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mbti-notes · 3 years

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Anon wrote: Hey. I'm INFJ. I want to ask about relationship problems. The relationship in question is between my ESTJ mother and I. Generally, I would describe our relationship as close and loving, but there is a conflict, and that came from our opposite ideology and political beliefs.

I want to say before continuing that we are neither American or European, so our ideology and politics shouldn't be understood from the "western" side of things, though to simplify by comparison, my views could be described as leftist and my mother's as conservative. I should also add that I used to hold her worldview when I was younger, but changed once I was old enough to form an opinion of my own. This caused my mother to imply many times in our discussions that I am "brainwashed" and dismiss me as "too young" and "too ideological". I should add that the latter (ideological) is a valid criticism. Still working on that.

Otherwise, I often tried to persuade, then later find middle ground with her, to no avail. We ended up arguing many times, until we decided to not talk politics with each other anymore. So, what's the problem, you might ask.

Recently, the political climate in my country got intense. Heated, even. I won't go into details, but there are protests again the government by young liberals/leftists-equivalent of my country. Many of my good acquaintances joined the protest. The government used police force against them, and it got violent. There are young unarmed protestors who were teargassed, beaten, and shot with rubber bullets and high velocity water jets. Some protestors were heavily injured. Some protestors were arrested and incarcerated in horrible conditions. My mother and I agreed to not speak about politics, so I said nothing.

Until my mother, right infront of me, with another family member, openly mocked the protestors, made judgments about them based on the goverment's propaganda, called them a nuisance, and implied that they "deserved it". It's not about her discussing it, but it's about how unempathetic she was when she said those things, towards those young people my age, with similar ideology to me, and how apathetic she was when she said that "nothing's going to change anyway". It was the first time that I saw my mother in that angle, the complete lack of humanity in her words. It still haunts me until now.

So my question to you is, how does one deal with that? I love my mother, I think I always will. I also know that she loves me, or at least the part of me that's still her child. But for a moment, I loved her less, and that frightened me. I began to wonder, what would happen one day if we have to actually take sides, because things are getting worse in my country, not better. This adds to other issues I have in my life and made me more depressed. A part of me tells me that I should tell her about how I feel, but how do you tell someone you love that they're one of the reasons for your sadness?

I'm sorry if this is stupid. I'm sure that this feeling I have is one-sided, and I wonder if I'm being selfish or ungrateful. Maybe it's because I'm too sensitive these days, so I thought if I have an outside neutral opinion, it will help illuminate my clouded mind. Thank you. I hope you had a good summer break!

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The sentence that sticks out at me the most is: "It was the first time that I saw my mother in that angle, the complete lack of humanity in her words." I would argue that the problem doesn't lie with her. In fact, nothing about your mother had changed. She was still the same woman as before she uttered those words. The issue arises from your perception of her and the standards by which you evaluate her.

I follow world affairs very closely, so I think I know which region you are speaking of. One of the biggest problems in the manner that people think and talk about politics is the tendency to stereotype. Stereotyping is basically a form of cognitive oversimplification. It makes your thinking ability fast but also very dull and blunt, unable to understand situations with the nuance and sophistication that is required for good judgment and decision making.

It doesn't matter which country/culture you are from, there is always some variation of "right versus left". Why? Because in every society, there will always exist an underlying tension between those who don't want change and those who do. You may label these two opposing forces as right vs left, conservative vs liberal, regressive vs progressive, etc, but the fact of the matter is that these labels are gross oversimplifications of people's political belief systems.

When you divide people along an oversimplified dichotomy, it's too easy to stereotype them, in terms of believing that all people on each "side" hold all the same beliefs and values. Stereotyping goes along with the natural tendency of humans to be tribal. You start to view those on your side as being intellectually and morally superior to those on the other side. This leads to dehumanization and even demonization of the other side. In essence, you lose the ability to empathize with people, as long as you believe that they aren't on your side or the "right" side.

It seems that your political thinking has become too stark due to how extreme the situation has become. You have the feeling of fighting for your life because of the way that the situation has been handled by authorities, as they are indeed putting people's lives in danger. Your feelings about the situation are completely valid. But you fail to recognize that your mom's feelings about the situation are also valid. Certainly, there are hard-core fundamentalists and extremists out there that you can never reach because their beliefs and values are not based in any form of reason. However, I don't think your mom fits into that category, does she?

Do you know what it means to have no humanity? You are accusing her of something like psychopathy. Is that really true of her? I don't think so. She said: "nothing's going to change anyway". I don't consider this an expression of "apathy", as you assume. This is an expression of hopelessness. In that sentence, there is a real possibility that your mom is sympathetic at heart, but she disagrees that the chaotic actions of the protestors (i.e. the method) will lead to any meaningful change... and she may be absolutely right about that.

You haven't grasped the nuances of your mom's beliefs and values because your mindset has been so hardened by the extreme nature of the political conflict. This means that, when you engage in political discussion with her, you are unable to: 1) acknowledge how she feels, 2) acknowledge that there is some reason/merit/validity behind her beliefs, and 3) be open-minded enough to meet her halfway.

Put another way: If you met someone who wouldn't acknowledge your feelings as valid, dismissed all of your beliefs and values as completely wrong without proper investigation, and only sought to "convert" you, would you want to communicate with them? Probably not. This is the unproductive attitude that you now both bring to the table. This is the divisive attitude that arises when a conflict becomes too polarized and everyone is forced to "choose a side".

Unless one of you learns to listen and communicate more effectively, what will change? You say that you have tried to find middle ground with her but always end up arguing. Not finding middle ground is one thing, but getting caught up in interpersonal drama is a whole other thing. The option to amicably agree to disagree is always available. If you genuinely respect someone and respect their freedom to form their own beliefs, it shouldn't be hard to agree to disagree. Why do you find it so difficult to let her be her? Ultimately, you're not really interested in "middle ground"? You just want her agreement? Getting caught up in arguments all the time, especially on a recurring basis, indicates poor communication skills that stem from a troubling lack of objectivity. The more you argue with the intent to shame/change the other person, the more you push them away from your side, and the more myopic you get in your own beliefs.

