#necrostrigoposting

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don't worry, he'll tell you

everyone asks why art thou Romeo but no one asks how art thou Romeo 😞

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What does necrostrigoposting mean?

necroposting, but strigiform

it's my tag for responding to argumate posts that aren't new.

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Not Like Other Boys

TIL the thing where young guys get really bitter towards “teen heartthrob” male singers like with Justin Bieber or various boy bands dates back to at least Elvis

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true but it's weird to suggest that masks 'cost literally nothing to wear'. Nothing costs literally nothing.

it's an extra thing to remember every time you leave the house. it's an extra thing to have to fiddle with every time you go in and out of places. it makes it harder to understand people. it alters social interactions. it intersects badly with assistive technology people need for going out and about in the world, like my noise cancelling headphones and other peoples glasses They can be uncomfortable, especially when worn for long periods of time or in the heat. the resultant humidity can cause some people to have skin problems.

insane to suggest anything is costless. the insistence that anything was costless has absolutely been part of the breakdown in messaging and communication over covid measures imho.

I really appreciate the attempt by Lessons From The Crisis to really treat the early covid period as the history it is, and the “masks are dangerous” messaging was one of the most obvious failures. Masks are probably effective (its hard to evaluate its true effectiveness) but also cost absolutely nothing to wear, so it passed the cost-benefit test with flying colors. How and why the west got itself somehow into a anti-mask stance to the point where it was acceptable in come contexts to harass mask wearers is definitely one of the big questions, so I am eager for the rest of the series.

What stands out to me is how much of the discourse around “masks are dangerous” was that it was never about masks themselves but the public ‘sentiment’. It was all “oh sure masks work in a certain sense, but the panic! Or the false sense of security! Both of those at the same time, somehow! It will be worse than no masks, I assure you”. And it strongly reminds me of the JJ vaccine fiasco - “yes we know that even if the 6-in-6-million deaths is causally linked to the vaccine it still strongly passes the cost-benefit test, but ~public confidence~” while of course through their actual actions they severely harmed said public confidence in the vaccine.

Every time public health officials have factored in “public sentiment” they have failed, utterly, to not only impact public sentiment but even to understand it. Can you imagine, in March 2020, as every school and workplace shut down and runs on toilet paper (???) were happening in every city, that you could somehow “avoid a panic”?  What does that phrase even actualize as in someone’s mind? What does ‘success’ look like? I don’t think anyone promoting the idea ever even specified it, it was just a shibboleth marching on uncontested.

Its a shibboleth that was born in the 1950′s, I think, in a very different time. Back then public health realized that their job needed to include PR if they wanted people to say take vaccines, but it was also a time where they controlled all of the flows of information. You could take a handful of newspapers, loop in the state agencies, and the only information about a public health issue would come from one, unified source. You could control the messaging, so you did that, and back then it often worked.

That mindset was carried forward into the modern era despite it having been shattered. Twitter was lightyears ahead of the CDC on both accurate information and completely fabricated-but-plausible-sounding information, every American had an opinion on Covid while never having read a single CDC press brief. The ability to “set the narrative” is largely gone, but public health seems to act like they still can. This is less of a condemnation of the discipline of public health - which has had many prominent figures calling it the idiocy of things like the JJ vaccine pause - than the actual institutions of public health, which I think have essentially zombie branches of their admin who devote themselves to “messaging” that perpetually backfires. I suspect unless the reality of the modern information era is adapted to in the structure of these orgs, they will take way longer than they should to learn these lessons.

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hiring manager: SLUT!!!

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https://youtu.be/-yp4C5-d4nU

i think japan is exactly identical to britain in every way

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Quite probably! And I'm often disparaging of the (likely) vocal abilities of some of their more-intensely-appearance-selected modern equivalents, but no doubt some of them have chops too - pop is just allergic to writing that showcases vocal talent

feel like the ABBA ladies have better voices than their songs give them a chance to wield, constantly being crowded out by those infectious riffs

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It's very hard to depict uncommonly attractive women on screen because of the extremely narrow range of women that are allowed to appear on screen. There just logically cannot be a big gap.

I’m always fascinated by movie scenes in which fictitious bands play fictitious songs in performances which are supposed to be good, as it’s so difficult to pull that off with a brief clip of a song the audience hasn’t heard before that in all honesty probably isn’t good at all as it was written in a rush for the movie and isn’t worth releasing as a standalone track, and of course it’s so much easier to just signal that the song is good by having the other characters rock out or look really impressed, but that just creates this huge sense of dissonance, they might as well just put up a solemn caption saying THE BEST SONG YOU’VE EVER HEARD and let us imagine it.

the interesting part is you would expect similar to problems to dog movies all the time but they mostly don’t; if a character is presented as being impossibly cool or stylish or good looking they can carry that off just by casting an actor who is a legit movie star and you buy it, the only time where you might not buy it is if you’re watching Lord of the Rings and they introduce Arwen Evenstar daughter of Elrond Half-elven arguably the fairest woman to ever grace Middle-earth (Gimli: second fairest!) and you’re like wait a sec that’s Liv Tyler.

