#alkatyn

[st-just]

Reverse unpopular opinion meme. What do you like about star wars?

I imprinted upon the aesthetics of the prequels (clone and droid armies and the galactic senate and etc) at a very young age and am still incredibly fond of them. (Relatedly, the back half of the Filoni Clone Wars show is just like legitimately very good).

Doing space battles in the idiom of WW2 dogfights instead of like 18th century ships of the line actually works very well in a visual medium.

The original trilogy was just unironically good enough at the time to convince people that Joseph Campbell wasn't full of shit for like thirty years.

Reylo discourse will make a fascinating sociology thesis at some point. Probably already has.

[anghraine]

Yup. That's much later, but there's a lot of long-standing anxiety in English literature around someone who seems cold and indifferent to other people that's very different from the anxiety around someone who seems passionate and broodingly sexual, and the former is much more how Darcy is perceived by the other characters.

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[fyeahwebnovels]

Have you had a submission for Time To Orbit Unknown?

nope! also, feel free to submit listings/propaganda/reviews in general, even if you haven't checked the directory; worst case scenario is that i publish your submission and don't need to update the directory 'cuz it's already there.

[manorpunk]

Me: 2034, trying to purchase a train ticket to Montreal to fuck the last known human prostitute before I kill myself with my remaining BeastBucks from the last Presidential Giveaway

My neuralink monitoring persona [shes a copy of the Party's official Vtuber Liberty Eagleheart Freedom リバティ・イーグルハート・フリーダム (I was required to install it before accepting the war time rations)]: "Teehee loyal citizen-san, why do you need to head to head north?! Its almost SPRINGTIME hehe! it would make me soooo saaadd for you to be a draft dodger! *she does a little dance* Why not be draft poggers!?"

[loki-zen]

Re this https://www.tumblr.com/loki-zen/756515330999959552/did-pickme-start-out-describing-an-actual?source=share

@alkatyn (can't @ you properly for some reason)

Having separate hobbies/some time away from the partner that you live with can definitely be good! However if you can only conceive of this as meaning 'time away from all members of the opposite gender' then that's seriously essentialism-brained, plus, it leaves Handicrafts Keith excluded from the knitting club while his wife has nobody to watch the game with.

The notion that you have to "perform" in some capacity the entire time you're around any people of the opposite gender is a problem these kinds of social spaces invented, not something they solve. If you can perceive women as people like anybody else, capable of liking and engaging in the same kinds of banter as men, and capable of leaving if the social vibes are not to their taste, then there is nothing to perform about.

[st-just]

have you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's city of last chances? Your worldbuilding posts reminded me a bit of the setting for that (complimentary)

Afraid I haven't! Have a friend irl who strongly recommends it, but library doesn't have a copy and hard to justify buying books at the moment.

[glorious-tapa]

This day in History!

The number xero was Inveted at the University of Tapa, Green version! Beofre this people had to count bakwords from tin and it was ver confusing.

[humanfist]

@alkatyn Magic Inc. has something like this for flying carpets.

[st-just]

Have you watched "The Zeppo" (Xander focused buffy season 3 episode) and what do you think of it

I have! Fun episode, most tolerable Xander-focused screentime yet. I have a softspot for the occasional intentionally cheesy self-parody like the B-plot with the rest of the cast.

Mostly just continued to raise deeply troubling implications about the moral agency of 'monsters' though. The zombies were clearly just dudes, y'know?

[leviathan-supersystem]

the point being contested here wasn't just whether or not there was a housing bubble (i don't disagree that there was) but whether the government had, as alkatyn-castle claimed, actively promoted housing as an investment instead of as a living space, and i have never seen evidence of that being the case and have seen evidence (such as the earlier screenshot) indicating the contrary.

[capitalist voice]: in the dystopian commie hellscape that is china, housing just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper, leaving people who buy and then re-sell houses instead of doing actual work high and dry, while mean greedy workers selfishly buy houses, to live in.

