mrrrrrrrrrp meow meow meow :3

this is the weapon they killed Shinzo Nyabe with

the social utility of the concept of "kink" is that it compartmentalizes sexual activity. if something is a kink it is obviously not normative (i.e., the holder of the kink is not trying to make a claim about universal values or purposes when it comes to sexual activity) even if it is normal (in the sense it is statistically common and/or socially acceptable), both within society at large and within individual relationships (a kink can be confined purely to the metaphorical bedroom)

this is why a breeding kink is not the same as being part of the quiverfull movement, and why bdsm is not "normalizing abuse." kink is in that sense a really useful social technology to have, because it lets you make a distinction between desire and values, between id and superego, between social roles you might inhabit temporarily with your partner or partners and more fundamental aspects of politics and identity

and i think some of--not all, and maybe not even most, but some--of the appeal of more traditionalist values and gender roles relies people thinking such a separation doesn't or can't really exist. one of the ways in which that kind of divisible conception of desire and identity threatens conservative conceptions of sexuality is that it says that even if at the lizard brain/fundamental sexual appeal level of your psyche those relations appeal to you, you do not actually need them to prevail in society at large to still have a satisfying sex life, or even a satisfying relationship.

all of which is to say (contra an old tweet i saw recently) "breeding kink" isn't a contradiction in terms! it's actually a really useful concept! but also that it's useful to conservatives of all social stripes to pretend that this obvious feature of kink doesn't exist--the separation of desire and reality, the ability to, basically, gamify sex ("cops and robbers for grownups with your pants off," to borrow a phrase)--because if you are attentive to this feature, efforts to freak the normies out with the sexual practices of certain subcultures are a harder sell.

Hello, I am Kontextmaschine. I am 27 and not entirely happy with my life.

I had a livejournal, got it way back when I was the kind of person who had a livejournal. Now I see the people still there still are, and I seem to have become the kind of person who has a tumblr. Maybe I’ll still keep it up, split topics between them, we’ll see.

I will write about history, modern society, and my life. I will often write as if these things are indistinguishable.

Also sometimes there will be happy hardcore.

The title comes from an idea I once had to write a column tracing the history and precedents of events in the news, like some sort of “context machine”. But we all know the story of modern journalism, and I guess this is the place for that, now.

I made it Kontextmaschine because a machine dedicated to historicism is obviously German.

pushing the 'no such thing as inborn talent' line seems downright cruel sometimes

oh, no, it's not that i had any advantages over you. i just put in more work. no don't look at people who are getting far better results than you with half the effort, they don't exist. just bang your head against the wall harder, you lazy piece of shit.

you can say 'your skills can and will improve with practice' without saying 'the amount of practice you put in is literally the only thing that matters'. and you should, because the second thing is a fucking lie.

I think the biggest part of why these are both true is that hard work and practice matter a lot more than natural talent for getting into the top 5% of ability at something. If you want to get "good enough" just to enjoy it for your own sake, hard work is the way to go. But you usually need inborn talent to get to the top 1% or 0.1% or 0.01%, and unfortunately power laws and the winner-take-all dynamics of many creative or athletic fields (which is usually what these conversations are about) mean that money and prestige only come to that 0.01%.

This is true in an abstract sense - in a lab, I can sit someone down and use my mythically infinite science powers to make them work and they can hit the top 5% with median talent. And of course its field-dependent; the top 5% specialists in idk early rpg games MIDI archiving work weren't selected for their talent, they are the only ones doing it.

But for the fields where we think this convo is relevant, in real life if you aren't in the top X% of talent, your progress in the field is going to be lower than those who are, which you will notice. You aren't studying in a box, you are taking tests, doing applications, competing, etc. Those talented people will be intrinsically and socially rewarded for their work, while you will not be. And particularly if you have talents in other areas, keeping up the grind as opposed to pivoting is quite a challenge.

This is subjective but I bet in fields with a large merit spread, the correlation between top performers and top innate talent is going to be quite strong.

