#WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT POASTER?!

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

I just saw a pair of those socks with the beads on them and had vivid childhood memories flash before my eyes. The most prominent ones were when the kindergarten class were sitting on the carpet at reading time and the other kids would always play with my socks. I was supposed to be quiet so I didn’t say anything but it was a really weird feeling. On the one hand I didn’t like being touched by other people very much, but on the other it kinda tickled and it distracted me. I had mixed feelings about it.

[queenlua]

amusing bits from Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet so far:

* "What sparked [Luther's] anger, so he later reminisced, was the preaching of a Dominican friar, Johannes Tetzel, in the nearby town of Jüterborg, who went so far as to claim that his indulgences were so efficacious that even if a person had raped the Virgin Mary they would be assured complete remission from Purgatory." used car salesman-ass strategy lol

* "...the wealth of material that has survived on Luther is so great that we probably know more about his inner life than about that of any other sixteenth-century individual... His collected works, the famous Weimar Edition, extend to 120 volumes, including 11 volumes of letters and 6 volumes of his dinner-table conversations"

holy FUCK. truly a poaster before his time. like would the median tumblr blog fill 120 volumes jeez

* "In the early years of the Reformation, for example, [Luther] talked constantly of invidia, or envy, attributing it to his opponents—though it is hardly likely that they would have envied a penniless, powerless monk, while he, on the other hand, had every reason to be preoccupied with those he envied." lmao. mean girl who goes "they're just jealous" every time ppl hate on him

* "Extraordinarily, in an age when letters were routinely passed from person to person, were forged or intercepted, and when every chancellery filed drafts, Luther kept no copies. This gave his correspondents huge power, because they alone had records of what he had written, but Luther was relaxed about this, joking that he could always deny his own 'hand,' a remark that reveals his remarkable confidence."

i will have to look into this later but this is lowkey fascinating??? it hadn't occurred to me the 16th century world would've, like. written out copies of every damn thing. to support audit trails and such. just because the overhead of producing all those damn copies seems really high. suggests fun possibilities for intrigue and mailfraud shenanigans lol

* "It was popularly believed that when of the counts [in the town where Luther grew up] commissioned an altarpiece for the chapel depicting the Crucifixion, he had the thief on Christ's right painted as his most hated co-ruler

LMAOOOooo. also reminds me of the funny story that the tobacco magnate who funded the creation of Duke University Chapel asked that the stained glass depict the 12 desciples smoking cigarettes, and the dude had to be talked out of it... though i can't find any reference to the story on the internet, sadly. did the duke chapel tour guide MAKE UP LIES to me

* Luther grew up in a family that owned a mine & it's sort of hilarious how bad all these 1500s miners were at economics. they're like. running whole mining operations but with only the haziest idea of, like. where capital comes from. how to not resource trap your way into fuckedness. etc. i dunk on economists a lot but y'know there are some concepts here that actually were p worth formalizing

* our dude Luther was a fucking DRAMA QUEEN let me tell you:

"[Luther] joined the Augustinian order in Erfurt on July 17, 1505 [...] Luther sent his academic gown and ring home to Mansfeld, telling his parents he had drawn a line under this part of his life. He sold some of the fine legal textbooks his father had bought him and donated others to the monastery. Then he invited all his student comrades to a lavish meal, with music and entertainment. At the height of the party, he told his shocked companions of his decision to become a monk, announcing melodramatically, 'Today you see me and never again!' He then left for the monastery, accompanied by his sobbing companions." bet those dudes never forgot that party

* though Martin Luther's dad sure could match him for drama queen-ness (and apparently never stopped resenting Luther becoming a monk instead of a lawyer):

"At the ensuing feast to celebrate [Luther's first mass a priest], for which Luther's father, always the man for the grand gesture, had given the sum of twenty guilders, the breach was still evident. Luther asked whether his father now accepted his decision, and in front of everyone at the table, Hans Luder replied, 'Remember the fourth commandment, to obey father and mother.' 'What if it was an evil spirit' behind [the storm that convinced Martin to become a monk]? he asked. It was a very serious charge, made at a point where Luther had just acted as Christ's representative on earth for the first time."