[tanadrin]

@alkatyn

Is there a like, minimum viable shorthand?

if you mean in terms of the complexity of their encoding of english, there are plenty of shorthand systems that are very simple: one-to-one replacements of letters following normal english orthography. the upper limit on the efficiency of these systems is probably lower overall.

for me, the goal is to be able to write about as fast as i type--i max out at about 90 wpm, and allegedly orthographic shorthand can get you about that fast with enough practice. while it would be cool to know how to write in gregg shorthand or something, i don't think it'd be worth investing the years of effort necessary to master a system like that.

@str-ngeloop

would u recommend shorthand for someone who finds handwriting tedious

uhh depends on how tedious you find learning shorthand ig. some of the systems are really complicated and take ages to master (since they are effectively the tools of stenographers before the invention of modern stenographic typing machines). others are pretty simple but are still a nontrivial time investment.

[random-thought-depository]

@alkatyn - "So in this kind of scenario would relationships between same age people be tabboo in general? Or is it more like the skew to older male partners in human society, where its true on a statistical level but not in individual cases"

The second thing. The majority of BLH sex happens between similar age people, and sex and romantic relationships between similar age people are viewed positively in BLH society (as long as they're not abusive or anything like that), so their society isn't that different from ours in that way.

I'm actually not sure if older woman/young male is dramatically more common than young woman/older male in BLH society, it's just that sex between young women and older males (or young males and older males) doesn't have the same social significance because it doesn't trigger the affection-submissiveness response.

Sex across big age gaps is more common and normalized in both directions (older woman/young male and young woman/older male) in BLH society cause BLHs have more casual sex and marriage-like partnerships are less socially important in BLH society, so BLHs are a lot more likely to have sex with people they wouldn't want as long-term cohabiting partners. Like, a lot of the potential problems with a big age gap are much less of a problem if it's a one night hook-up or a friends with benefits arrangement between people who mostly know each other through their weekly book club meetings.

Actually, old BLH males reproduce more than old Homo sapiens males because 1) they aren't in monogamous marriages to post-menopausal women like a lot of old Homo sapiens men are, 2) BLH women usually don't expect to have to rely on their kid's male gene donor for co-parenting, financial support, or companionship, they have other institutions to meet those needs for them, so it tends to be much less of a problem for them if their kid's male gene donor is likely to be dead or disabled five or ten years after the kid is born. This has had significant effects on BLH evolution, but I'll leave that for another post.

Also, the affection-submissiveness response to older women isn't just a heterosexual thing, it's also something young women experience (though a bit less strongly) and the women-loving-women version is socially significant too (e.g. it's part of how those age-mediated female reproductive hierarchies work).

I might sooner or later make a reply to this post and also write up a post expanding on what I said here, but there's an aspect of bonobo-like human sexuality which is highly relevant to what I'd write there that I think I'd need to make a giant infodump to properly explain. So I'll just do an infodump/reference post about it here; later I can just link to this post.

@who-canceled-roger-rabbit, I think you might like this.

Now, this is about weird spec-bio alternate human sexuality, so it does talk about sex. Also, you might find some of it squicky and/or creepy; it is a description of one of the more disturbing to Earth human sensibilities and "this is a kink thing, isn't it?" aspects of bonobo-like human biology and society. Because of this and also because it's kind of long, I will be putting the actual infodump part of this post behind one of those "keep reading" links. Also I am going to start abbreviating "bonobo-like human" as "BLH" a lot, because that's less awkwardly long and it's much less awkward to just be able to say "proto-BLHs" when talking about the species's ancestors.

The watershed divergence between bonobo-like humans and Homo sapiens was the ancestors of bonobo-like humans got a functional equivalent of modern birth control in the Stone Age, and it worked in a way that gave females a big leg up in sex-antagonistic selection.

