.

So if they consider you totally fungible with all unskilled grunt workers, why do they value retaining you specifically?

Here's where I think you are going wrong: you say "Their relationship with you is contingent on your usefulness to them" but what you are actually describing is "Your survival in the cult is contingent on your usefulness to them."

I'm asserting that those two things are not the same! The way I'm using relationship encompasses a relationship that ends in murder.

If you are not useful to a cult, it seems to me that generally the preferred options are, in order of preference

They really, really, REALLY do not want to sever their relationship with you, *that's what makes them a cult*.

Like, I'm groping for the right words here but as I use "fungible" here it is totally possible to see someone as disposable and replaceable without seeing them as fungible.

Fungibility here is about a situation in which it is incredibly difficult to conceive of receiving personal attention, either good OR bad, because you are fundamentally identical to other units.

The wooden chair at my dining room table can be disposed of and replaced by a similar unit and so it is fungible in that sense, but at the same time I might go, "Well, trying to use the office chair at the table is really awkward, I miss my old chair."

I'm talking more about the fungibility of the dollars in your bank balance. You couldn't go, "Sure, I got $500 from this paycheck, but I really miss the $500 from my paycheck two months ago, those were some top notch dollars, these new ones just aren't the same."

I'm saying that our conceptualization of ourselves and our place in society is becoming more analogous to the dollar than it used to be.

They do not.

They value nobody leaving. They want nobody to leave, Because they have to invest resources in getting people in, and have extremely negative utility from letting people go, they prefer to put you to use doing grunt work because they might as well get some kind of use from you.

This is not a different kind of relationship, this is the relative weights on each factor driving the “are you useful to me” equation to arrive at different results in different circumstances. If you think this is what being non-fungible is, then take any job with a proprietary technology, or any other kind of relationship, economic or otherwise, that requires resources to be invested in you. Like being married! Your marriage is a significant investment of resources and so it’s a good idea to try and maintain it. Also hopefully you like each other anyway.

Our lives are not more like dollars. You miss the dining chair of anyone you personally know and do not miss the dining chair of anyone you do not personally know. This is how it has been forever. When evaluating a relationship with a person you do not personally know you will always evaluate it in terms of how they fulfill the needs of the relationship, and they will for you. This is how it has been ever since people started gathering in groups higher than 150. If I don’t know you, all you ARE to me is what you can perform because, get this, I don’t know the other things about you. 

You are trying to find new terminology and blame capitalism for feeling isolated and not knowing enough people. 

"This is not a different kind of relationship"

Why not?

You keep explaining how it results in different behaviors so why wouldn't it also feel different to the people inside it?

Here's another question, if I join a cult, how easy would it be to convince them that I'm so useless that they should just ignore me and drop out of contact with me?

How easy would it be to convince my employer to do that?

You keep saying that this difference must be a *meaningless* difference because the behavior of both cults and businesses are selfish, but I don't understand how that can lead us to the conclusion that there is no important difference between these two evidently different things.

Because the nature of your relationship to them is not different. You wanted a relationship where it wasn’t contingent on you having certain skills, and you weren’t replaceable. Even in a cult, your relationship is contingent on skills and you are replaceable, but the factors around cult recruitment mean that it’s a huge pain in the ass to replace you and the skills you need to provide are not very high. 

Employers would ALSO be reluctant to fire you in certain situations, namely when it was expensive to train you up. That’s what fucking contract negotiations are! “I feel like leaving, what are you going to do to convince me to stay?”

It would be a lot easier than you probably think to convince a cult to ignore you and drop out of contact with you. Because the cults that kill you are actually extremely rare because killing you is a huge hassle that most people don’t want to do and most of the time they can’t do no matter how ruthless they are because there’d be Too Many Questions. Cults rely on psychological manipulation. When you just want to leave, they manipulate you into staying. If you’re being a nuisance or asking too many questions or getting into fights with the cult leader or drinking all the booze, they threaten you with excommunicating you from the cult to keep you in line. And if you don’t stay in line, they do that. They kick you out for being a problem. “Literally nobody ever leaves this cult” is exceedingly rare because they can only do that to people who won’t be missed and won’t have people asking questions, which are not actually as useful to a cult as you’d think because they don’t have assets or connections.

If you want to leave Scientology they threaten and coerce you. If you’re a total nobody that won’t be missed they kill you, but given who Scientology goes after they tend not to be able to. If you’re a problem to Scientology, if you vocally criticize Scientology, you’re out of the cult! They kick you out for being a “suppressive person.” And then they proceed to ruin your life. But you’re not in the cult any more because you’re no longer useful to them. 

The Branch Davidians were a cult and then David Koresh splintered off into a sub-cult by being more wacko than they could handle, George Roden forcibly kicked him and his followers out of said cult with dudes who had guns, but did not and could not have them whacked because it was a huge hassle. Roden was willing to kill people, as evidenced by the time he killed a dude and then Koresh and his followers took over the compound when he went to jail, but it was not an option here.

Aum Shinrikyo had people whacked, it killed people trying to leave and it tried to have critics killed (and in one case actually succeeded) and that’s not really the “cult” part that was the “terrorist organization” part -- you HAD to die if you knew too much. That’s still not the thing you want where they try hard to keep you on, because if you looked like you were faltering they would order someone else to kill you to ensure their loyalty. Everyone was evaluated in terms of their usefulness to the cult’s goals of “perform massive chemical weapons attacks.”

But you look at Aum’s rival Happy Science, who is trying to grift money instead of kill people en masse, and they have all the manipulation and extortion and truly batshit anime they can get their hands on and the founder’s own fucking son left the group and spoke publicly about what a complete pile of shit it is.

