mttheww asked: I think you're a real cool cat
Thanks, dog!
todbrowning replied to your post: For a lot of last winter I was really …
is journey to the west one of the four classics? I’ve always kind of wanted to read that one
Yeah. The four are listed here
Journey To The West sounds the second most interesting/accessible to me (or maybe on par with Dream of the Red Chamber). The other two sound more forbidding, partly on account of being older and further (?) from what we’d expect novels to look like
blurds replied to your post: For a lot of last winter I was really …
Dream of the red chamber is great, and I have read the whole dang thing. Worth another attempt.
ozymandias271 replied to your post: For a lot of last winter I was really …
I really liked Story of the Stone, but it is definitely one of those books where you have to put up with three hundred pages of people going to garden parties and it all says something about Society.
You guys are definitely making me want to try it again! (I can definitely deal with books where very little happens for long stretches, there just has to be something there to interest me other than “things happening”)
todbrowning replied to your post: Like many such beverages, this show is…
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the person who wrote this sentence is a white man who is at least 40 years old
Right on all counts (Ben Brantley, white, age 59)
speaking as a (mostly) straight (probably) cis man who has never had any particular interest in changing any of that, nor in becoming a full communist, I never really saw moneycat’s appeal, although a lot of people I know seem to like her a lot
For me it’s mostly “she has a lot of interesting things to say on stuff that isn’t related to trans issues” and “she’s really articulate and funny”
Some of the “interesting things to say” are from a communist perspective but they don’t necessarily depend on that, and it’s rare for one of her posts to depend so heavily on communism that it’s irrelevant to non-communists
And – this is a nontrivial thing – she’s fucking hilarious and a great writer
She was once my favorite tumblr blogger for the stuff mentioned above, and she still might be if you could just excise all the trans ideology stuff, which you can’t because it’s like 70% of her content at this point and not reliably tagged or anything
sorry if this is too personal but do you believe in God?
It’s not too personal, and no.
I say stuff like “God hates us/me” sometimes as a shorthand for the way my anxiety feels sometimes, like the world is just corrupt and diseased and failing to meet some ideal standard and like something is disappointed in us, or would be disappointed in us, should be, that kind of thing
lol is this from one of those christian movie review sites like “caps” or whatever it was called
It was! Although it was ChristianAnswers rather than CapAlert
mttheww asked: it could be that it's really people who are too convinced of their own smartness that are wrong all the time; like the smartest and most frequently correct people I know tend not to think of themselves as particularly smart, eg lia
I feel this completely
But as it happens, it doesn’t fully address the problem I’m personally having, which at root is about how it makes me feel that I live in a world with 7 billion people in it, most of whom moralize various lifestyle choices about which there is no consensus.
There is a part of me that just thinking I can have any reasoning for my choices (anything that makes them better than just rolling dice, say) is “hubris,” because it seems to imply I have my hands on this magical source of insight that millions or billions of others don’t. And any argument that talks about how, say, “smart” people aren’t necessarily smart feels like a way to try to cling onto that sense of specialness, and feels hubristic.
The only way out of this is to realize that my mind is setting me an unbeatable challenge. It stipulates that it’s “hubristic” to think of myself of having reasons for my actions, so any argument in favor of that, no matter how good, gets rejected for being “hubristic.” The conclusion is fixed in advance. Instead, I just need to say “this particular feeling about ‘hubris’ seems to have no practical use” and try to ignore it or make it go away when it arises.
mttheww asked: reading that basilisk article leaves me even more convinced than I already was that being too smart for one's own good is often virtually indistinguishable from being a complete moron
Yeah, there are a lot of things you can think about in this world, and only so much time to think about them, and it’s easy for smart people to apply their smarts to things that maybe aren’t worthy of them, and get very lost in the process. (See also the ask from most recent anon)
wait are we talking about actual basilisks here? as in the cryptid?
We’re talking about this. (Also what those Christine Love tweets I posted yesterday were about)
If you’ve never heard about this before then you’re in for a wild ride
todbrowning replied to your post:Have you seen, “they are made out of meat”? It’s a short film addressing uh, the shortcomings of humans
have you read “partial people”?
Nope!
Do you have a link to it (or where to potentially buy it)? Googling the phrase in quotes turns up several things that might be it