This happened very early, before the ancestors of bonobo-like humans had time or evolutionary impetus to evolve a monogamish (not a typo) social system like ours. It prevented the development of a monogamish social system in their species and sent them evolving in a direction much more like bonobos. Bonobo-like humans evolved to use sexual bonding to reinforce a bunch of different types of relationships (and to facilitate that evolved to be polyamorous and bisexual by default).

It also gave women a lot more control over reproduction, so bonobo-like humans were much more shaped by female sexual selection than Homo sapiens. Female sexual selection could only directly act on males, but since human males and females have most of the same genes, the entire species was changed. One effect of this was bonobo-like humans got more rapid and intense self-domestication than Homo sapiens. This happened in a couple of ways:

First, by a mechanism similar to how female sexual selection likely contributed to Homo sapiens self-domestication, but amped up. Intelligent, high altruism, low aggression, high impulse control males tended to make better companions and co-parents, so women tended to like them better and were more likely to allow such men to impregnate them.

But bonobo-like humans also got a selection pressure Homo sapiens didn't get (or at least that was much less significant to Homo sapiens evolution). A lot of proto-BLH women adopted a reproductive strategy of taking a look around their social group, noting which males had good and kind of submissive relationships to their mothers, and strategically allowing those males to impregnate them in the hope of having children who'd grow up to be like that.

The second thing selected for a strong bond to mothers that persisted into adulthood and manifested as affection and low-key submissiveness to mothers even in adulthood (i.o.w. a "momma's boy/girl" personality type). But because of the messiness of mammalian brains, it also selected for affection and low-key submissiveness to anyone who kinda-sorta resembled a mother as perceived by a small child. This meant people who were: women, older, big, familiar, and had a kindly and helpful and confident personality. The more of those traits a person had, the more other proto-BLHs would tend to be affectionate and low-key submissive toward them. This caused a subtle but powerful shift of social advantage to people with those traits (this itself became a selection pressure that further intensified self-domestication; it meant women with "Mr. Rodgers" personality type thrived and tended to reproduce more). One obvious effect of this was that older women came to have enormous "soft power" in proto-BLH social groups.

Initially this "soft power" of proto-BLH older women was mostly non-sexual in nature. After all, its evolution was the bond of young child to mother coming to persist neotenously into adulthood and being extended to people who vaguely resembled a mother as perceived by her young child. But nature is often creative with repurposing organs and systems to perform functions radically different from their original ones; witness the whale's front flippers, which evolved from legs, or for that matter your own arms and legs, which evolved from flippers. As I said earlier, bonobo-like humans evolved to use sexual bonding to reinforce a bunch of different types of relationships. And eventually sexual bonding was recruited to reinforce the social hegemony of older women, through sexual bonding between older women and younger adults.

A key connection through which that happened was voluptuousness.

Big breasts, wide hips, a big butt, and thick thighs make a woman highly visually distinct from males and sexually immature girls, which is probably part of why these features became common gynephilic attraction cues. They also show that a woman has significant accumulations of body fat, i.e. they show that she is able to get enough food, she is healthy enough to accumulate body fat, and she has metabolic surplus to draw on if she gets pregnant.

People tend to get fatter as they get older. Fifty-somethings tend to have more body fat than twenty-somethings. Middle aged and older women tend to have wider hips, bigger butts, and thicker thighs than younger adult women.

Modern bonobo-like human women usually don't go through menopause until their late sixties and have slow fertility decline, and modern bonobo-like humans tend to form reproductive hierarchies where the fertility of younger women is behaviorally suppressed and younger women assist in caring for the children of older women. I'm not sure to what degree the evolution of these features preceded the recruitment of sexual bonding for reinforcing the social hegemony of older women and to what degree it was a result of it. But it's suggestive in this context to point out that if you're a modern bonobo-like human your mother was probably in her forties or fifties when you were little, meaning your earliest visual impressions of her were probably of a woman with the sort of body middle-aged women usually have. It's also suggestive in this context to point out that insofar as the higher body fat of older women can potentially be read as a fertility signal, in modern bonobo-like humans this would functionally not be an error; in modern bonobo-like humans 40-65 year old women are functionally much more fertile than young women; sure, young BLH women probably still have better biological potential fertility, but natural selection doesn't care about completely theoretical unused capacities, it only "cares" about actual reproductive success, and in terms of actual reproductive success bonobo-like humans are a very BOFFFish species and I would expect that to be a significant selection pressure on bonobo-like human gynephilia.