These are not different types of relationship and they are neither new nor particular to capitalism.

See, this response, particularly the last paragraph, makes me think you have no earthly idea what I've been arguing.

At no point did I even suggest that cults are particular to capitalism.

I also find it bizarre that you keep misunderstanding what I'm talking about and acting like I think certain people in certain roles can't be replaced. I've said, in about half a dozen ways, that this isn't what I'm saying.

Usually I would clarify but since I have done so like half a dozen times I'll refer you to those.

"You wanted a relationship where it wasn’t contingent on you having certain skills, and you weren’t replaceable. Even in a cult, your relationship is contingent on skills and you are replaceable, but the factors around cult recruitment mean that it’s a huge pain in the ass to replace you and the skills you need to provide are not very high."

First of all, never talked about relationships where you can't be replaced, as I've explained at great length.

Second, the rest of that paragraph very nearly restates my argument (Although I get that it's slightly different).

Like, in a low skill job you're easy to fire, in a high skill job you only keep your job as long as you keep your skills, in a cult low-skill people don't get fired that often.

I'm saying that this is not a trivial difference to people.

I guess I don't know what you've been talking about because you have changed what you are talking about in every post. Just like in SJ arguments with you, you talk about a central concept and give an example, then someone responds to your central concept, and you shift the subject to be something else about the example that moves further away from the central concept you originally brought up.

You said that the issue was about fungibility and that capitalism has made more or nearly all of our relationships fungible. You provided, as examples of things that weren't fungible, a cult that does whatever it can to keep you aboard, and the idea that if you were a king that kingness is inextricably tied up in your being to the extent that the only way to unking you is to kill you. You said the cult does whatever it can because you specifically are valuable to them and they don't just value a person in the cult they value you being in the cult.

The example you have pursued at extended length, the cult, is not what you originally claimed it was, and now you're saying you never claimed it even though we can see the post at the top of this chain. You said the cult cares about you as an individual and want you specifically in the cult; this isn't true. Now you've shifted to "they view you as disposable but not utterly and easily disposable," which isn't the same thing.

Now what you're claiming is one of two things: either being in a cult is like being in a high-skilled job in that while you are replaceable, it's a huge pain in the ass to do so. If this is your current claim, this contradicts your OP's argument where you say this relationship is unlike being employed.

Or the thing that is notable and comforting about being in a cult is not the non-fungibility of not having a replaceable relationship contingent on skills, but SOLELY on the basis that they don't let you leave. If this is your current claim, not only are the fungibility arguments irrelevant (Aum Shinrikyo sees people as completely fungible but kills anyone who might leave since they present a liability and can be replaced), it also has nothing in common with your other example, that of being a monarch! Being a monarch is not about people not letting you leave, the example you provided is about it being definitionally impossible to leave the role since it's tied into your being! Nobody is trying to control you into staying the monarch, they can't, they probably want you to leave! You're a bad monarch!

I am still responding to the idea you advanced in the OP while you shifted the argument to something else that doesn't have anything to do with the OP. I thought you were actually trying to express an idea in the OP, but apparently not, since now you're incompatible with it.

Regarding this thread:

The thing I am talking about is not good nor bad; it can exist in a supportive community or in an authoritarian cult.

I keep trying to figure out exactly how to put what I'm trying to say, but fundamentally the big issue is fungibility.

That is, how easy would it be to exchange me, or an idea, or a building, or an institution, for a different one?

The cult doesn't care about you as a member. The cult cares that nobody ever leaves. You don't have to be a member, nobody has to be an ex-member. If you stay, good. If they kill you, also good.

This doesn't seem like anything about capitalism. I can think of very, very, very few examples of your concept of non-fungubility (outside your personal relationships) in history and ALL of them are very bad.

For the past ten thousand years, people who know you as a person have viewed you as non-replacable, and nobody else did. They would all view you in terms of what you can DO, and those can be compared to other people. The thing you provide that nobody else does is your individual personality and identity, which they aren't considering, because they don't know you.

This isn't a development of capitalism or modernity. This is a development of "living in groups larger than 150 people." There's no other distinction and nothing about this relationship has changed other than "there are no longer extremely valuable positions tied to individual people you don't know, which is good, because if you don't like who is in an identity-locked position you generally kill them."

I feel like I must be exlaining this wrong, because I have said over and overagain,

"Cults don't care about you as an individual, but they care deeply about keeping you in the cult"

And the top rebuttal I hear from all corners is,

"That's absurd, cults obviously don't care about you as a person, they just want you to stay in the cult."

How is it that a rephrasing of my own argument keeps getting thrown at me as though it contradicts what I am saying?

Here's my question: given that the cult only views you as a replaceable asset, why does it spend so much effort trying to recruit you back into the cult if you leave?

Why are the two choices "Stay in the cult and survive" and "Stay in the cult and die?"

Why is "leave the cult and the cult doesn't care?" not one of our choices?

Could part of the psychological appeal of cults be precisely the fact that the third choice is so prevalent outside the cult and so completely rejected as a possibility inside of it?

To state it for the milllionth time, in some groups the dynamic is "Because you have certain skills, you are part of the group" and the unspoken corollary is "And once you no longer have them you won't be part of the group."

In other groups, the dynamic is, "Because you are part of this group, we will ensure you have certain skills".

Now, the unspoken corollary is "And if you can't display those skills we will punish you until you do, or maybe just kill you."

But that second dynamic has an appeal to people, it is very attractive to many of us and it *has* been eroded by processes of capitalism and bureacracy.

Why do I attribute this to capitalism? Because every job works on a "Our relationship lasts only as long as you have certain skills and then disappears."