You seem to have fallen into the trap of categorizing her into the tribe that you view as the enemy of your tribe, namely, the authorities that are cracking down on you young protestors. You've started to view her as the enemy, now you can't empathize with her, and even accuse her of having no humanity. You now consider yourself morally superior to her. If there is any possibility that she could be your ally, you've slammed the door on it.

You describe a very dire and desperate political situation that affects everyone, BUT, it doesn't affect everyone the same way. Different people have very different ways of dealing with intense emotions like fear, insecurity, grief, despair, helplessness, etc. Due to inferior Fi, ESTJs have extremely low tolerance for intense and uncontrollable emotions. Remember that one's ability to utilize the inferior function is not much better than a young child. If ESTJs can't neutralize or deflect their sense of powerlessness quickly, the burden of the emotions will quickly destroy them. I don't think you've really understood the thought process behind your mom's words and what is really motivating her "apathy".

Just because someone doesn't agree with your methods, doesn't mean that they don't have anything in common with you. Politics isn't just about good vs evil, as in, if you don't stand up for good, then you are evil. Everyone has their own way of looking at the situation because everyone has their own interests to take care of first and foremost, and everyone has their own ideas about the best methods to pursue. This is true for both you and your mom. It is possible to agree on beliefs but disagree on methods. For example, I'm assuming that you care about this cause so deeply because you care about your future. Sure, your ideas about the future differ from hers. But, certainly, you are both interested in securing your future, aren't you?

History has shown us that young people are always more willing to fight for causes because: 1) they would suffer less immediate material loss than the elder generation, 2) they have fewer life responsibilities, obligations, and commitments to take into consideration, and 3) their lack of life experience sometimes makes their thinking too simplistic when visualizing future implications.

Your interests aren't fully aligned with your mom's in this situation, perhaps because you are from different generations. However, this doesn't mean that your interests don't align in other important ways. At the end of the day, your mom is probably deathly afraid of seeing YOU on the news being beaten to a pulp and disappeared by the police, right? And it may be the case that she's passing harsh judgment on the protestors because she's trying to discourage you from meeting their horrible fate? That's hardly lack of humanity.

To be a good critical thinker, you need to learn to be more objective. Objectivity means understanding all aspects of the situation, or as many as you can manage. Objectivity and empathy often go hand-in-hand. You won't be able to empathize well unless you acknowledge that there might be some aspects of the situation that you're not seeing or understanding. When you take more time to get to the bottom of someone's thought process and why they really feel the way they do, you will discover all sorts of openings to influence their political beliefs in a friendly way. But when you can't even acknowledge that the other side might have an important point to be made, because you are so hardened in your stance, you've created a dead end for yourself.

#politics #empathy #emotional intelligence #debate #disagreement #conflict #infj #infj relationships #communication #ask

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drumpfwatch · 5 years

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How to Convert Someone into a Conspiracy Theorist

Today I decided I’d take a break from specific ragging on Trump to talk about the cult of personality surrounding him - or, more specifically, cults in general.

Now let me be positively clear from the get go - I am aware that anti-science rhetoric and cult thinking provides both sides of the political spectrum. Anti-vaxxers tend to be leftists, for instance, and conspiranoia about the involvement of the government and/or large corporations in any given tragedy is pervasive. I used to be 9/11 Truther, and I have always been a liberal. So this isn’t targeting any particular political belief. This article - and myself, frankly - are interested in how smart people get pulled in by stupid things.

So I thought for a while about which one conspiracy to use as an example, and after much wringing of hands and internal arguing I decided I’m just going to pick “The Moon Landing was a Hoax” people as my example. Because that one is fairly apolitical and the only people who are going to get mad at me for that one are moon hoaxers.

Yeah, sorry guys. You’re wrong, and everyone who isn’t you is laughing at how stupid you are. We’ll get to why sooner or later, but for now let’s talk about how you got there.

But see, that’s the thing. You’re not stupid. Not statistically speaking, anyway. I’m sure there are legit crazy and stupid people in your community - there are in every community - but statistically, you’re an average everyday ordinary human with hopes, dreams, a job, and some common sense. But here you are, believing stupid things. How did you end up there?

It all starts with what I like to call “logic bait.” See, the thing about reality is that it’s often more complicated then common sense would lead you to believe. An indoctrinator will often dangle one of these logic baits in front of you, telling you “isn’t it suspicious that this is what it’s like?”, without mentioning that if it were that simple people at, say, NASA would have to be morons.

A perfect example of this is lunar regolith. One of the first things a moan hoaxer will tell you is “Isn’t it strange that the foot prints make these perfect shapes on the moon? Those shapes only happen in wet sand, and there’s no moisture on the moon so the moon dust can’t be wet! Those famous boot print pictures are a hoax!” At first that almost sounds convincing. Ignoring the fact that special effect artists and space scientists would have to be idiots to overlook something like that if they were trying to hoax people, why do those boot prints appear so pristine?

Well, the reason is that moon dust ain’t like earth sand. Moon dust - called regolith - doesn’t have any moisture to make it stick together, but there’s another thing the moon doesn’t have, and that’s erosion. Without an atmosphere, there’s no wind, and without wind, the hardened and sharp pieces of rock that end up on the surface from meteor impacts and moon quakes never get eroded down into fine points. What that means is instead of being a fine round rock, regolith is basically made of tiny sharpened spikes. This was actually a huge problem for the Apollo astronauts, the regolith kept getting in their space suit joints and restricting their movement and was almost impossible to get out. But this also means that unlike sand, which has little friction and will just roll around because it’s more or less circular, regolith has sharp edges and thus, a high friction. When you step foot on the moon, you’re basically basically shoving all these pieces together and hold that way because there’s no wind to blow them away, and their edges get caught against one another.

That’s the bait. And if you buy it, you get hooked. What follows is what I call “the reel”. You ever wonder why conspiracy theorists love to produce and distribute documentaries? They then drop a bunch of facts at you, one after the other, without explanation, and keep on doing it without interruption.