* Luther was in one of the more hardcore monkish orders, and said order had a pretty rigorous schedule of prayers that involved waking up in the middle of the night... but apparently you could just pay other monks to pray for you if you just Didn't Feel Like Doing It one day? lmao. and in particular Luther did the strategy of "i'll just get them done ALL IN ONE DAY" instead of, like, doing them throughout the week (going without food or sleep, working that day & night to get them done)

* our dude could definitely be a poor lil meow meow / woobie if fandom got their hands on him. this boy is constantly having literal panic attacks about WHAT IF I MISINTERPRETED THIS PART OF SCRIPTURE AND NOW WE'RE ALL GOING TO HELL, when he's in Rome one of the things that bothers him the most (besides the famous indulgence thing) is the fact that they SPEEDRAN masses over there and he's like "oh no though, i spend SO MUCH time on the masses i run, i'm so afraid of doing it without true feeling... who are these speedrunning fucks with no respect goddamn," his confessor gets tired of him because he'll spend UP TO SIX HOURS AT CONFESSION agonizing over shit that doesn't matter... (this is part of the reason he went into academia, actually, his confessor was like "boy you have got way too much anxiety for the purely monastic life, go get a degree or something i stg")

* i do kinda love it when theologians get sexy with it:

"[Staupitz] wrote of different 'stages' of union of the soul, the first being that of 'young maids in faith,' the second that of the 'concubine,' the third, the 'queens': 'They are naked and copulate with the naked one. They taste that outside Christ there is nothing sweet and they enjoy [his] continuous sweetness. For the naked Christ cannot deny himself to those naked,' while in the fourth stage, which Mary alone experienced, Jesus 'sleeps naked with her naked and he shows other signs of such love.'"

[baroquespiral]

So I finally read this sequence, AKA Yudkowsky does the moral of Evangelion And it’s pretty fascinating because it touches on all the points @philsandifer was trying to make about/around Yudkowsky in Neoreaction A Basilisk... raises the same objections and endorses the same values... and immediately people start debating the merits of pickup artistry in the comments.