(TL;DR - talent matters more than hard work because talent predicts and promotes hard work)

Really like how the Bible tries to have it both ways on human sacrifice. "It's abominable to burn children alive to appease the gods but also you absolutely must if we ask you to. But we won't." Iron Age centrism.

Real gothic dracula shit going on there: "Oh, yeah those child sacrifices give us so much power. You shouldnt do it, but with that juice we can smite so many heathen neighbors, absolute king tier strength boost. And you will get into heaven for sure if you do it.

But dont do it. Because its wrong."

@kontextmaschine has been confirmed deceased after someone called for a welfare check following him going MIA for a week. Rest easy, fellow traveler.

H/t @selentelechia on Twitter:

Ah, strange to slowly figure this out from memes after the fact. That is really sad :( I imagine for a lot of newer folks here he may not be well known, as he mainly wrote a personal diary-style blog for the last few years, but @kontextmaschine is a long time 'community member' (whatever that means) who has been a fun, thoughtful, and very unique writer and friend for a lot of us. I will miss you, and many of us here will remember you. You will always be 'one of us', like we all are, and that mattered to many.

hard to think of a period anything like as consequential that’s of a similar span—maybe the napoleonic wars, or the thirty years’ war. But even then only in Europe. World War One; but in context it feels like a moment of transition, the last great war of the nineteenth centur prefiguring the great cataclysms of the 20th. And even then, it was a comparatively European affair.

I think WW1 can at least 'make the argument' not for the specific war itself, but how much it destroyed centuries-old systems that never recovered. Its really about the decade - The Qing Dynasty fell in 1912, after all; the Russian civil war dragged into the 20's. While WW2 did build a brand new world from the victors side, the challengers turned out to have a very short shelf life; not at all the New World Order they promised.

The stakes of WW2 were certainly higher, much higher, but those long tail impacts of each decade seem to be comparable.

My sister got called materialistic in a tarot reading at a fair and it scarred her. Nobody hates gypsies like she does.

"Nobody hates gypsies like she does" Having been to Eastern Europe, I promise you this is not true.

2023: missives from desktop tumblr suggest that per the latest update my mutuals are being hunted by some kind of grotesque clown. staff assure us this is driven by user feedback.

the person who tagged this #unreality is about to have the worst but unfortunately funniest day of their life

The US is deeply segregated not only along racial lines, but along class lines as well: from housing to schools to healthcare, many of our major institutions are designed to allow rich people to keep poor people as far away from them as possible.

Where do rich and poor people interact with one another? If I'm reading this study right, it's restaurants. Which restaurants? They find that some of the most cross-class locations in the country are cheap full-service restaurants: "Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Chili’s and IHOP."

The more I think about this finding the more it makes sense. Places like Olive Garden are some of the only locations in US society which are simultaneously "nice" enough to draw in high-income diners and cheap enough to attract low-income diners. Rich people go to, say, Outback Steakhouse because they see it as a cheap and easy meal that's better than fast food, poor people go because it's one of the closest things to a nice steakhouse you can eat at without dropping $100+ per person.

Other cross-class locations: churches, libraries, credit unions, alcohol stores, the DMV. Locations which worsen class segregation: golf courses and country clubs, bars, museums.

This reminds me of the most fantastic book liveblogs I've ever read (by ozy thingofthings). It's Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Afrofuturist scifi author Samuel Delany.

(full but paywalled review by that liveblogger here, although the visible portion of the text should give you an idea of what a weird and fantastic book this is)

A lot of it is about The Venus Theater, which showed adult films until a push to close all the porn theaters also shut it down in 1970. It was pretty normal to jerk off in the theater and cruise for (mostly m/m?) sex – both of the sex worker and non sex worker variety (although the line was very blurry). It was normal to e.g. jerk off your neighbor.

Delany was a college professor at Amherst the time he was a Venus regular. He had social and sexual relationships with a large number of people he met at the Venus Theater, including homeless people – he kept up correspondence with many of them, including at least one who went to prison. When establishments like the Venus shut down, one reason he didn't like this was that he thought it was unhealthy for society to get rid of spaces with high levels of inter-class contact.