See the thing about “logic bait” is that it can be any number of logical sounding arguments. The moon is too hot in the day, and too cold in the night for humans to reasonably survive (the astronauts always landed on parts of the moon that were in dawn/twilight hours). There are belts of radiation that if a human were to pass through, would outright kill them (these belts are mobile and don’t encompass the entire Earth, and thus can be easily accounted for). The shadows shown in the pictures don’t make any sense (regolith is also highly reflective and causes reverse lighting - things that should be in shadows aren’t). There are no stars in the background of the pictures of the moon, and there’s no atmosphere so there should always be (this has to do with exposure levels - if you exposed it enough so you could see the stars, you’d not be able to see the things going on on the moon at all.) It doesn’t matter, any one of these could be used to hook you into their talk, but the rest are used as further evidence. Throw one on top of the other, and suddenly the case becomes convincing. Throw those one after the other without anyone to rebut it, and people can be convinced. From there, you end up on the ship with everyone else. And it’s there where the real indoctrination begins.

There could be another separate post entirely about the cult techniques used to draw people into these conclaves of people, but that’s a different topic. I’m interested in the fishing for conspiracy theorists. Needless to say, however, the techniques are similar. Once you’re on the ship, you’re encouraged only to associate with people who believe the moon landings never happened, to ingratiate your denial into your identity, and all those other wonderful, funderful things that cults do. But there’s another thing that happens unique to conspiracies.

If everyone basally accepts that the moon landing never happened, then you don’t even need to think about the obvious stuff. There’s a reason the first argument for the moon landing hoax is never the one about the “flag that still waves without their being wind”, it’s obvious to anyone with even a modicum of skepticism that it’s only moving because someone just touched it, and that it’s just taking a little longer to slow down because there’s no friction, but by the time someone’s on the ship they’re not thinking like that. To them, the moon landing obviously never happened, and any evidence to suggest it didn’t is just accepted at face value by most people. It’s another log on a burning fire.

But it doesn’t stop there. Often, after conspiracy theorists finish giving their pitch, they’ll pretend to ask themselves the question “if this happened, why doesn’t everyone know about it?” and that leads to the actual conspiracy. “They” are covering it up! “They” don’t want you to know about it! Why? Who the fuck cares, I’ve only ever heard that question answered once with an answer that wasn’t “because they think we’re dumb sheeple who need to be controlled” or whatever, and with an answer so absurd that a minute of thinking about it would reveal it’s folly.

This is a protective armor of sorts for the mind. If a cultist sees a person writing, say, a blog post online against Moon Hoaxers, they’re conditioned to believe that I’ve been deceived by this conspiracy. And when they see an actual scientist with actual credentials who actually knows what they’re talking about talk about it, they’re in on it! They can’t be trusted, they’re evil! Every one of them has a reason to lie to you, and apparently none of them have even the slightest modicum of morals to step forward and call their comrades out. Either way, they can’t be listened to.

Next, they believe that each and every piece of evidence invalidates the Moon Landings, so you have to refute every. Single. One of them. This is standard fare for dogmatic beliefs. You try and jump through a hoop, they pull it back. You manage to make it through anyway, they set up another one, and they keep doing this until you get tired - or they run out of hoops. But they probably won’t, because each and every one of those little reel lines and baits from earlier is a hoop, along with every single other stupid thing they thought of, and every aspect of it.

You throw that into the indoctrinated mindset, and the human desire to never admit they’re wrong and what you end up with is a conspiracy theorist, and some of them are just in too deep. Some do this as a job, it’s how they make their money and they will never give up. Others are just physically incapable of changing their mind, either because of strict indoctrination or stubbornness. Some can be helped. But that’s not what this article is about.

No, the conclusion here is that ignorance is not a crime. Your everyday average Jane Doe doesn’t need to know how regolith functions to go about their daily lives, they don’t need to know about the Van Allen radiation belts, just like how I don’t need to know the proper legal protocol and methodology for the operation of a crane. I am many things, but a construction worker is not one of them.

You’re not stupid if you’ve been tricked into believing a conspiracy, be it the Flat Earth, the Moon Hoax, Trutherism, or that Trump is a good president. But you are ignorant, and you need to be willing and able to look at the matter objectively. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing, especially when a very charismatic person is the one delivering the information, but you must choose.

#Wednesday Essays #by Phoenix

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nobszone · 7 years

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Hate and Anger

(With apologies to Jonathan Pie)

So, what plans do you all have for this week?

Me? I’m gonna go to work, try out a tabletop RPG with some friends, and get set for my trip down to the heartland next week for the Solar Eclipse.

I mean, I’m just trying to carry on as normal.

Because isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Whenever something disturbing happens in this country, we’re just supposed to carry on as if nothing is wrong, right?

Actually, this week isn’t normal for me. This is a break from normal, because these days “normal” for me involves me getting annoyed at people. And who I get annoyed by depends largely on the day.

On some days it’s the right, because they have the most control they’ve had over the Federal Government since the Civil War, and they’re using it for the sole purpose of shitting on Barack Obama’s legacy no matter how much it fucks up the nation in the process.

On some days, it’s the left because they’ve still shown a complete and total obliviousness to why they lost in 2016, and now they’ve become obsessed with diversity as long as it’s not diversity of opinion.

I mean, some days I just need a break from that. Some days I just want to go to my place of work and hang out with a red-tailed hawk that happens to reside on the premises.

You know what she does? She just perches in a tree all day. No terrorist is gonna stop her from doing that. She doesn’t attack people, she doesn’t annoy them, she minds her own business. Good on her.

Oh, I’ve also been playing Rainbow Six. Because I get to pretend the terrorists in those games are Neo-Nazi’s. In fact, in one of the games, the terrorists are Neo-Nazi’s.

Right now, Tom Clancy might be the only thing keeping me from starting down on the path to serious radicalization.

You guys know why there’s so many radical leftist groups out there? Why AntiFa, BAMN and others exist? Why people are willing to condone violence from the left?

Because in this day and age, “carrying on as normal” feels apathetic. You don’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything.

I mean this whole weekend, my social media pages were flooded with what was going on down in Charlottesville, and since I wasn’t out there protesting or counter-protesting or whatever you want to call it, I felt like my only choices were to either carry on as normal, or write a Twitter thread.

I only made that one post about it here, because what was I supposed to do otherwise? Write a Twitter thread on “what if these people faced REAL oppression” or go on Facebook saying “FUCK THIS COUNTRY AND FUCK WHITE PEOPLE” or just write some feel-good message about unity or solidarity or how we’re better than this?

I’m sick of it, folks. I don’t want to Tweet anymore. I want to fucking scream.