Anyway, in bonobo-like humans gynephilic attraction to big breasts, wide hips, big butts, and thick thighs was recruited for sexual bonding between older women and younger adults to reinforce the social hegemony of older women. In bonobo-like humans, especially the younger adults, and especially the boys, the sight of an older woman with these physical features tends to trigger both sexual desire toward her and an affection-submissiveness response toward her. This combined sexual desire and affection-submissiveness reaction is especially strong if the older woman is nice and helpful to you and is doing things that suggest sexual receptivity (e.g. wearing "sexy" clothing and/or flirting with you).

Note: while this might have spilled over into increased attraction to obese women to some extent, in the majority of bonobo-like humans this form of gynephilia is centered on approximately Jennifer Atilemile's body type, not obesity. This might be because obesity tends to obscure the "hourglass" profile more, reducing the effect of strongly visually distinguishing women from males.

Also, similarly, while it does spill over into increased attraction to elderly women, in the majority of bonobo-like humans this form of gynephilia tends to respond most strongly to women who are between 40 and 60 or so. Elderly women are more likely to trigger the older, non-sexual version of the affection-submissiveness to older women response. Don't get me wrong though, bonobo-like humans tend to be very willing to fuck that old woman.

Another note: this form of gynephilia is strongest in younger male bonobo-like humans. There are multiple probable reasons for this:

For the "younger" part, that affection and low-key submissiveness to older women response is stronger in people young enough to relate to older women as "respected elder, older and likely wiser than me" figures. Older people (especially older women) will tend to see older women as social equals and have less of a submissiveness response, or not have one at all. Remember, the affection-submission response to older women originally evolved from the child to mother bond, so it tends to be activated by people who remind you a little of your mom as you perceived her when you were a kid; if you're a twenty-something you're likely to relate that way to a forty-something woman, if you're a fifty-something you probably won't. Since younger people are more likely to have a submissiveness response to older women, they are also more likely to have the eroticized variant of it.

For the male part, for pretty obvious reasons, males will be under stronger selection for gynephilia and for attraction to features that indicate childbearing prowess.

Also, the evolution of the affection-submissiveness response to older women was driven by female sexual selection. Female sexual selection can only directly exert selection pressure on males, so it's likely it would change males more than females. So males might have a stronger affection-submissiveness response to older women.

Also, maintaining the loyalty of fighting age males might have been particularly important at a lot of points. On one hand, the possibility of fighting age males leveraging their superior physical strength (and, in many societies, greater familiarity with weapons and organized violence) to establish themselves as the dominant class in society would be a major potential threat to a female-privilege social system. On the other hand, fighting age males would often have been particularly valuable allies in societies with significant internal or external violence (or both). So I think proto-BLH and BLH women might have made a special effort to selectively breed for loyal, domesticated sons (domesticated in the way a guard dog is domesticated). This also might result in males having a stronger affection-submission response to older women.

Re: "sexual bonding between older women and younger adults to reinforce the social hegemony of older women" - so, the way that works is...

Well, it's a modified derivative of the older non-sexual affection-submissive response which is still used to reinforce non-sexual relationships such as adult son or daughter to mother, so...