Which sort of resonates with Promethea’s criticism of Sandifer’s resolution, and sort of resonates with the reasons I kind of hate most (thematic) Eva-knockoffs of the formula “your neurodivergence/queerness/trauma is artistically fascinating, but in the end you have to learn to love yourself, perform your gender correctly and Get The Girl (as if she had no more say in the matter than she ultimately does in the masturbation fantasies this is supposedly the alternative to)”. But hanging over the whole thing is the question of what the fuck is a catgirl. (I have to say, Yudkowsky is the last person I’d expect to have the same concept of catgirls as the /r/socialism mods.)   Another commenter suggests Yudkowsky replace “catgirl” with “fembot”, which I think is the correct TVTrope for “nonsentient romantic partner”, and suggests Yudkowsky has already subsumed Actually Existing Catgirls under the category of “furmod”.  A furmod, in this definition, is a purely cosmetic body modification, “scarcely different from wearing lingerie”. For many people, this is all a catgirl or catboy’s feline features are or need to be: floating signifiers that attract ambient erotic charge, moe points in database space.   But most of these moe or fetish points once had content, even if the otaku’s strategy for dealing with sexual contradiction (the topic of the Sequence) is to evacuate it: maids belong to a social class, school swimsuits are worn in an institution, etc.   The content of the catgirl image, especially when I encounter it in anime, is that while fully sentient, they behave a bit like at least some stereotype about cats.  Interestingly these aren’t quite identical to the conventional straight desires people will necessarily admit to, at least outside of a culture that has a concept of gap moe: the general extrapolation plays towards a wilful, playful and yet comparatively disinterested sexuality, the specific implications of which I’ll probably post about one of these days.  As a rule, animal-people in fantasy since long before they were fetishized are a combination of human and animal psychological and physical traits, and it is on this basis - that of a sentient nonhuman romantic partner - furry or catgirl fetishes evolved.  The key insight is that sentience is not identical to the modern human array of social and evolutionary conditioned behaviours, and a two-player sexuality could still have radically different rules.  This is why the furry community is so overwhelmingly queer - but sexual contradiction opens enough space even within normative heterosexuality, as Yudkowsky observes, to fit two whole new gender-subspecies: “sweet sexy catgirls” and “darkly gentle catboys”.   The catgirl problem is actually a much more vexing, Yudkowskian one (wasn’t @inferentialdistance talking about it lately? but I can’t be assed to find those posts): what if for a posthuman sentience, contradiction (sexual or otherwise) could actually be optimized away?   In other words, what if the danger to interpersonality as we know it is the original Human Instrumentality? but note that I qualified this with “as we know it”, which brings us to the pickup artistry in the comments.  biologically or socially, we do not come unconditioned (what would unconditioned consciousness even mean?)  insofar as the social plays a big, I’d personally bet bigger role in shaping sexuality than the biological (as if the two could be extricated), we are not even ethically free of responsibility for shaping each other’s desires to an extent that could absolutely distinguish social reproduction from catgirl-engineering.  broadly speaking, the sexual modes Yudkowsky like many others criticizes as contradictory (he, like the PUAs in his comments/most cishet men, experiences this contradiction as a “needlessly frustrating” resource imbalance: others experience it as rape, gay-bashing, fat-shaming etc.) are optimized to reproduce the institutions of heteropatriarchy and capitalism.  if we are to have a remotely coherent argument against genetically engineering sentient catgirls, it would seem, it must be intersectional.

even Cordwainer Smith, who was CIA and probably knew something about MK Ultra’s horrific attempts at optimizing people IRL, wrote an Instrumentality better as allegorization of extant social reality (particularly, class) than extrapolation of a future one. and even taken literally, I think the takeaway from Cordwainer Smith (or Steven Universe, or being gay, or most things that deal with this question) is mostly that the problem would resolve to something like the present one.  sentience as we define it is overdetermined and always-already in contradiction with the single determination, or at least generates the possibility of such: perfect optimization will funge against sentience to the point that we’re either back at the “nonsentient romantic partners” starting point or our own.  the fantasy of perfect convergence of sentience and desire-fulfilment, according to that poaster who doesn’t like Madoka, is another otaku strategy for dealing with sexual contradiction, yet one that can only be expressed in reality as violent domination “a few psychological nudges in both sexes—to behavior and/or desire—could solve 90% of the needlessly frustrating aspects of relationships for large sectors of the population, while still keeping the complexity and interest of loving someone who isn't tailored to your desires” is a large part of the conventional feminist solution.  (not only does Yudkowsky define catgirls the same way as /r/socialism, he provides the exact same alternative!)  of course, the demand to optimize yourself - the Tumblr moralism that seems to strain as fervently as an ascetic religion against experienced “human nature” - does not solve the problem of contradiction.  while perhaps necessary in a fallen world, it only gives us the comfort of a coerced consent, a kind of Augustinian tautological reversal of ontological unfreedom.  indeed, mere sexual collectivism even at its most intersectional struggles to distinguish itself in meta-logic from the “community of women” that Marx refuted which is why it’s still worth thinking about catgirls because while different sentient desires will probably never be optimized into perfect harmony, they will continue to differentiate.  and the best, or at least most ethical and funnest, way I can think of to reduce the harm done by sexual contradiction is to encourage - with a feline aloofness and sense of play - that differentiation and profusion - through abstinence and perversion, deepening and broadening, socioeconomic levelling, wireheading and bihacking and niche-identifying and if we are ever at a point as a society where we can do this without expecting fulfilment of our creations, creating until the totality of desires approaches the threshold of a Deleuzian multiplicity without contradiction i.e.

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