I wanted to fly down to Charlottesville, go up to every one of those alt-right fuckers, and make them proper skinheads by ripping out every one of their goddamned hairs, and then smash in their faces for good measure.

But I couldn’t do that.

Why?

1. It’s technically illegal in this country to assault someone.

2. Apparently, if I get mad, or if I fight back, they’ve won.

Because we have one weapon those assholes don’t, and that’s love, right? We’re not going to fight them with fistcuffs, or pepper spray or anything like that, we’re just gonna sing fucking My Little Pony songs at them. That’ll show those punks!

Look, I understand the need for nonviolence. You’ve all heard me express that viewpoint on a constant basis.

I understand that if a guy is standing on the corner and doing nothing except shouting at the top of his lungs, if you run up to him and sock him in the face for no reason besides you don’t like what he says, then you’ve lost. You’ve given him the moral high ground, and you’re getting hauled off to jail.

I get all that.

But I gotta be honest with you folks, as the days go by it gets harder and harder for me to stick with that mindset.

Because right now? I’m not feeling the love. To be perfectly honest, I feel nothing but hate.

I feel nothing but hate for a group of people who think plowing their car into a crowd of civilians and advocating for an ideology that was responsible for the worst conflict in the history of mankind is going to “Make America Great Again.”

Who the fuck told them that?!

David Duke was down there with those assholes saying “This is what President Trump wants.”

Who the fuck gave him that idea?! That’s what I want to know.

And yes, I know the alt-right doesn’t represent the GOP or all the Conservative voices in America. They don’t even represent all white people. I get that.

But it’s time to stop pretending these people just showed up, and we have no idea why.

Trump is up there, looking flabbergasted that people that support him are committing this violence. Why would they do it? What is their goal?

Just check their fucking Twitter feeds. Look at the pictures of them doing the fucking Nazi salute. It’s not hard to figure out.

For better or worse, there is an entire generation of white Americans who looked at the KKK and the Nazi’s and apparently ISIS and said “You know what, they were on to something.”

Why can’t we talk about that?

Why should we pretend that this has nothing to do with ideology? That this has nothing to do with the growing radicalization of the hardline elements of the right wing? That this is not an extension of the racism that existed in this country’s past?

I mean, they went to Charlottesville for a reason. Despite the fact that it’s one of the more progressive cities in the US, it also has a history of segregation. Hell the apparent motivation for the protest was the removal of a state of Robert E. Lee.

They went there for a reason.

The alt-right subscribes to a twisted version of Conservative ideology, but it feeds off of the biases and prejudices that still exist in parts of America. If you pretend that’s not the case, it doesn’t go away.

We need to have a conversation about this.

There are sensitive issues in this country, and they need MORE discussion, not LESS.

And don’t think the left is immune to criticism here, either. A guy at Google wrote a memo saying he was concerned that certain political views were frowned upon, and Google fired him for it, thereby proving his point.

I mean what the hell am I supposed to do if I work at Google someday? Never talk about my beliefs because I might offend someone? What the fuck happened to freedom of speech?

But this isn’t the day to talk about the cntrl-left. This is the day to talk about the alt-right.

Why? Because when it comes to my own line in the sand, my own definition of terrorism, the alt-right crossed it first.

An innocent person is dead because of the actions of a member of the alt-right.

These are FACTS. They are undisputed.

This is something that should not have happened. IT HAS HAPPENED.

Oh and by the way, someone dressed up in riot gear and carrying around an AR-15 does not need protection from someone who has opposing political views.

Seriously, if they weren't carrying military grade weapons, I’d have told them to fuck off.

Anyway, please excuse the fact that this post is a tad more emotional than what you’d usually see around here, but I just don’t know how much longer I can put up with this.

Because a little more than a year ago, when Trump won the nomination, I wrote a post that talked about the message the alt-right was sending, and that message is ringing loud and clear today:

Be afraid. Be terrified. And give into that fear, embrace the darkest part of your soul, and do everything to them that they’ll do to us.

And seeing as the cntrl-left has no problem repeating that message to their followers, I think it’s only a matter of time before we see more bloodshed.

Fuck it, maybe we should all get Rainbow Six. We can resolve our differences with fantasy violence. Everyone wins.

I need folks to do terror hunt with anyway.

#charlottesville #rant #alt-right #cntrl-left #I'm trying followers #I'm trying real hard to be the shepard

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breakingarrows · 5 years

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Discourse Conversations During E3 2019

Watching press conferences and livestreams of various talking heads discuss whatever video game thing they saw that day is only part of E3. Another major part is the social media discussions that unfold faster and accumulate more conversation than any ten hour IGN livestream could. However, like any form of discourse being developed on Twitter and elsewhere, it can be easily lost if you aren’t in the moment, and nearly impossible to find due to some of the best commentary coming indirectly. This is a small attempt to capture some of that discourse that unfolded during this week of E3 2019.

Before E3 even started we already had a large social media argument about “spoilers” for the press conferences. Essentially: people went back and forth on whether or not to share/publish/promote leaks of things like, “This game surprise is going to happen!” While things like Breath of the Wild direct sequel being announced is a fun secret to watch live, a headline report spreading online beforehand isn’t something to condemn. The sort of corporate love-fest E3 already is will only continue when gamers are actively antagonistic to anything other than the publisher message being put out. As many of these discourse conversations will go, this is the same old song and dance we have seen for over a decade. If you don’t want to see anything before a corporation hits “go” on a press conference, just stay offline and don’t bitch about it at whoever it is that’s publishing details earlier than the publisher dictated commercial. People trying to frame this as hurting developers feelings should redirect that energy towards unionization and fair pay advocacy, not, “Please don’t publish details early, these people worked really hard to sell me this game.”