Delany draws a distinction contact and networking. The Venus was contact, and more formal "people of various backgrounds who are interested in X, come mingle" events are networking. And if you get rid of interclass contact spaces, interclass networking spaces have to 'take up the slack' of facilitating connections, and they... can't do it. Example about parenting from the linked blog post:

And here's Delany on the value of public spaces that facilitate sexual contact:

After reading the above Delany quote I sat back in my chair, grinning wildly at the ceiling. You may not like it but this is what the optimal take looks like

Probably the first time in over a year I have seen a legitimately new take, game recognize game.

It's that easy

Inspired by another argument over what “fascism” is

Is there such a thing as a genocidal anarchist? Because that would pretty thoroughly undermine a lot of these statements about what “fascism” is.

I feel like the track record of anarchism in life has generally involved a lot of organized violence against civilians - I don't think they have ever had the power to go full Genocide but I feel like the inclination is certainly there. That is not some rousing condemnation of anarchism, since their opportunities for power were very limited, and all almost a hundred years ago, in times and places where mass violence was the order the day. But I think its enough to lean towards not giving anarchism any level of advantage in this category over most other radical or even normal political groups.

I mean if you don't want to go with Geoges Sorel or Robert Michels you have a lot of the Ukranian "anarchists" during the russian civil war who Makhno had to constantly tell to stop trying to exterminate the jews.

Yeah I don't think people like Sorel provide any evidence, he (from what I know) never made any serious attempts at actual political practice or power. Generally I think the "journal publishers" provide scant evidence for what a political ideology is going to be like.

The Black Army is ofc a far better example, and as you say it was not exactly a time of peace and tolerance. But, and this is truly the faintest of defenses, what side in the Russian Civil War wasn't killing Jewish civilians? That and few rubles got you a meal for the day, it was very ideology-agnostic. Which says mountains about anarchism's ability to restrain human nature, for sure, but at least doesn't make them stand out in the opposite direction.

Inspired by another argument over what “fascism” is

Is there such a thing as a genocidal anarchist? Because that would pretty thoroughly undermine a lot of these statements about what “fascism” is.

I feel like the track record of anarchism in life has generally involved a lot of organized violence against civilians - I don't think they have ever had the power to go full Genocide but I feel like the inclination is certainly there. That is not some rousing condemnation of anarchism, since their opportunities for power were very limited, and all almost a hundred years ago, in times and places where mass violence was the order the day. But I think its enough to lean towards not giving anarchism any level of advantage in this category over most other radical or even normal political groups.

yurinatsu

London was saved from urban highways but the tactic that saved it was NIMBYism… maybe local vetos and planning inquiries aren't always bad? No, if only I had been in charge the plan would have been good instead of bad.

I often use the Dutch highway plans for my go-to to make this point, but this is a great example too - in all likelihood it would have been better for this plan to go ahead. None of the "great old walkable European cities" were like that unchanged through the past 200 years - a lot of the modern urban friendliness is very recent, like 90's or later recent. In the 1950's most every European city was pivoting to cars, which was a valid enough experiment to try with the technology, gas prices, and knowledge base of the time. European cities built tons of motorways and car-focused infrastructure during the post-war years.

What happened was that these cities learned that (some of) that was poor infrastructure, and pivoted in response to the times. That is in fact the entire NIMBY trap; the idea that mistakes are irrevocable, so we must freeze everything to prevent a single mistake. This motorway seems like a bad idea, but London would survive - they can demolish the roads (a common, not-hard thing to do!), build new neighborhoods, etc. If you have a city government that can actually build things, you can do that! The ability to respond to reality is the pearl beyond price, well worth the occasional bad highway project.

(I think this article imo is overstating how likely this plan even was to begin with personally, its taking "blue sky" stage plans and saying they were defeated like they were ever seriously going to go ahead unchanged. The actual plan that could have happened was more modest. But that doesnt matter too much)

Definitely a peak based-and-Yglesias-pilled moment; politics, alas, will never end.

icons for the soul