The older non-sexual form of the affection-submissiveness response to older women basically works by the younger person feeling affection toward the older woman, a desire to be liked by her, and a desire to please her. There's often other feelings that are part of it, such as gratitude or admiration, but there's a lot of diversity in what those feelings are, they vary depending on the relationship and the traits and personalities of the people involved. The strength of the affection-submissiveness response varies a lot depending on relationship; a young person is likely to have a feeling of slight vague goodwill and desire to please toward an older female stranger, a much more intense response to their mother or aunt. Much as friendship, love, and sexual desire are highly variable experiences, the BLH affection-submissiveness response to older women is a highly variable emotional experience. But affection toward the older woman, a desire to be liked by her, and a desire to please her is the closest thing to a common denominator.

The eroticized version of the affection-submission response to older women is very similar to the non-sexual version! The big difference is that it's mixed with sexual desire, and the affection-submissiveness response gets stronger as sexual desire and/or sexual stimulation increases. The sexual desire and the core affection-submissiveness feelings are often experienced as linked, e.g. you want to please her so you want to give her a really good time with a vibrator and give her screaming orgasms, or you feel grateful for the sexual stimulation she's giving you and want to be real nice to her and do her favors to repay her for it.

Note: in male bonobo-like humans the eroticized affection-submissiveness response is strong enough that male bonobo-like humans, especially younger ones, will often experience a weaker version of it even in response to young women, especially when receiving direct sexual stimulation from them. The response is stronger and more consistent in interactions with older women though.

So, implications...

Older bonobo-like human women can use sexual bonding to bias younger people toward good-will toward them. Note that this isn't some kind of zombification or magic brainwashing, it just biases the younger person to feel some good-will toward the older woman. It can be subtly powerful, but the younger person stays very much their own person with their own ideas about things and retains a capacity to disagree with the older woman (or older women) they're sexually bonding with. Note also that kindness, niceness, and helpfulness are important triggers and reinforcing stimuli for the affection-submissiveness response (both the non-sexual and eroticized versions), and the pleasure and joy experienced during sexual stimulation is an important reinforcement stimulus for the eroticized version, so this is a form of social power very dependent on "consent of the governed." Note also that this isn't some kind of secret control system; the behavioral effects of this form of social bonding are openly discussed in the BLH equivalent of high school sex ed. It usually isn't something forced on young people either; modern mainstream bonobo-like human sexual morality includes a pretty strongly held value that sex should be mutually consensual. Most young people who participate in this form of sexual bonding do so because they enjoy it, as an expression of affection for older women in their lives, and/or because they actively want to experience its behavioral effects.

[samueldays]

Different example: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

A magician has cursed the Duffers to be invisible. The Duffers ask Lucy to please make them visible. Lucy sneaks into the sorcerer's house, finds his spellbook, and casts the Spell Of Make Things Become Visible from it.

No class-gating, no training.

The magician's spellbook is also a very mixed bag between that, Spell of Cure Warts, Spell of Donkey Head Curse, Spell of Scrying On People Back In England, Spell of Become Supremely Beautiful Like Helen Of Troy And The Book's Illustrations Already Show Kings Fighting Over Your Hand Yes You Lucy. There really is no spell level balancing here.

and that brings to mind an extra note for The Essay on magic literature someday: why are pre-D&D wizards often such secretive hoarders? because 1) any random person could cast OP spells if the spellbook got into the wrong hands, 2) spells that summon/invoke/bind a specific being might not work if someone else has already summoned that being for something else.

D&D keeps some of the secretive hoarders trope but undermines the mechanical reasons for it, and from there it's been a bit of an undead horse trope but I guess secretive hoarder wizards are still useful to drive the plot.

(Tangent of tangent: Exalted brought back the specific named summons but I don't think it ever did anything with it, Octavian had top billing but nobody worried about Octavian being "in use" by another summoner that I recall, that would be bad gameplay because you'd just summon Knockofftavian instead and the GM uses Octavian's statblock to save on work.)