This kind of thing is not, no matter how often people say it, the only kind of social relationship that has ever existed in large organizations.

I've admitted, again and again, that the kind of non-fungibility I'm talking about is not inherently good, but that does not demonstrate that it has no meaning to people and that it can simply be excised from us without negative consequences.

The cult views you as a replaceable asset. There is a nonzero difficulty in replacing you as an asset, and part of the process of replacing you is killing you. They don’t care about you as a person. They care that none of their assets leave the cult, even if they don’t get to use the asset any more. If people got to leave their cult, more people would leave their cult, and then they would lose a lot of assets. It’s not you they care about, but the aggregate of all the people who would want to leave if they saw you do it.

This is also the first time you bring up skills as part of non-fungibility -- being the king has NOTHING to do with it nor do any of your other examples in that post -- and it’s also just not true. There are groups that will ensure you have certain skills, obviously so, any trade union at bare minimum is going to try and do this.  Any kind of proprietary tech and a lot of other IT jobs do that. Because part of their use for you is that you have a certain set of skills they teach. They try harder to keep you because it is more of a hassle to replace you, but they can replace you. And it was just like that in the days of feudalism.

If you join a tradesman’s guild, they ensure you have training in the trade they -sman. That’s what they do, they are in large part a skills training system. Your identity is only valuable in that you have the skills they teach and it is a pain in the ass to get someone else with those skills they teach; that’s not you being individually important that’s you taking a very long time to train. If you fucking suck at -smaning, they cut you loose. Your relationship is completely contingent on your usefulness up until you get to like retirement age where they place benefits to incentivise people staying longer and thus not making them have to train more people because it’s a pain in the ass. And the guild is only willing to do all that because the primary purpose of the guild is to keep people out of it. 

Like, do you just mean by non-fungibility that you have built up a specific relationship and training that makes you difficult to replace? Because that is exactly the same dynamic. You will always be replaceable to any organization to some degree, because they will have to replace you. People die. If you die, they need another dude who does what you do. They have to have a way to get that dude.

h Your narative about how trade organizations act is completely different from you narraive about how cults act and I don't understand why you are insisting that they are actually exactly the same.

Like, you've mentioned a bunch of ways in which the cult fundamentally differs from the trade guild (e.g. the cult wants people to join, the guild wants to be exclusive; the guild will fire you, the cult will kill you; the cult wants people to stay in at all costs, the guild will cut you lose if you cost too much) but for reasons I can't understand you're asserting that they both have exactly the same reasoning and exactly the same psychological effect on members.

What if those differences are actually, like, important to people and not just irrelevant cruft that doesn't matter?

But the cult does things that are bad and they aren't interested in your personality or overall well-being!

Yeah I've said that like a million times now.

See also my other reply about how people often prefer negative attention to no attention.

I’m not talking about the cult being bad. You’re saying that fungibility is the opposite of your relevance to someone being contingent on the utility you provide to them, and I am pointing out they both have the effect of “their relationship to you is contingent on your usefulness to them.” plus you’re not comparing similar situations

the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leaving is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that, or they kill you. they just don’t often do that because cultist labor is very cheap so there’s SOMETHING you can do.

the guild fires you when you want to stay but they want you to leave. you get fired for being a bad -sman who is a waste of resources, because you’re a net drain. if you want to leave the guild and the guild wants you to stay, they do a similar thing: they try to keep you from leaving but at least instead of killing you they make you agree not to ply your trade where you’d compete with them.

in both cases your relationship with them is contingent on the skills and resources you provide. the only difference from normal is that the cult loses a lot of utility by letting ANYONE leave no matter what skills they have, and the guild puts a lot of investment into its members so wants to ensure they are not wasted.

"the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leavng is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that,"

But they *really* do not want to do that an consider it an enormous step, far more enormous than the company you work for would consider it.

In fact, as you yourself say, they'd rather keep *you specifically* on doing unskilled grunt work even though the supply of outside grunt workers is enormous.

So if they consider you totally fungible with all unskilled grunt workers, why do they value retaining you specifically?

Here's where I think you are going wrong: you say "Their relationship with you is contingent on your usefulness to them" but what you are actually describing is "Your survival in the cult is contingent on your usefulness to them."

I'm asserting that those two things are not the same! The way I'm using relationship encompasses a relationship that ends in murder.

If you are not useful to a cult, it seems to me that generally the preferred options are, in order of preference

They really, really, REALLY do not want to sever their relationship with you, *that's what makes them a cult*.

Like, I'm groping for the right words here but as I use "fungible" here it is totally possible to see someone as disposable and replaceable without seeing them as fungible.

Fungibility here is about a situation in which it is incredibly difficult to conceive of receiving personal attention, either good OR bad, because you are fundamentally identical to other units.

The wooden chair at my dining room table can be disposed of and replaced by a similar unit and so it is fungible in that sense, but at the same time I might go, "Well, trying to use the office chair at the table is really awkward, I miss my old chair."

I'm talking more about the fungibility of the dollars in your bank balance. You couldn't go, "Sure, I got $500 from this paycheck, but I really miss the $500 from my paycheck two months ago, those were some top notch dollars, these new ones just aren't the same."

I'm saying that our conceptualization of ourselves and our place in society is becoming more analogous to the dollar than it used to be.

They do not.

They value nobody leaving. They want nobody to leave, Because they have to invest resources in getting people in, and have extremely negative utility from letting people go, they prefer to put you to use doing grunt work because they might as well get some kind of use from you.

