Severa

kontextmaschine:

You know what I don’t hear about much anymore? Cosmetic “plastic” surgery. That used to be a bigger thing in the culture, in the 90s you heard about face lifts, neck lifts, breast lifts, breast implants (silicone AND saline), “tummy tucks”, liposuction all the time.

Is it because people don’t do that so much anymore, the fad wore off, it was an artifact of a high-disposable-income boom time, it was really about the boomers confronting themselves as mortal and decaying things for the first time?

Is it because we’re more body-positive about being lumpy fucks, or that we invest our appearance neuroses into going to the gym instead? (As if the jogging and aerobics fads, NordicTrack, ThighMaster hadn’t been a thing before?)

Is it just no longer novel, something we need to work into our culture, now dog bites man? (I remember later mini-booms of attention around Botox, butt implants, collagen injections that then faded)

Is it that it fit into a authentic/phony binary that used to be a lot more central to understandings of culture – notions of “selling out” and “keeping it real”, white picket fence suburbanism and antidepressants equally disdained as false happiness?

After a quick Googling, every source seems to indicate that plastic surgery is still increasing in popularity. For example:

Also this:

Matarasso credits the uptick in plastic procedures to a bevy of industry, societal and economic factors.

There was a time people would be “outed” for getting plastic surgery. Now many have embraced the procedures, often posting pictures of their recoveries on social media.

…

The growth could be attributed, Matarasso said, to the greater public awareness about the success of the surgeries and procedures, brought on by better education and advances in technology. Fifteen years ago, he said, a nose procedure could put someone in the hospital for two to three days. Today, it takes just a few hours. Many of the non-invasive surgeries, he added, didn’t exist even a decade ago.

If plastic surgery is less drastic (Botox is way more popular than those surgeries listed above, by an order of magnitude) and less noticeable, that would make a difference as well.

Mike Stoklasa’s visible aging reminds me of my own mortality to a distracting and alarming degree.

As a good democrat, of course, you have been taught to fear systems [which manipulate public opinion] only in the case that they have an evil genius, or at least a cabal, behind them. Thus “conspiracy theories.” But in fact, you should find a decentralized, self-coordinating system, one in which ideas are filtered and organized by memetic evolution rather than intelligent design, far more creepy and dangerous.

For one thing, it is a heck of a lot harder to shut down. And, as we’ve seen, the result of the filtering process is not always a good one.

This is the truth at the bottom of the Modern Structure: it is out of control. It is best seen as a mindless and automatic beast. Its capacity for destruction is obvious.

Finally Moldbug makes a more-or-less good point.

In retrospect, the written-constitution design is another case of the pattern of wishful thinking that appears over and over again in the democratic mind. From the perspective of a subject, political stability is a highly desirable quality in a sovereign. We should all be ruled by governments whose constitution does not change. The error is to assume that this outcome can be achieved by simply inscribing a desirable constitution. This is a quick dive off the pons asinorum of political engineering, the quis custodiet problem.

Says the man who wants to turn America into a joint stock company. Jesus Christ.

Also, Moldbug’s argument against written constitutions is that either the political order is so stable that a constitution is superfluous, or it’s unstable in which case the meaning of the written constitution will shift over time, making it “a fraud”. Of course, the idea that a constitution might function by being somewhat flexible but still stickier than normal laws – the meaning of “cruel and unusual punishment” shifts over time but the length of a senator’s term doesn’t – never seems to occur to him. All he can see is the purported dishonesty, not the pragmatism. What an unsupple mind! Actually, you see this with a lot of anti-democratic thinkers. They notice, correctly, that democracy doesn’t really function on its own purported terms and they call it a failure, when really it ought to be understood on let’s say Burkean grounds. (Moldbug would also condemn the constitution on Burkean grounds, but that’s besides the point.)

Though I do think that the US constitution is too inflexible and we rely too much on Supreme Court precedents relative to amendments, so Moldbug is at least adjacent to correctness.