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This is kinda the original plot of the book they made that Jim Carrey vehicle out of

y’all out there trying to fuck god, kill god, sue god, why not just be polite but distant roommates with god, uncooperative group project members with god, disdainfully waving your hand out the window after being cut off in traffic by god

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Name a king who isn't pathetic or evil

there’s a trope in stories where particularly successful kings are made out to be a product of cuckoldry by a more dashingly heroic character than their historical father, such as Alfred the Great being the son of the monk Athelstan in Vikings and Louis the Sun King being the son of one of the Musketeers in various stories, it’s an interesting trope as it reads as a muted refutation of the central premise of monarchy.

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@dagny-hashtaggart you live within ~20 miles of Wigan now. What you do with this information is up to you.

gosh Trump sure is perky, those Walter Reed doctors must have given him some smack barm pey wet haha! oh I’m wasting my life

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I'm here to start a new pointless phyrric linguistic struggle: reclaim 'man' as gender neutral

the woman → womyn → womxn thing is a perfect example of a nonsense symbolic battle that allows the appearance of progress and provides a convenient rhetorical device without actually effecting any meaningful change of itself, much like the euphemism treadmill that is no doubt spinning madly towards a replacement for ‘bipoc’.

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I mean there are diagnostic measures of cognitive impairment for a reason; namely that even medical professionals who work with people with dementia are not especially good at distinguishing between dementia and a bunch of other stuff just on Vibes.

Watching people try over the Biden thing has been pretty depressing; you just know this is the same public where that other guy's people were right to think he needed to hide his polio sequelae despite it being completely irrelevant to anything actually required of a president.

it would be funny if Biden’s lifetime of obsessive practice at avoiding his stutter ends up hiding his slowly growing dementia as well

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On ponderation I feel like all the imaginings of this neglect a key feature of HPMOR: that it was a Harry Potter fic but not a fanfic exactly; which is to say the choice of setting wasn't driven by Yud having any particular love of Harry Potter - iirc it was a cynical choice to get more people to read it because Harry Potter was very popular at the time. You guys who've seen this show would know how to do that as a Bit in a tumblr post with the untamed better than me ofc but maybe I'd be better at writing the actual fic bc I haven't seen Untamed

can’t help pondering what would be the most irritatingly smug way to frame a rationalist Untamed fic

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Guard who walks in with an ity bitty waist..

you’re laughing, a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face and you’re laughing

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did you try to follow any of those citations? bc let me tell you those links do not go to evidence that proves the claims they’re making

From an evolutionary perspective, intrasexual competition is common and is one of the strongest forces shaping sex differences [8]. This is also true in humans and the fact that direct conflicts were largely fought by men [9] can help explain sex differences in body structure [10,11]. In a similar manner, these biological sex differences also shaped sex-specific competitive strategies. As a man’s access to resources and mates (i.e. fitness) is determined by his position in a hierarchy [12–14], it is important for men to understand and navigate dominance hierarchies enforced through overt signals of dominance [15]. In contrast, there is no evidence that a woman’s fitness is determined by her position in a hierarchy, making overt hierarchical navigation less important. In addition, because direct conflicts are relatively more costly for women [16], women generally use more subtle competitive strategies that reduce the social status of rivals and minimize retaliation [17,18]. The sexes thus differ in how social hierarchies are navigated, and the correlation between the placement within a hierarchy and fitness.

I still can’t get over how this paper (Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour) in the service of understanding a hot topic (why are often men hostile to women in video games?) casually drops these points in the introduction.

Just look at this:

Our results support an evolutionary argument for why low-status, low-performing males are hostile towards female competitors. Dominance is tightly linked to fitness in men as studies from hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate that dominance rank increases fitness through offspring number [14] and resource availability [12]. Even in modern day society, dominance and not attractiveness is associated with college male mating success [13]. Low-status and low-performing males have the most to lose as a consequence of the hierarchical reconfiguration due to the entry of a competitive woman. As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status [37], the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank. This idea is reinforced by the fact that higher-skilled males that should not feel threatened by a female increased their number of positive comments.

Apart from restructuring the hierarchy, a high status female poses a secondary threat to relatively lower status males: as women are attracted to dominance [13], a high-status female is less likely to find lower-status males attractive. We argue that a secondary benefit of increased female-directed hostility is that it simultaneously decreases a female’s confidence and perception of her self-worth (i.e. negging) while simultaneously increasing the perception of him being a dominant (i.e. socially valuable) mate. Higher-skilled (i.e. more dominant) males do not behave in this manner as there is no need for them to reinforce their dominance to maintain their attractiveness. Although there is no direct evidence in the literature that negative behaviour towards females increases a male’s mating opportunity, our results provide an interesting testable hypothesis requiring further investigation.