Perhaps the biggest thread-spawner was the reappearance of Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt Red at the Microsoft press conference. Developer CDPR also owns GOG, which has previously tweeted a gamergate related gif of Postal 2, a, “did you just assume their gender?” response tweet from the Cyberpunk account, and using the #WontBeErased for GOG games. Eurogamer has a rundown of it all here. Then this week, you have Keanu Reeves making a surprise appearance in the game Cyberpunk 2077 as well as on the Microsoft stage to announce the release date. The internet goes wild, fueled by post-John Wick 3 hype and long-lasting Keanu love. Then an advertisement in-game for ChroManticore appears, bearing the image of a presumably trans-female with a large erect dick and the phrases, “Mix It Up,” and, “16 flavors you’d love to mix.” CDPR’s explanation via Polygon was: “This is all to show that [much like in our modern world], hypersexualization in advertisements is just terrible,” Redesiuk continued. “It was a conscious choice on our end to show that in this world — a world where you are a cyberpunk, a person fighting against corporations. That [advertisement] is what you’re fighting against.” Responses were generally critical of the ads message, intentional or not, as well as critical due to CDPR’s past actions. “Also, as a note, and this is all i'm gonna say: in proper context, that ad could absolutely be a meaningful statement in a cyberpunk world, and we don't know the context. But also, sadly, CDPR has burned all their trust and have given us little reason to take them in good faith.” [source] That about sums up most of the opinions coming from trans critics, CDPR has failed to properly respect them in the past, why should this be treated in good faith?

Discussions about cyberpunk weren’t limited just to the one game, as it also extended a previous conversation about the origins of cyberpunk as a genre and if the genre has any inherent themes no matter its adaptation or usage. One thread making the rounds argued that cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic, playing on fears of Eastern Asian cultures spreading and taking over the world. Other pushed back against this, citing early Japanese media that heavily influenced western cyberpunk fiction, not the other way around. The opinion I most agreed with was, “Maybe I'm being naive, but everyone keeps saying ‘Cyberpunk is good’ or ‘Cyberpunk is bad’ or ‘Cyberpunk is X’ as if cyberpunk is a cohesive, monolithic thing. It's a genre that has been around for decades which countless different creators have contributed to, and all of those creators were trying to say different things within the genre.” [source] “I am beginning to feel like strongly emphasizing genre as an acting force is kind of formalist nonsense? Like, cyberpunk or whatever isn't any *thing*--it's just a set of ideas some people have used, and other people can take or not take or use or not use.” [source]

Another big topic was the continuing saga of games as non-political and the back and forth between media and developers/publishers/PR in the lead up to a game’s release. Games have messages, but their creators, whether intentionally or due to PR, won’t engage with those ideas during pre-release coverage most of the time. Those sorts of conversations don’t happen until post-release, because the previews are generally focused on the gun-feel or summarizing slideshow pitches. There is also a disconnect between what “political” even means. “They think ‘political’ means being explicitly literalist about what every single moment means instead of being in any capacity complex or open to audience interpretation, for better or worse.” [source] Chris Avellone, longtime games writer, had a statement in a VG247 article about whether stories can be apolitical. “If you’re purposely pushing an agenda or point of view in your game – especially a real-world one that’s clearly divorced from the game world – and you’re dictating that perspective as correct vs. asking a question or examining the perspective more broadly, then it’s left the gaming realm and the ‘game’ has become a pulpit.” However, in an example like Far Cry 5, a game that doesn’t “push an agenda,” actively, still promotes a specific perspective or viewpoint as valid with its endings, as I detailed before. “But, another (very reasonable group, to which I largely subscribe) would say that ‘asking questions that emerge from perspectives in the fiction’ is *exactly* what being political is--interrogating our relationships to each other and the world.” [source] This topic also seemed to collapse in on itself when Watch Dogs Legion was announced, playing on the fears of a post-Brexit London and an authoritarian surveillance state, and coopting the “welcome to the resistance” which is mostly mocked by leftists online whenever someone from the right is kicked out of their group. Definitely not political.

This is also a very tired subject. Ubisoft for years, and other publishers as well, have avoided talking about their games messages relating to the current events during events like E3. Continually the press laments and pushes back against it on social media and sometimes in previews, but the cycle continues. “You know how I've argued ‘We need to stop debating if games are art and just do the job of treating them like art?’ It's also time to move past ‘Can games be apolitical?’ and just focus on continuing critical cultural analysis. Do the work, make it unavoidable, shift the frame. To be clear, I think we needed to spend some time on that earlier debate just to have a mass-level, stakes-setting conversation. But at this point, the best way to push back on ‘No, no, we just make games just ask questions’ is to show how those games actually offer answers.” [source] This is true, but it’s also something others (mostly non-staff people) have been saying for years now.

The annual, “E3 is weird huh?” conversation also happened, like it has for at least the past five years. In May it begins with, “Man what is E3 going to be like this year?” Then E3 happens, everyone does their shit, and at the end they go, “Boy what’s next year going to be like?” The major difference this time was Sony’s complete absence from the show. Despite not having a press conference or show floor presence with demos and presentations, games media still had plenty to talk about, including E3’s relevance. It seems to be the same old song and dance, with the ending statement being, “Well I guess we’ll wait and see what next year is like.”

Another repeated conversation was that of video game streaming platforms, with Stadia having another presentation pre-E3 and Microsoft coming out with console and internet streaming plans for later this year. No real advances were made in this conversation other than confirmation that, yeah, Stadia streaming for those with data caps on internet or smartphone use are going to be fucked if they want the best presentation, which of course they would. Not a ton of talk about the details behind how developers would be paid, though going by how streaming has been slowly killing the movie and music industries, it is not going to be good. Of course the usual access and archivist arguments continue, which I am 100% behind.

New game details sparked lots of speculation, mostly in regards to a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, one of the few good Zelda games. Being a direct sequel to a previous entry and having a trailer with a darker tone, mean Majora’s Mask became a recurring subject in regards to what this follow up could be. The inclusion of visuals and audio cues seemingly from Twilight Princess also fueled the “darker” Zelda sequel. Some also speculated about a playable Zelda, which, don’t get your hopes up people, this is Nintendo after all.

A game closer in release and in my heart is Final Fantasy VII Remake, which looks to be a big fucking hot mess. Broken up into parts, each seemingly equivalent to a mainline Final Fantasy game in content, this first one releasing next March (we’ll see about that) will only cover the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII. You know, that section that takes about five hours to complete in the original release. Now that’s going to be extended into probably 30+ hours, which means lots of new original content coming from Square Enix, who are great at adding great new content to the already existing universe of Final Fantasy VII! Despite that I’m still very interested in getting my hands on it and playing through it all. I really like the opening hours of Final Fantasy VII, I just have little faith that they are going to do anything interesting with the new content and not make it feel like filler. It appears Jessie will have a much more expanded role, but still no word on the crossdressing or squats minigame. Combat has been very much changed, and everything is super overproduced in terms of visual flairs, which might explain why there will be TWO blu-ray discs! TWO! Red Dead Redemption 2 is the only other game to do this!