This is not a different kind of relationship, this is the relative weights on each factor driving the “are you useful to me” equation to arrive at different results in different circumstances. If you think this is what being non-fungible is, then take any job with a proprietary technology, or any other kind of relationship, economic or otherwise, that requires resources to be invested in you. Like being married! Your marriage is a significant investment of resources and so it’s a good idea to try and maintain it. Also hopefully you like each other anyway.

Our lives are not more like dollars. You miss the dining chair of anyone you personally know and do not miss the dining chair of anyone you do not personally know. This is how it has been forever. When evaluating a relationship with a person you do not personally know you will always evaluate it in terms of how they fulfill the needs of the relationship, and they will for you. This is how it has been ever since people started gathering in groups higher than 150. If I don’t know you, all you ARE to me is what you can perform because, get this, I don’t know the other things about you. 

You are trying to find new terminology and blame capitalism for feeling isolated and not knowing enough people. 

"This is not a different kind of relationship"

Why not?

You keep explaining how it results in different behaviors so why wouldn't it also feel different to the people inside it?

Here's another question, if I join a cult, how easy would it be to convince them that I'm so useless that they should just ignore me and drop out of contact with me?

How easy would it be to convince my employer to do that?

You keep saying that this difference must be a *meaningless* difference because the behavior of both cults and businesses are selfish, but I don't understand how that can lead us to the conclusion that there is no important difference between these two evidently different things.

Because the nature of your relationship to them is not different. You wanted a relationship where it wasn’t contingent on you having certain skills, and you weren’t replaceable. Even in a cult, your relationship is contingent on skills and you are replaceable, but the factors around cult recruitment mean that it’s a huge pain in the ass to replace you and the skills you need to provide are not very high. 

Employers would ALSO be reluctant to fire you in certain situations, namely when it was expensive to train you up. That’s what fucking contract negotiations are! “I feel like leaving, what are you going to do to convince me to stay?”

It would be a lot easier than you probably think to convince a cult to ignore you and drop out of contact with you. Because the cults that kill you are actually extremely rare because killing you is a huge hassle that most people don’t want to do and most of the time they can’t do no matter how ruthless they are because there’d be Too Many Questions. Cults rely on psychological manipulation. When you just want to leave, they manipulate you into staying. If you’re being a nuisance or asking too many questions or getting into fights with the cult leader or drinking all the booze, they threaten you with excommunicating you from the cult to keep you in line. And if you don’t stay in line, they do that. They kick you out for being a problem. “Literally nobody ever leaves this cult” is exceedingly rare because they can only do that to people who won’t be missed and won’t have people asking questions, which are not actually as useful to a cult as you’d think because they don’t have assets or connections.

If you want to leave Scientology they threaten and coerce you. If you’re a total nobody that won’t be missed they kill you, but given who Scientology goes after they tend not to be able to. If you’re a problem to Scientology, if you vocally criticize Scientology, you’re out of the cult! They kick you out for being a “suppressive person.” And then they proceed to ruin your life. But you’re not in the cult any more because you’re no longer useful to them. 

The Branch Davidians were a cult and then David Koresh splintered off into a sub-cult by being more wacko than they could handle, George Roden forcibly kicked him and his followers out of said cult with dudes who had guns, but did not and could not have them whacked because it was a huge hassle. Roden was willing to kill people, as evidenced by the time he killed a dude and then Koresh and his followers took over the compound when he went to jail, but it was not an option here.

Aum Shinrikyo had people whacked, it killed people trying to leave and it tried to have critics killed (and in one case actually succeeded) and that’s not really the “cult” part that was the “terrorist organization” part -- you HAD to die if you knew too much. That’s still not the thing you want where they try hard to keep you on, because if you looked like you were faltering they would order someone else to kill you to ensure their loyalty. Everyone was evaluated in terms of their usefulness to the cult’s goals of “perform massive chemical weapons attacks.”

But you look at Aum’s rival Happy Science, who is trying to grift money instead of kill people en masse, and they have all the manipulation and extortion and truly batshit anime they can get their hands on and the founder’s own fucking son left the group and spoke publicly about what a complete pile of shit it is.

These are not different types of relationship and they are neither new nor particular to capitalism.

why are birds so cursed

A Non-Comprehensive List of Birds That Piss Me Off

1. Dracula Parrot. This thing pisses me off like, a bunch

2. King Vulture. the felted craft project equivalent of a haunted ventriloquist dummy

i will never not resent this bird 

 3. Jacana Bird. This is the most unnecessary cursed nonsense. i deserve an apology for having to look at this. I can feel its fingers stroking my ears

No it does not have SIX FREAKING LIMBS. it’s carrying its stupid creepy spawn under its wings. A+ parents but still, piss off. even the normal 2 legged version isn’t much better

put those AWAY.

4. The Shoebill, which i’m sure we’re all sick of hearing about. this thing is the epitome of a crappy photorealistic cgi disney villainy. i despise this bird.

also this is what they look like standing up. i just feel like i shouldn’t have to deal with that, i really do.

5. Inca Tern. truly, hipsters ruin everything

6. Tragopan. it looks like a star wars species, which i dislike on principle 

7. The Secretary Bird. it wears yoga pants.

also i’m uncomfortable with the length of its eyelashes

8. finally, i really dislike this one specific parakeet

in conclusion, these birds exist to haunt me and this knowledge is a burden. birds exist to observe our sin; always watching, they are filled with malice. flee from them

this was intended as an humorous post but based on replies some of u have been genuinely cursed i think

@birdblogwhichisforbirds

Actually, most stuff *isn’t* political; you are just insane

Over the last several years, what was once a niche academic observation has become something of a mantra in left-liberal spaces: everything is political. (Everything is ideological doesn’t quite mean the same thing, but in effect the two assertions are interchangable).