Another tangent: Ali Baba saying "Open Sesame" to Gandalf pondering "Speak friend and enter" are also examples of one of the things that I'm gesturing at. Password systems don't spring up randomly, this is a kind of speech-act-magic that acts on the magic door proxy for someone's mind that has been set up to listen for a specific phrase and react to that phrase. It is not authority-speech controlling the world or wielding an abstract force, it's secret knowledge.

@alkatyn wrote in other branch of replies:

For "magic as speech act" Wildbow's recently finished web serial Pale does a very good job of depicting that. Magic is described as almost like rhetoric, you're persuading the world that something ought to be the case because of your performance. Everything is inherently dramatic and symbolic. Certain rituals are powerful because they draw on historically accepted and repeated symbols, the same way cultural tropes persist. One cool extension of that is that you have to always speak the truth, because otherwise your words lose weight

I haven't read Pale, not planning to read it, have read Pact and found Wildbow to be vastly overrated, this meta-trope you describe is one I despise because there's a sentence which should be important and isn't there whether in your post or in the (first) web serial: "and mages are at war for control of Hollywood and publishing houses".

Again, see the Khan's imperial passport disc upthread, it drew on the power of the Khan to kill you because the Khan is a powerful guy with lots of soldiers. Someone might forge or steal a disc, but the Khan's power is fairly objective, and he would want to crack down on someone with a fake disc. The symbol points to a thing that it symbolizes.

The trope indirection level of magic drawing on the power of "historically accepted and repeated symbols" changes the entire nature of the thing, now it's drawing on the subjective opinion of people thinking about the disc or other symbol, which is much more malleable, there's no fact about anything being "fake". The symbol points to the act of pointing, recursively. This suggests mages can power up by spamming media about their own symbols and suppressing media about the symbols used by other mages to make those symbols be more or less repeated and accepted as tropes.

The implied ritual magic system here has all the fickleness of demagogues manipulating public opinion, without any ground truth to compare to! It should be a far more volatile world than it is! The media should be mage-run because media control feeds back into magical power! The media environment should be very different!

Maybe you've seen how deranged American media gets right before the election, screaming about the importance of voting, denouncing the other guy as Hitler reborn, people posting fake news for the greater good, demanding the other side be suppressed for posting fake news, MOSTEST IMPORTANTEST ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIMES, BIDEN IS GOING TO TRANS YOUR CHILDREN, TRUMP IS A RUSSIAN PUPPET--

trope mages should be like that all the time.

I blame White Wolf, which I think was one of the early examples of this trope with a sort of 'consensus reality' in part of the Mage game line, and even there it was mitigated by points such as:

WW presented this as a vast conspiracy by the Technocracy which had put in serious effort

The Technocracy was not at war mostly because it had already won and taken control of the media to suppress belief in magic

It was a much weaker and local effect, you were mostly fine doing magic around your fellow mages, Paradox happened when nonbelievers watched you do it

and it seems like after that, a whole bunch of authors liked the cool idea and decided to turn up the power level of consensus reality while turning down the effort put into shaping belief, which makes no sense, and it grates on me.

OK that turned into more of a rant than I planned. I'm gonna leave this topic for a while now and go cool down with something else.

quick notes to the Opinions On Magical Animacy that I want to write out longer someday:

ideas of magic circa Pre-D&D are really, really big on pacts and obligations and social relations and asking elves or spirits or gods to please do things, often in exchange for a sacrifice

"rituals" in particular are speech acts, they only make sense if you assume a magical being is listening for a specific plea

medieval "demonology" grimoires frequently threatened the demon with Do As I Say Or I'm Telling Jesus, and without Jesus you get bizarre symbol-studded summoning circles and Do As I Say Because Funny Marks On Floor

This is near "magic". It worked insofar as the Khan was backing it. The funny marks on the disc had no power in themselves, they worked by appealing to someone with power.