Back to Nintendo, Animal Crossing will now allow players to choose their skin tone, something that has been asked for a very, very long time now. They also confirmed they will let you use whatever hair type you want, which some people took and ran with as equivalent to them saying trans rights, which, no? “You guys please these are fucking table scraps. This is not pro-trans this is just a bare minimum feature for thee love of god.” [source] “Not only is that animal crossing thing a bare minimum there weren't hair restrictions in new leaf anyway???” [source] This was giving me flashbacks to when Soldier 76 was shown to be gay in a tertiary comic from Overwatch and people went nuts despite it not being represented in the game at all. Also, “quick reminder that nintendo fired a support team member bc of ppl making trans flag stages in smash bros” [source] [source]

There was some good news, Ikumi Nakamura came out and presented her new game Ghostwire to rapturous reception. A female creative director, a visually interesting trailer, and an excited jump at presenting her game made her the darling presenter alongside the likes of Keanu Reeves. She was previously an artist on Bayonetta, The Evil Within and its sequel, and made her own Twitter account during E3 to celebrate with her fans. Some of the reaction is probably rooted in how Asian women are treated as adorable and infantilized when compared to others, but she’s been having a good time gathering all the fan art of herself on Twitter, so for now it’s a nice break from the usual depressing nature of AAA publisher presentations.

Lastly, this wasn’t so much a part of the discourse but just an amazing moment, Dr Disrespect was banned from Twitch and thrown out of E3 after he live streamed in a bathroom without censoring other people’s faces, violating a California privacy law. As Alex so wonderfully stated, “this is our generation’s version of Capone going down for tax evasion.”

There was probably a lot of other conversations going on and this isn’t even the full depth of what I tried to find but boy does going back on timelines and searching for threads and responses and quote tweets and subtweets take way too much time. Anyway hope this proves to be a good time capsule for E3 2019 discourse and can’t wait for next year where a majority of these topics are readdressed again and again and again. Video games!

#E3 2019 #Video Games #Discourse #Criticism #writing

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jmrphy · 7 years

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On turning left into darkness

In the past week, many associates of mine on the radical left have expressed grave concern about my recent cultural politics. If you haven’t been following, here’s my best shot at a succinct, impartial recap. I have been blogging about what it means to engage intellectually with smart people on the right. By “smart people on the right,” I mean people with non-trivial intellectual projects defending right-wing perspectives, potentially even including some that appear horrifying and/or evil. I use the word “smart” only to exclude from the mind two images that have come to define “conservatism” in the left-wing imagination: infantile and fundamentally disingenuous politicians, and then mindless, racist armies of trolls. Specifically, for instance, I have expressed interest in the writings of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug); I recently hosted a podcast with psychologist Diana Fleischman that included discussion of controversial topics such as “human biodiversity” (some say this is a euphemism for racism and some say it’s an empirical reality). Obviously not the usual talking points for a left-wing intellectual, but to be clear nobody is accusing me of writing or saying anything particularly impeachable. I did receive some very thoughtful concerns, however, so one goal of this post is to clarify at least one or two of the most fair and important criticisms I have received. This is a caring thing to do, and I still believe deeply in caring.

On the other hand, any culture of absolute kindness becomes a conservative system of unspoken violence insofar as painful truths get repressed and all participants become deformed over time. It is because I genuinely love my friends on the left that I am stepping up to publicly state, and seriously pursue the implications of, dozens of difficult questions we have basically had an unspoken pact to not speak about for perhaps decades now.

If you are one of my comrades on the left who is generally overexposed to human docility or illness, I must also warn you, caringly, that you might be alarmed or confused by what follows. Many of you are now accustomed to a particular script: comrade is “problematic,” group pulls moral alarm, comrade begs forgiveness and (even in the best of cases, not to mention the horror shows), comrade dies a little on the inside, group feels reassured comrade will do no harm, group grows old and gray wondering why they never changed the world. Well, I have seen this script performed too many times to play along any longer; over the past several years I think I have learned a thing or two about why our groups don’t change the world. One reason is that we punish our own for grappling with questions we pretend to understand but are in fact to fearful to seriously consider.

So at the same time this post will charitably respond to some left-wing critiques of my project, in the same breath I am going to unapolagetically push further outward on my perspective that so horrifies many of you. I will no longer fight rearguard battles against fearful and disingenuous people on the left who would rather condemn something than admit they don’t have the time to read and process it; but neither am I here to cozy up with right-wing currents, as so many on the left assume of anyone who starts really speaking up and speaking out. I should like to become a worthy opponent of the smart wings of the new reaction, rather than merely pretend they are stupid; for I consider it a great embarrassment that the revolutionary left has yet to generate anything as genuinely interesting and creative as The Dark Enlightenment or Unqualified Reservations. If so-called left-acclerationism is our best response, then we’re in deep trouble (see below). Fortunately, I think we can do much, much better, but we won’t know until we try.

One of the key objections put forward by my more thoughtful critics from the left is the following. They argue that it is ethically and/or politically wrong to entertain a frame of debate in which racist implications appear likely. For example, my podcast with Diana is ethically or politically bad because by even discussing biological differences across groups, I am effectively increasing the perceived legitimacy of notions that can and will be used to support racist ideas or policies. I think this is a reasonable concern based on a plausible model of culture. Yet after reflecting on this for several years, I believe this idea is fatally mistaken in ways that have not yet been fully grasped or written down anywhere (that I know of, anyway). Here is a first, short attempt.

This idea that it is ethically or politically wrong to entertain a certain frame of debate is a fatal error in both the normative and empirical sense of that term. First, on the normative level, the idea of refusing to engage people with certain frames of reference dehumanizes people who have no access to anything other than those frames of reference. In short, this objection writes off large swaths of humanity as inhuman. I believe that this monopoly on humanity claimed by educated leftists is now, on net, a more violent and reactionary phenomenon than any legitimacy that would be given to racism by even talking with a proper racist (let alone decent people who merely have dicey or controversial positions). What many on the left ignore is that today large swaths of human beings are, through no fault of their own, socialized into right-wing and often racist frames. There exists a large number of people who are racist because they were sociologically doomed from birth to be racist (e.g. poor undeducated white kids in racist families and geographies are statistically doomed to be racist). Their humanity has been robbed from them (as it’s increasingly robbed from everyone).