There’s a grain of truth here, as anyone who smoked pot in high school and just, like, had some really deep thoughts will confirm. In order to understand any statement or work of art–in order to communicate–there must exist some shared understandings and beliefs between senders and receivers. Okay, great. Whoopdee doo. That’s some real philosophy major-level shit. You should write a fucking book about. 

Aside from being unbearably tedious, this observation has become an all-consuming basal assumption underlying every left-liberal analysis of social issues and criticism of cultural artifacts. No longer are artists and commentators allowed to insist that some things simply fall outside the lens of our manichean partisan binary. No sir. Anyone who tries claiming their work isn’t explicitly progressive is actually a secret reactionary, and so every work–from sitcoms to video games to journalistic descriptions of city hall meetings–must soaked itself in the treacle of cultural liberalism.

If you’re writing a scene in which a black guy and a white guy are friends, you better fucking include a soliloquy in which privilege is reflected upon. If you’re making a breakfast cereal commercial that doesn’t feature at least one person of every conceivable racial marking, you might as well sign up for a job with the Daily Caller. Anyone who tries suggesting that, hey, I’m sorry I didn’t think it was a big deal that we didn’t make the Honey Nut Cheerio’s Bee gender non-conforming, I swear to god I didn’t think this was political is an idiot liar who deserves something far worse than prison. Why? Because everything is political, and fascism happens the second our vigilance falters in the slightest.

You all see how retarded this is, right? How much it’s ruining people’s brains? At the very least, you can grasp how this hampers one’s ability to just enjoy stuff, let alone to understand its artistic and cultural importance outside the very narrow and stupid and 99% inapplicable lens of contemporary American politics?

I’m sorry, but I’m tried of lying about this shit. There’s nothing political about Kramer storming into Jerry’s apartment. There’s nothing political about Charlie Kelly blowing cigarette smoke into a hornet’s nest. There’s nothing political about the Pink Panther appearance in Owens Corning Insulation commercial.

Yes, you can get a byline or a humanities degree suggesting otherwise, so long as you’re craven enough to ignore context and authorial intent and also you think comprehensibility is bad. Again, good for you. But the rest of us, we are not professional lying shitheads, we have lost patience with the bullshit and are begging you to please shut the fuck up. 

Regarding this thread:

The thing I am talking about is not good nor bad; it can exist in a supportive community or in an authoritarian cult.

I keep trying to figure out exactly how to put what I'm trying to say, but fundamentally the big issue is fungibility.

That is, how easy would it be to exchange me, or an idea, or a building, or an institution, for a different one?

The cult doesn't care about you as a member. The cult cares that nobody ever leaves. You don't have to be a member, nobody has to be an ex-member. If you stay, good. If they kill you, also good.

This doesn't seem like anything about capitalism. I can think of very, very, very few examples of your concept of non-fungubility (outside your personal relationships) in history and ALL of them are very bad.

For the past ten thousand years, people who know you as a person have viewed you as non-replacable, and nobody else did. They would all view you in terms of what you can DO, and those can be compared to other people. The thing you provide that nobody else does is your individual personality and identity, which they aren't considering, because they don't know you.

This isn't a development of capitalism or modernity. This is a development of "living in groups larger than 150 people." There's no other distinction and nothing about this relationship has changed other than "there are no longer extremely valuable positions tied to individual people you don't know, which is good, because if you don't like who is in an identity-locked position you generally kill them."

I feel like I must be exlaining this wrong, because I have said over and overagain,

"Cults don't care about you as an individual, but they care deeply about keeping you in the cult"

And the top rebuttal I hear from all corners is,

"That's absurd, cults obviously don't care about you as a person, they just want you to stay in the cult."

How is it that a rephrasing of my own argument keeps getting thrown at me as though it contradicts what I am saying?

Here's my question: given that the cult only views you as a replaceable asset, why does it spend so much effort trying to recruit you back into the cult if you leave?

Why are the two choices "Stay in the cult and survive" and "Stay in the cult and die?"

Why is "leave the cult and the cult doesn't care?" not one of our choices?

Could part of the psychological appeal of cults be precisely the fact that the third choice is so prevalent outside the cult and so completely rejected as a possibility inside of it?

To state it for the milllionth time, in some groups the dynamic is "Because you have certain skills, you are part of the group" and the unspoken corollary is "And once you no longer have them you won't be part of the group."

In other groups, the dynamic is, "Because you are part of this group, we will ensure you have certain skills".

Now, the unspoken corollary is "And if you can't display those skills we will punish you until you do, or maybe just kill you."

But that second dynamic has an appeal to people, it is very attractive to many of us and it *has* been eroded by processes of capitalism and bureacracy.

Why do I attribute this to capitalism? Because every job works on a "Our relationship lasts only as long as you have certain skills and then disappears."

This kind of thing is not, no matter how often people say it, the only kind of social relationship that has ever existed in large organizations.

I've admitted, again and again, that the kind of non-fungibility I'm talking about is not inherently good, but that does not demonstrate that it has no meaning to people and that it can simply be excised from us without negative consequences.

The cult views you as a replaceable asset. There is a nonzero difficulty in replacing you as an asset, and part of the process of replacing you is killing you. They don’t care about you as a person. They care that none of their assets leave the cult, even if they don’t get to use the asset any more. If people got to leave their cult, more people would leave their cult, and then they would lose a lot of assets. It’s not you they care about, but the aggregate of all the people who would want to leave if they saw you do it.