D&D mostly rips out the spirits because of format constraints where it's impractical to have the wizard player negotiate with the dungeon master over every spell, even the gods granting miracles to clerics are greatly depersonalized, magic is a bunch of simplified abstractions now

a generation grows up on D&D as their reference for fantasy magic and thinks this simplified abstraction is just how fantasy is, writes a new generation of fanfic-like fantasy stories with the constraints of a TTRPG rulebook outside that format

the LitRPG genre deliberately revolves around this and is full of complete nonsense for it, but a lot of fantasy stories that aren't explicitly LitRPG still have D&D attitudes towards magic as a gameplay abstraction with numbers all over, having replaced "The elf-lord owes you a favor".

I'm including Harry Potter here as having D&D attitudes of spells being graded, D&D's "third level spell" is the same sort of thing as HP's "third year spell", you need to level up this much as a wizard to cast it, the novices only get shitty spells like Magic Flashlight and Magic Punch, the good spells are unlocked later

[st-just]

See it's funny that they're very sanctimonious and judgemental about it but also like, if Murder Is Murder than objectively speaking they're all accomplices after the fact and show no qualms about this whatsoever. The Watchers Council tried to hold her more accountable!

(which, rookie move. Clownshoes amoral conspiracy - literally perfect opportunity to show your openly mutinous supersoldier who you have no meaningful way to coerce obedience from what you can do for her if she plays nice. Get burying those bodies! The Mayor gets it!)

The show suddenly deciding that demons are moral agents and you should feel guilty about killing them makes the whole production over Faitb killing a guy even weirder tbh

[tanadrin]

I think this is wrong in the worst way--that it's superficially plausible, if you aren't really paying attention, but doesn't engage with the actual substance of the problem, and doesn't approach the problem in a way that would actually give us the tools to solve it. And it narrows the blame far too much! It exonerates the huge numbers of people in the US who think the current system is fine, who actively vote for it, but who don't happen to personally benefit from it.

Rural towns which bid for prisons to be built nearby, simply are not numerous enough--not even with prison populations inflating the size of their electoral districts--to shape law enforcement policy across the country. That policy is shaped by prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers, is reinforced by police departments and a media that is extraordinarily hostile to any attempts at reform (cf. the fight over bail reform in New York and the way media outlets have flagrantly lied about and misrepresented the consequences of bail reform, often repeating claims of cops and former cops without any kind of fact-checking). And the people who elect those prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers--whose opinions are shaped by stories in local news--are the larger body of voters, many of whom are urban and many of whom vote pretty reliably Democratic.Voters who are scared silly about the Crime Bogeyman, voters who often have strong implicit racial biases when it comes to imagining what the Crime Bogeyman looks like and where it comes from.

That this is a more diffuse phenomenon is important! Because the problem isn't a single set of greedy evil small-town racists, it's the general American media environment and the general American perspective on crime, which still believes that tough-on-crime approaches work and that progressive attempts to reform law enforcement do nothing but cause crime rates to spike. And while some of that can be blamed on bad reporting and cops lying (both of which are pretty common!), there is a broader and deeper cultural attitude that makes those lies and bad reporting particularly plausible to American voters, and particularly effective as political tactics. And unfortunately it's the same attitude that makes suburban whites in favor of school integration in principle, but causes them to freak out when you propose integrating the schools their kids attend, and it's not the product of shady manipulation by a small clique of oligarchs deliberately perpetuating racism to get rich.

Like I don't deny there are people who probably benefit from structural inequalities in American society. But there is a very big difference from being in a position to benefit off preexisting inequalities, and creating those inequalities. If you could somehow erase every small, racist Southern town from the map, you would not stop the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the US, because small Southern towns that are supported by prisons are a symptom, not a cause.

And this is what I meant in my response to @alkatyn. For someone like you, who must divide the world into Manichaean categories of good people and bad people, it would be enough to disempower or to punish the right bad people, because bad things come from bad people, and not from more diffuse social attitudes or incentive gradients. But that's a comforting lie: in fact, the world is full of people who are good in some respects and ignorant and foolish in others, and it is not a matter of identifying and dethroning the power-wielding bad people, because the obviously bad people are like at best 20% of the problem. They give you a satisfying emotional and rhetorical target, but the world is mostly bigger and messier and more complicated than that.