It is my view that the revolutionary left is absolutely obligated to treat such people as the humans they truly are despite the dehumanization they have been subjected to. When the “humane” leftist says thou shall not engage with any racist “framing” of a conversation, they are saying that large swaths of essentially innocent people do not have the right to think, speak, or participate in public life, i.e. this position coldly writes off the past and continued dehumanization of literally millions of people. Leftists think they are being radically humane, guarding the last line of defense against the collapse of human equality, but the horrifying mistake nobody is willing to reflect on is that this is actually saying “keep those filthy animals out of the little circle of humanity I still get to enjoy with my educated friends.”

The genuinely humane, revolutionary-emancipatory position in contemporary culture is that we must dare to do the cognitively and emotionally terrifying, and dangerous, work of extending whatever last shreds of humanity we have, to everyone we possibly can. Therefore, the truly humane, caring, revolutionary gambit today ethically requires us to “engage with racist frames.” As a militant antifascist, I also believe in drawing lines across which absolute refusal or physical resistance becomes the correct move: to me, the clear line is if someone is actively engaged in violence or directly inciting it. I would not have a conversation with a neo-Nazi marching in my town throwing bottles at immigrants; I would, with my community, physically remove them from my town. All I am saying is that to draw this line of militant non-engagement at the level of “thinking and speaking with a racist frame” would require us to tell millions of people to go die in the cesspool they were born into. We have been effectively doing that for decades now, and not only does it fail, but it appears to engender or intensify novel mutations of racist politics (e.g., carefully non-explicit white “identitarian” movements, etc).

Continuing from the previous part, the second problem is as follows. This notion that it can be wrong, a priori, to consider certain frames of reference is a grave error in the practical or strategic sense as well, because to cast off so many people as inhuman casts off all of the humans we would need to change anything. It empirically dooms the left to never achieve the fundamental transformations we claim to be fighting for. If you listen to smart people on the right, they are currently laughing their way to the end of humanity as the left continues to push deeper and deeper into the mistakes we are actively refusing to learn from. It is very difficult for the few revolutionary leftists still alive to confront this, because it’s genuinly so vertiginous and horrifying that it really approaches what is cognitively and emotionally unsurvivable for genuinely caring people: there are at least some objective reasons to believe the human species may be genuinely crossing the threshold at which exponentially increasing technological efficiency makes the absolute end of humanity an objective and irreversible empirical reality. I think it’s debatable where we are at in that process, but it seems undeniable this question is now genuinely at stake and I simply don’t see a single person on the revolutionary left seriously considering this with the radical honesty it requires.

If folks like Srnicek and Williams and the “post-capitalism” types are the best the radical left has to offer on this front, I’m very sorry but we’re in serious trouble. No disrespect to those folks, they are all very good and smart people. But that is exactly the problem. A really profound problem nobody on the left wants to consider is that being a “good person” imposes psychological constraints on your most basic capacities to think and express yourself honestly. To understand this, we need to take a little historical detour.

Recall that capitalist society only emerged and grew on hypocrisy as the standard mode for cognitively and emotionally managing the necessity of having to brutally exploit each other to survive. This hypocrisy is what the word “bourgeois” means, and it is nothing less than the naturalized lifestyle of everyone who qualifies as a “good person” in modernity. Because living as a human being under capitalism requires hypocrisy, being empirically correct about what is happening and how the world functions (science) as well as interpersonally adequate to each other (what is called “caring,” or saying/doing what helps specific other people in specific moments) are mutually exclusive to a substantial degree. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown with several years of research that people who identify with the political left are disproportionately interested in “care” as a value; conservatives have a more multi-dimensional “palette” of moral foundations). To be clear, I am in fact deeply interested in the value of care, which is one reason I find myself sociologically on the left-wing of political culture. The unique challenge I don’t see anybody on the radical left seriously confronting is how our committment to care comes with the cost of certain systematic errors we happily ignore by dishonestly repeating over and over that we ignore them because we “care.” The issue here is that, it is programmed into the nature of a capitalist bourgeois society that to pursue unlimited “care” means that you objectively do not care about changing reality. This is because changing something as complex as “society” requires an extremely sophisticated empirical rigor deeply at odds with the care we also need to exercise in order to cooperatively change things together as diverse human beings. How to achieve the optimal balance of these genuinely contradictory tendencies is, in my view, one of the million-dollar questions for any serious revolutionary political thought today.

(An aside. The first and most stupendous person to see all of this in the early stages of capitalist modernity, who so clearly saw the doomed destiny of any society organized on hypocrisy, that he preferred to sacrifice his public “goodness” to produce monuments of honesty so outrageous he hoped they would raze the hypocritical order altogether, was, of course, Rousseau. Now, Rousseau did not squash the rise of bourgeois hypocrisy, but he had demonstrable effects in generating the modern revolutionary left tradition as we know it, from the French Revolution to Fanon and beyond. There are many good critiques of Rousseau, but if there is one example of how a sincere individual can craft a life that contributes to genuinely collective, world-historical waves of revolutionary political change, it is surely Rousseau. If this aside does not help you to see the world-historical difference between my own perspective and the neo-reaction, then it is unlikely any other citations ever will.)

In my view, this tradeoff between being correct about how the world works and caring for each other enough that we can cooperatively change it in the direction of peace and abundance for all—this is perhaps the most vexing and urgent puzzle for a genuine revolutionary left today. Yet remarkably I am not aware of a single person genuinely risking themselves on solving it, so I’m going to try. At present I am working on understanding the mechanisms whereby such an important problem has somehow been so stubbornly invisible to so many of us for so long. My wager is that we if we can truly understand the mechanisms of our own blindness, we will find pathways to the holy grail of the revolutionary left tradition: the flourishing of all human beings in peace and abundance, immediately, without recourse to all of the right-wing solutions that get raised in direct response to the left’s willful neglect of exactly this impasse.