This is also the first time you bring up skills as part of non-fungibility -- being the king has NOTHING to do with it nor do any of your other examples in that post -- and it’s also just not true. There are groups that will ensure you have certain skills, obviously so, any trade union at bare minimum is going to try and do this.  Any kind of proprietary tech and a lot of other IT jobs do that. Because part of their use for you is that you have a certain set of skills they teach. They try harder to keep you because it is more of a hassle to replace you, but they can replace you. And it was just like that in the days of feudalism.

If you join a tradesman’s guild, they ensure you have training in the trade they -sman. That’s what they do, they are in large part a skills training system. Your identity is only valuable in that you have the skills they teach and it is a pain in the ass to get someone else with those skills they teach; that’s not you being individually important that’s you taking a very long time to train. If you fucking suck at -smaning, they cut you loose. Your relationship is completely contingent on your usefulness up until you get to like retirement age where they place benefits to incentivise people staying longer and thus not making them have to train more people because it’s a pain in the ass. And the guild is only willing to do all that because the primary purpose of the guild is to keep people out of it. 

Like, do you just mean by non-fungibility that you have built up a specific relationship and training that makes you difficult to replace? Because that is exactly the same dynamic. You will always be replaceable to any organization to some degree, because they will have to replace you. People die. If you die, they need another dude who does what you do. They have to have a way to get that dude.

h Your narative about how trade organizations act is completely different from you narraive about how cults act and I don't understand why you are insisting that they are actually exactly the same.

Like, you've mentioned a bunch of ways in which the cult fundamentally differs from the trade guild (e.g. the cult wants people to join, the guild wants to be exclusive; the guild will fire you, the cult will kill you; the cult wants people to stay in at all costs, the guild will cut you lose if you cost too much) but for reasons I can't understand you're asserting that they both have exactly the same reasoning and exactly the same psychological effect on members.

What if those differences are actually, like, important to people and not just irrelevant cruft that doesn't matter?

But the cult does things that are bad and they aren't interested in your personality or overall well-being!

Yeah I've said that like a million times now.

See also my other reply about how people often prefer negative attention to no attention.

I’m not talking about the cult being bad. You’re saying that fungibility is the opposite of your relevance to someone being contingent on the utility you provide to them, and I am pointing out they both have the effect of “their relationship to you is contingent on your usefulness to them.” plus you’re not comparing similar situations

the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leaving is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that, or they kill you. they just don’t often do that because cultist labor is very cheap so there’s SOMETHING you can do.

the guild fires you when you want to stay but they want you to leave. you get fired for being a bad -sman who is a waste of resources, because you’re a net drain. if you want to leave the guild and the guild wants you to stay, they do a similar thing: they try to keep you from leaving but at least instead of killing you they make you agree not to ply your trade where you’d compete with them.

in both cases your relationship with them is contingent on the skills and resources you provide. the only difference from normal is that the cult loses a lot of utility by letting ANYONE leave no matter what skills they have, and the guild puts a lot of investment into its members so wants to ensure they are not wasted.

"the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leavng is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that,"

But they *really* do not want to do that an consider it an enormous step, far more enormous than the company you work for would consider it.

In fact, as you yourself say, they'd rather keep *you specifically* on doing unskilled grunt work even though the supply of outside grunt workers is enormous.

So if they consider you totally fungible with all unskilled grunt workers, why do they value retaining you specifically?

Here's where I think you are going wrong: you say "Their relationship with you is contingent on your usefulness to them" but what you are actually describing is "Your survival in the cult is contingent on your usefulness to them."

I'm asserting that those two things are not the same! The way I'm using relationship encompasses a relationship that ends in murder.

If you are not useful to a cult, it seems to me that generally the preferred options are, in order of preference

They really, really, REALLY do not want to sever their relationship with you, *that's what makes them a cult*.

Like, I'm groping for the right words here but as I use "fungible" here it is totally possible to see someone as disposable and replaceable without seeing them as fungible.

Fungibility here is about a situation in which it is incredibly difficult to conceive of receiving personal attention, either good OR bad, because you are fundamentally identical to other units.

The wooden chair at my dining room table can be disposed of and replaced by a similar unit and so it is fungible in that sense, but at the same time I might go, "Well, trying to use the office chair at the table is really awkward, I miss my old chair."

I'm talking more about the fungibility of the dollars in your bank balance. You couldn't go, "Sure, I got $500 from this paycheck, but I really miss the $500 from my paycheck two months ago, those were some top notch dollars, these new ones just aren't the same."

I'm saying that our conceptualization of ourselves and our place in society is becoming more analogous to the dollar than it used to be.

They do not.

They value nobody leaving. They want nobody to leave, Because they have to invest resources in getting people in, and have extremely negative utility from letting people go, they prefer to put you to use doing grunt work because they might as well get some kind of use from you.

This is not a different kind of relationship, this is the relative weights on each factor driving the “are you useful to me” equation to arrive at different results in different circumstances. If you think this is what being non-fungible is, then take any job with a proprietary technology, or any other kind of relationship, economic or otherwise, that requires resources to be invested in you. Like being married! Your marriage is a significant investment of resources and so it’s a good idea to try and maintain it. Also hopefully you like each other anyway.

Our lives are not more like dollars. You miss the dining chair of anyone you personally know and do not miss the dining chair of anyone you do not personally know. This is how it has been forever. When evaluating a relationship with a person you do not personally know you will always evaluate it in terms of how they fulfill the needs of the relationship, and they will for you. This is how it has been ever since people started gathering in groups higher than 150. If I don’t know you, all you ARE to me is what you can perform because, get this, I don’t know the other things about you. 

You are trying to find new terminology and blame capitalism for feeling isolated and not knowing enough people. 