And I won't lie, it annoys me a little that you can't name specific examples, you can't even put broad ballpark figures to your attempt at arguing against my post, that all you have is vibes. Like my back of the envelope math shows that prison labor in the US just isn't that profitable! It's not that big of an industry! $11 billion a year, the estimated fruits of all prison labor, is like 0.04% of U.S. GDP--not 4%, 0.04%. 80% of that labor is spent in prison upkeep, so that's what, $2.2 billion available to line private pockets? This is not a load-bearing part of the American plutocracy. Even private prison contractors aren't that big a portion of the prison economy--only around 8% of U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons.

And none of this is an apology for the American prison system, which is brutal and inhumane, or for the American justice system, which is deeply biased against poor and minority defendants. But I wish people who had been whipped up into a frenzy with rhetoric about the vast machine of the American prison-industrial complex would try to put some relative figures to their intuitions, because you talk about it like millions of prisoners are being worked to death in sweatshops, and that's. Uh. Not true.

This is not just dumb evil shit, but a hundred and fifty years old technique to control Black population and a tool for the white elite to compensate themselves for the loss of slaves.

This rhetoric just histrionics. The total U.S. prison population is about 1.2 million; IIRC about 800,000 prisoners are employed (again, 80% of those in prison upkeep!). So not only is the replacement for the whole system of slavery a fraction of the number of slaves held in the South at the time of the Civil War--about four million; and keep in mind 800,000 is the nationwide prison population regardless of race, not the population of prisoners in the South--it's gone from about one-third of the population of the South to 0.6% of the population of the south (again, if all prisoners in the United States were held in the South. Which they are not).

And what also annoys me mightily about this is that I paid attention in U.S. history in school, and I know that there was an actual system imposed to try to replace slavery in the post-Civil War era, and it was a combination of sharecropping and Jim Crow laws. Which were much more effective, because they actually worked to keep black agricultural workers working in agriculture--you know, the whole industry slavery existed to support in the 19th century! So not only is your rhetoric hyperbolic, it's historically erroneous.

Please read actual American history (there's some really good leftist American history out there!), and don't get your understanding of the American political economy from tumblr posts and twitter.

Saw someone claim in a comments section that something like 25% of Louisiana’s GDP comes from prison labor. Which would be insane if it was true. They must be running the most technologically advanced prisons in the country. They’re using prison labor to build microchips or some shit while everybody else is still using it to make license plates.

[tanadrin]

There's also a famous passage in Chaucer:

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do.

I think it would be obvious to any culture that had had writing for more than a couple hundred years that languages change over time. But, to @alkatyn's point, I'm not sure how many ancient cultures would have identified this as a natural, value-neutral process. IIRC we have early medieval comments on Romance languages, for instance, talking about how badly people speak nowadays--language change is seen as a degredation of an ideal past pure form, part of a general decline in virtue and knowledge.

The period between “all languages were created at the Tower of Babel” and the invention of proper historical linguistics was wild. You had guys out there (including Schleicher!) trying to derive all Indo-European verb suffixes from “ma” and “tva” (supposed to mean “I” and “you”), people linking isolating languages to “savages,” agglutinating ones to “barbarians,” and inflectional ones to “civilization,” and dividing the history of language into a progressive “Sprachbildung era,” which then ended and all languages entered a state of permanent decay called the “Sprachgeschichte” era.

Brugmann’s principles of the same rules applying at all phases in the history of the language was in fact inspired by Lyell’s geological uniformitarianism, an interesting bit of cross-disciplinary inspiration that put an end to “glottogonic” theories of language that linked language development to an underlying telos of human thought and nature.