It is because of this tradeoff between being correct and caring that I have recently become interested in what I have been referring to as the “smart” right-wing. Many people are concerned that my recent interest in intelligence means that I’ve become an IQ elitist or something. On the contrary, I am keenly suspicious of the politics of high-IQ subcultures, precisely because I know there is a trade-off between being correct and caring. Because we care about each other, there are certain things we refuse to see or else refuse to tell each other about what is really true. That’s fine, and perhaps a hard constraint of the types of beings we are on the radical left. But “smart” far-right people, who do not give a fuck about how people feel, they might just be the only ones capable of telling us those truths we need to process if we are ever going to have a sufficent command on reality to generate the systemic transformations we believe in. But at the same time, I am highly skeptical that the evacuation of care is a viable political project, because warmth is a condition of life for we creatures who require the sun to live, we creatures who are literally composed of a once-exploded star. I think right-accelerationists are wagering on the possibility that, if technologically super-charged hypercapitalism is understood correctly (hence the call to minimize care), that is objectively the most likely path for the possibility of surviving, perhaps into the becoming of something post-human.

For instance, a remarkable feature of Nick Land’s current writing is his obsession with coldness; I have never read anyone who so conscientiously endorses the absolute evacuation of care as a political project. Many on the left find this so evil they are resolutely insisting that if one so much as speaks his name with even one non-negative adjective in the same sentence, that very act is enough to force the speaker out of the publicly defined circle of “good humans” into that outside zone of cast-off inhumanity (consider that Land’s handle is @outsideness), via the same intellectual-social process I described above. If we self-servingly cast off human beings as if they are sub-human, we cannot then feign surprise and indignation if they say, “OK then! I’ll go off to become one with the superintelligent eugenically produced cyborg overloads you’ll be enslaved by in a couple of generations and I will laugh my ass off all the way to the singularity!” That’s the vibe I get when I browse Nick Land’s ongoing work, and when I look at the objective reality of runaway global finance and the tech sector, it does not seem implausible that something like this could potentially be underway. Of course I find that horrifying, which is why I am calling absolute bullshit on the people who say that it’s “too evil to engage.” On the contrary, it’s too alarming not to engage.

The more evil you think someone is, the greater should be your concern to ensure there is not the slightest chance they understand something better than you. If they are so evil, and they understand even one tiny thing you don’t, perhaps they are off using that edge in knowledge to engineer you out of existence. This suggests to me that when people say, “intellectual engagement with person X is prohibited,” what they are actually saying is “we are so afraid they might be part of the superintelligent cyborg army coming to enslave us that, even if they are literally preparing to, we do not want to know about it, even if there is a chance that we can still stop them!” And this is where I get off the train to nowhere, for this is where moderate respectable leftism (including most currently existing “radical” variants) converges with the most insiduous and cowardly conservatism. If there is some chance that hyperintelligent cyborgs are preparing to overtake humanity once and for all, because there is some chance that for generations now they have been operating on a model of the world we made it our pact to never consider, then I’m going to take a real look. Not everyone has to be comfortable doing so themselves, but at this point I think that any honest, decent, thinking being on the radical left will at least allow me to try.

I believe that currently, a dirty little secret on the the left is that for some people, the “left” is an agreement to protect each other’s right to look away from the most horrifying and potentially tragic realities of planetary life today, to (implicitly) secure amongst ourselves the last bits of interpersonal warmth available on the planet, agreeing to allow the rest of humanity’s descent into irreversible coldness. It helps to explain why, if you even approach these issues with the slightest indication of analytical coldness, you have to be ejected from the warmth cartel, for ejecting such existential threats is a condition of its survival. But I believe it has always been the vocation of the revolutionary left, properly understood, to risk its own survival on deploying just enough analytical coldness to engineer the unique machine that would take as an input the left’s unique material resource (warmth or energy via care) and produce as an output non-linear, systemic dynamics the ultimate equilibrium state of which would be peace and abundance for all. What that machine looks like is the question, and this is only a formal statement to illustrate the revolutionary left position today as an engineering problem. There are many reasons that have been adduced as to why such a machine cannot exist, and I do not pretend to offer responses to them here. I am only suggesting that any revolutionary left today, worthy of the name, would need to “solve for X,” as it were. The point of the engineering metaphor is not that everybody in the revolutionary movement will need to be an engineer, not at all; the point is only to show that any left-revolutionary project, to succeed, will have to solve this engineering problem.

What does this mean for revolutionary politics, in plain conversational terms? By putting all of our eggs in the basket of care and kindness, the radical left is now suffering from an engineering crisis it does not have enough engineers to even notice. In short, making revolution is a complex practical problem we are not solving because we are now generations deep in a long-term strategy of prohibiting people who are good at high-level problem solving but bad at being polite. Not to mention people who are good at creative and social openness, but bad at obeying rules. Thinkers of the respectable-radical left, people such as Paul Mason or Srnicek and Williams are selling a hope of technological super-abundance, but they are too sweet to tell any of their left comrades that all of the people you would need to actually produce that super-abundance are off building hyper-exploitative super-capitalism in part because they once went to an activist meeting and everyone treated them like fascists. To bring this back to anti-capitalist basics, the reason left post-capitalist thinkers don’t reflect much on such little problems as this one is because selling books is as mutually exclusive with truth-telling, in the short run, as is being a “nice person.” Hence the need for a fundamentally anti-bourgeois revolutionary intellectual culture cold enough to seek all of the darkest truths, but still warm enough not to betray the calling of solidarity. I’m not saying the left should start worshipping cold analytical power; all I’m saying is that if we genuinely believe in the necessity of changing the world, a revolutionary culture would have to be at least minimally hospitable to a minimal number of people who have knowledge of how complex things work and how they break, and people with the traits and inclinations to maneuver among diverse others. Both types of people are effectively prohibited from those who currently define radical progressive politics. Contemporary radical left culture is now so fully doubled-down on the wager of kindness over intelligence and creativity, that I am afraid it is almost vacuum-sealed against learning why it might be on the verge of extinction. I am writing this, and will continue writing to this effect, on the last-ditch possibility there exist other people out there, somewhere, who can see in this something more important than a moral offense.

from Justin Murphy http://ift.tt/2ppFcmI

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