Sex fantasy that's for asexual people only

I mean I got multiple responses to this effect about Eilverra so that’s out there I guess

Regarding this thread:

The thing I am talking about is not good nor bad; it can exist in a supportive community or in an authoritarian cult.

I keep trying to figure out exactly how to put what I'm trying to say, but fundamentally the big issue is fungibility.

That is, how easy would it be to exchange me, or an idea, or a building, or an institution, for a different one?

The cult doesn't care about you as a member. The cult cares that nobody ever leaves. You don't have to be a member, nobody has to be an ex-member. If you stay, good. If they kill you, also good.

This doesn't seem like anything about capitalism. I can think of very, very, very few examples of your concept of non-fungubility (outside your personal relationships) in history and ALL of them are very bad.

For the past ten thousand years, people who know you as a person have viewed you as non-replacable, and nobody else did. They would all view you in terms of what you can DO, and those can be compared to other people. The thing you provide that nobody else does is your individual personality and identity, which they aren't considering, because they don't know you.

This isn't a development of capitalism or modernity. This is a development of "living in groups larger than 150 people." There's no other distinction and nothing about this relationship has changed other than "there are no longer extremely valuable positions tied to individual people you don't know, which is good, because if you don't like who is in an identity-locked position you generally kill them."

I feel like I must be exlaining this wrong, because I have said over and overagain,

"Cults don't care about you as an individual, but they care deeply about keeping you in the cult"

And the top rebuttal I hear from all corners is,

"That's absurd, cults obviously don't care about you as a person, they just want you to stay in the cult."

How is it that a rephrasing of my own argument keeps getting thrown at me as though it contradicts what I am saying?

Here's my question: given that the cult only views you as a replaceable asset, why does it spend so much effort trying to recruit you back into the cult if you leave?

Why are the two choices "Stay in the cult and survive" and "Stay in the cult and die?"

Why is "leave the cult and the cult doesn't care?" not one of our choices?

Could part of the psychological appeal of cults be precisely the fact that the third choice is so prevalent outside the cult and so completely rejected as a possibility inside of it?

To state it for the milllionth time, in some groups the dynamic is "Because you have certain skills, you are part of the group" and the unspoken corollary is "And once you no longer have them you won't be part of the group."

In other groups, the dynamic is, "Because you are part of this group, we will ensure you have certain skills".

Now, the unspoken corollary is "And if you can't display those skills we will punish you until you do, or maybe just kill you."

But that second dynamic has an appeal to people, it is very attractive to many of us and it *has* been eroded by processes of capitalism and bureacracy.

Why do I attribute this to capitalism? Because every job works on a "Our relationship lasts only as long as you have certain skills and then disappears."

This kind of thing is not, no matter how often people say it, the only kind of social relationship that has ever existed in large organizations.

I've admitted, again and again, that the kind of non-fungibility I'm talking about is not inherently good, but that does not demonstrate that it has no meaning to people and that it can simply be excised from us without negative consequences.

The cult views you as a replaceable asset. There is a nonzero difficulty in replacing you as an asset, and part of the process of replacing you is killing you. They don’t care about you as a person. They care that none of their assets leave the cult, even if they don’t get to use the asset any more. If people got to leave their cult, more people would leave their cult, and then they would lose a lot of assets. It’s not you they care about, but the aggregate of all the people who would want to leave if they saw you do it.

This is also the first time you bring up skills as part of non-fungibility -- being the king has NOTHING to do with it nor do any of your other examples in that post -- and it’s also just not true. There are groups that will ensure you have certain skills, obviously so, any trade union at bare minimum is going to try and do this.  Any kind of proprietary tech and a lot of other IT jobs do that. Because part of their use for you is that you have a certain set of skills they teach. They try harder to keep you because it is more of a hassle to replace you, but they can replace you. And it was just like that in the days of feudalism.

If you join a tradesman’s guild, they ensure you have training in the trade they -sman. That’s what they do, they are in large part a skills training system. Your identity is only valuable in that you have the skills they teach and it is a pain in the ass to get someone else with those skills they teach; that’s not you being individually important that’s you taking a very long time to train. If you fucking suck at -smaning, they cut you loose. Your relationship is completely contingent on your usefulness up until you get to like retirement age where they place benefits to incentivise people staying longer and thus not making them have to train more people because it’s a pain in the ass. And the guild is only willing to do all that because the primary purpose of the guild is to keep people out of it. 

Like, do you just mean by non-fungibility that you have built up a specific relationship and training that makes you difficult to replace? Because that is exactly the same dynamic. You will always be replaceable to any organization to some degree, because they will have to replace you. People die. If you die, they need another dude who does what you do. They have to have a way to get that dude.

h Your narative about how trade organizations act is completely different from you narraive about how cults act and I don't understand why you are insisting that they are actually exactly the same.

Like, you've mentioned a bunch of ways in which the cult fundamentally differs from the trade guild (e.g. the cult wants people to join, the guild wants to be exclusive; the guild will fire you, the cult will kill you; the cult wants people to stay in at all costs, the guild will cut you lose if you cost too much) but for reasons I can't understand you're asserting that they both have exactly the same reasoning and exactly the same psychological effect on members.

What if those differences are actually, like, important to people and not just irrelevant cruft that doesn't matter?

But the cult does things that are bad and they aren't interested in your personality or overall well-being!

Yeah I've said that like a million times now.

See also my other reply about how people often prefer negative attention to no attention.