Also, Moldbug, when he’s in his cod Hobbes mode, makes the same mistake as Hobbes: assuming that political power can ever be unitary. Hobbes/Moldbug think that you can create some single absolute monarch with ultimate authority over everything, but in practice even in the most unitary states power has to be shared, with his ministers or functionaries or whatever, who can and will form their own fiefdoms. That is, even if you call someone an absolute monarch, that will never fully reflect political reality, which leads to the same complaint Moldbug has about written constitutions: stated authority will diverge from actual authority. The formal structure of government is implicitly taken to be reified automatically. Which doesn’t mean that absolute monarchy is bad necessarily, but it can’t be good for the reasons Hobbes/Moldbug say. Divided power is the reality of all governments to some degree, whether or not that’s ever made explicit.

femmenietzsche:

the-clockwork-crows:

femmenietzsche:

“America’s comprehensive social credit system arose as a byproduct of airport security” is going to be an interesting point of historical trivia for at least the next millennium.

Explain?

Several aspects of airport security in the US – the No Fly list, reliance on computers to do the sorting – contain in embryo the elements of a full-on social credit system like the one that keeps getting hyped (or overhyped) in China. It’s easy enough to imagine that system of opaque, algorithmic, unchallengeable punishment spreading to other aspects of American life over time.

For the record, although I worry about this kind of surveillance a lot, if you made me dictator I would go all-in on all of this – cashless society and trackable driverless cars too – without a second thought, in the Bismarckian spirit of riding with the tides of history, rather than against them

MOLDBUG: Repeatedly fantasizes about imprisoning his political enemies

TRUMP: Repeatedly fantasizes about imprisoning his political enemies

MOLDBUG: Calls black people “Negroes”

TRUMP: Somehow hasn’t been caught on tape calling black people “Negroes” 

ADVANTAGE: Trump

I know this isn’t exactly a constructive critique, but I’m genuinely shocked by how much Moldbug sucks. He’s a stone cold high IQ idiot. Even when he almost makes a good point he dances past it each time, partly because he’s a bad writer, partly because his generalizations are consistently off center from reality, partly because he’s gratuitously antagonistic and overshoots the mark. It’s really bad! On a paragraph by paragraph level!

That said, “the Cathedral” is a solid and reasonably insightful pejorative for America’s meritocratic monoculture, and it is important to draw attention to the flaws of that culture. It’s unsurprising that’s outlasted everything else. Though AFAICT, Moldbug incorrectly sees it more as an evil cabal, rather than as a class with its own class interests, for the reasons listed above.

Ah, now Moldbug is talking up friend-of-the-podcast Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson… and he misidentifies him as an Anglican, when he was actually a lifelong Puritan with some Anglican sympathies. And in an attempt to make the Loyalist side seem more reasonable than it was, he ignores that Hutchinson spent as much time trying to talk down intransigent British officials as paranoid colonists. Hutchinson was actually pushing the sort of conciliation (repeal of the Stamp Act) Moldbug denounces. (Anyway, Moldbug rather confuses trying to avoid provoking a crisis with failing to crack down once a crisis is underway.)

He also says that “The Declaration [of Independence] shouts at us.”, which is a truly strange misrepresentation of its tone. It’s ponderous!

It’s not that hard to make a case against the American Revolution – it really was at least 50% a paranoid spasm – but he still falls short. For one thing, he simply assumes that having the law on one’s side is sufficient to put one in the right, which totally misses the point if the dispute is about the constitution, about which laws are valid in the first place. Maybe he’s a Hobbesian who holds that laws ought always to be followed, but that’s not an axiom, it’s a point in dispute.

Also, this:

So: we’ve completed the operation, at least as far as the American Rebellion is concerned. We’ve created a clean separation between the parasite, democracy, and your understanding of the 18th century, and we’ve replaced the infected Whig mass with a small dose of healthy Tory history. Presumably the counter-democratic nature of the latter is obvious, if not definitive.

In retrospect, your former support for the Whig cause was a classic received opinion, installed without any sort of thought on your part. In other words, it is not something you were reasoned into. It is to your credit as a thinker that you’ve let yourself be reasoned out of it

is bog-standard sleight of hand. You replace someone’s conventional wisdom with the conventional wisdom of some subculture and congratulate them for thinking outside the box. If you’ve ever had a relative skeptical of the mainstream media parrot Fox News talking points (or whatever left wing equivalent), this is just a more niche version of that.