I’m not talking about the cult being bad. You’re saying that fungibility is the opposite of your relevance to someone being contingent on the utility you provide to them, and I am pointing out they both have the effect of “their relationship to you is contingent on your usefulness to them.” plus you’re not comparing similar situations

the cult doesn’t want to let you go when you want to leave and they want you to stay because people leaving is bad for their resources. if they want to kick you out of the cult, they do that, or they kill you. they just don’t often do that because cultist labor is very cheap so there’s SOMETHING you can do.

the guild fires you when you want to stay but they want you to leave. you get fired for being a bad -sman who is a waste of resources, because you’re a net drain. if you want to leave the guild and the guild wants you to stay, they do a similar thing: they try to keep you from leaving but at least instead of killing you they make you agree not to ply your trade where you’d compete with them.

in both cases your relationship with them is contingent on the skills and resources you provide. the only difference from normal is that the cult loses a lot of utility by letting ANYONE leave no matter what skills they have, and the guild puts a lot of investment into its members so wants to ensure they are not wasted.

Regarding this thread:

The thing I am talking about is not good nor bad; it can exist in a supportive community or in an authoritarian cult.

I keep trying to figure out exactly how to put what I'm trying to say, but fundamentally the big issue is fungibility.

That is, how easy would it be to exchange me, or an idea, or a building, or an institution, for a different one?

The cult doesn't care about you as a member. The cult cares that nobody ever leaves. You don't have to be a member, nobody has to be an ex-member. If you stay, good. If they kill you, also good.

This doesn't seem like anything about capitalism. I can think of very, very, very few examples of your concept of non-fungubility (outside your personal relationships) in history and ALL of them are very bad.

For the past ten thousand years, people who know you as a person have viewed you as non-replacable, and nobody else did. They would all view you in terms of what you can DO, and those can be compared to other people. The thing you provide that nobody else does is your individual personality and identity, which they aren't considering, because they don't know you.

This isn't a development of capitalism or modernity. This is a development of "living in groups larger than 150 people." There's no other distinction and nothing about this relationship has changed other than "there are no longer extremely valuable positions tied to individual people you don't know, which is good, because if you don't like who is in an identity-locked position you generally kill them."

I feel like I must be exlaining this wrong, because I have said over and overagain,

"Cults don't care about you as an individual, but they care deeply about keeping you in the cult"

And the top rebuttal I hear from all corners is,

"That's absurd, cults obviously don't care about you as a person, they just want you to stay in the cult."

How is it that a rephrasing of my own argument keeps getting thrown at me as though it contradicts what I am saying?

Here's my question: given that the cult only views you as a replaceable asset, why does it spend so much effort trying to recruit you back into the cult if you leave?

Why are the two choices "Stay in the cult and survive" and "Stay in the cult and die?"

Why is "leave the cult and the cult doesn't care?" not one of our choices?

Could part of the psychological appeal of cults be precisely the fact that the third choice is so prevalent outside the cult and so completely rejected as a possibility inside of it?

To state it for the milllionth time, in some groups the dynamic is "Because you have certain skills, you are part of the group" and the unspoken corollary is "And once you no longer have them you won't be part of the group."

In other groups, the dynamic is, "Because you are part of this group, we will ensure you have certain skills".

Now, the unspoken corollary is "And if you can't display those skills we will punish you until you do, or maybe just kill you."

But that second dynamic has an appeal to people, it is very attractive to many of us and it *has* been eroded by processes of capitalism and bureacracy.

Why do I attribute this to capitalism? Because every job works on a "Our relationship lasts only as long as you have certain skills and then disappears."

This kind of thing is not, no matter how often people say it, the only kind of social relationship that has ever existed in large organizations.

I've admitted, again and again, that the kind of non-fungibility I'm talking about is not inherently good, but that does not demonstrate that it has no meaning to people and that it can simply be excised from us without negative consequences.

The cult views you as a replaceable asset. There is a nonzero difficulty in replacing you as an asset, and part of the process of replacing you is killing you. They don’t care about you as a person. They care that none of their assets leave the cult, even if they don’t get to use the asset any more. If people got to leave their cult, more people would leave their cult, and then they would lose a lot of assets. It’s not you they care about, but the aggregate of all the people who would want to leave if they saw you do it.

This is also the first time you bring up skills as part of non-fungibility -- being the king has NOTHING to do with it nor do any of your other examples in that post -- and it’s also just not true. There are groups that will ensure you have certain skills, obviously so, any trade union at bare minimum is going to try and do this.  Any kind of proprietary tech and a lot of other IT jobs do that. Because part of their use for you is that you have a certain set of skills they teach. They try harder to keep you because it is more of a hassle to replace you, but they can replace you. And it was just like that in the days of feudalism.

If you join a tradesman’s guild, they ensure you have training in the trade they -sman. That’s what they do, they are in large part a skills training system. Your identity is only valuable in that you have the skills they teach and it is a pain in the ass to get someone else with those skills they teach; that’s not you being individually important that’s you taking a very long time to train. If you fucking suck at -smaning, they cut you loose. Your relationship is completely contingent on your usefulness up until you get to like retirement age where they place benefits to incentivise people staying longer and thus not making them have to train more people because it’s a pain in the ass. And the guild is only willing to do all that because the primary purpose of the guild is to keep people out of it. 

Like, do you just mean by non-fungibility that you have built up a specific relationship and training that makes you difficult to replace? Because that is exactly the same dynamic. You will always be replaceable to any organization to some degree, because they will have to replace you. People die. If you die, they need another dude who does what you do. They have to have a way to get that dude.

wait a second

they made a live action anime adaptation of Saint Seiya

with a Western cast

and it came out LAST WEEK and I have not heard a single person talk about it even while discussing that "which anime should get a live-action Hollywood adaptation" Jump poll

Saw a trailer for that yesterday and thought: "Huh. Well I'm going to completely ignore that."

oh yeah it sounds terrible

but you would think that people would talk about how terrible it is!