(Part 2) Best products from r/TheMotte

>Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man pretending to be a cis man to seduce a woman, and had hardcore-enough sex scenes to receive an NC-17 rating on its first cut.

There's a film called "this film Is Not Yet Rated" that examines the MPAA and how subjective it is as a control system for what gets into the public's eye. A segment of this film discussed the MPAA's issues with Boys Don't Cry.

From a blogger:

>In addition, the MPAA system often fails to take context into account. For instance - as director Kimberly Peirce comments in "This Film is Not Yet Rated" - the MPAA threatened Peirce's brilliant "Boys Don't Cry" with an NC-17 rating based in part on the very rape scene that is directly central to the movie. In the scene, the protagonist is raped as a brutal "punishment" for what her attackers see as her impersonation of a boy. Here, the MPAA's rating seems especially senseless: How could it hurt a sixteen-year-old's psyche to see a depiction of a brutal hate crime, presented as exactly what it is? If anything, the film is rightly educational.

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From Roger Ebert:

>"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a catalog of grievances against the MPAA: The membership of the ratings board is anonymous, so the filmmakers have no right to appeal directly to the people who are judging their work. The ratings board is supposed to be comprised of "parents" -- but hardly any have children under 18, which is the only age group to whom the ratings apply. Although the MPAA ratings were allegedly created as a way of heading off government censorship, some say that has always been a ruse -- and, besides, a government system would actually require rules, documentation, transparency, accountability and due process. These are not things the secretive MPAA is fond of.
>
>And although the MPAA ratings are supposedly "voluntary," agreements between the studios that fund the organization, the exhibitors who show their films, and the media in which those films are advertised, make it something less than optional for most films. Check your newspaper to see if "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is playing in your town. If that newspaper accepts advertising for unrated films ("This Film" was originally awarded an NC-17 for "graphic sexual content," but the rating was "surrendered"), you'll see that "This Film" is not playing at one of the studio-owned theater chains.
>
>[...]
>
>The whole kangaroo court is founded on a doozy of a Catch-22: The MPAA insists that it has procedures that it applies evenhandedly. But the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are. If something is not allowed, it's because it's against the invisible rules.
>
>So, how do you make sense out of the MPAA's decisions? As "This Film" demonstrates, you don't. The Kafkaesque absurdity behind the movie ratings is beyond belief. Matt Stone ("South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "Team America: World Police") testifies from experience that studio pictures are treated a lot more kindly than independently financed and distributed ones. Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") and Wayne Kramer and Maria Bello ("The Cooler"), intuit that the raters are uncomfortable with depictions of female sexual pleasure, while Allison Anders("Grace Of My Heart") suggests that orgasms of any kind are frowned upon (although women's do tend to last longer, and may therefore make the raters more uncomfortable), and that the male body is even more verboten that the female body. And everybody agrees that the MPAA is very liberal when it comes to violence, and conservative when it comes to sex.

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the MPAA is important to this discussion largely due to their rating influence which affects the marketing and release of a film. This is why you hear so much about the studio trying to get a 'PG-13' rating instead of an 'R' (or in the case of Boys Don't Cry, trying to get an 'R' rating, settling for 'NC-17' after making cuts to shake the 'X' rating). The biggest issue issue sin't necessarily the rating system, but the power enshrined in a select group of anonymous and unaccountable influencers. It's pretty eye opening to see how much power they have over culture.

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link to film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpbxzP2mkoA

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Great write up!

Also, I'm a Gen-Xer and recall all of thee films and the milieu very well. It's interesting to see analysis from a younger viewer.

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If you like this topic I'd also suggest "Pictures At a Revolution" which discusses the 5 Best film nominations of the 1967 Oscars, and how these films changed the Hollywood. It's a nice context for how we got to 1999.

>In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittle signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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As a supplement, I also suggest Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which goes into detail about the rise of various media, how they supplanted the old media (i.e. telephone vs. telegraph; broadcast tv vs. Cable tv) and were in turn supplanted by other technological industries. There is a bit about the various takeovers of the film industry in the mid 90's that set the stage for the making of these films and the subsequent dawn of the Internet age. It's probably in need of a new edition now, but I really enjoyed reading about media and technological history in this context.

I'll second that, and recommend the book as well (Winter Tide; I haven't read the second in the series yet).

While on the subject, I'll be lazy and just put my full reply here: I'll recommend Tor.com's short fiction in general. Not all of it is perfect, of course, but I'd say generally above average and most definitely SJ themed to the point that finding a straight couple in a romance or a straight human male protagonist is a needle in a haystack. It usually doesn't come across as hamfisted, instead quite casual, which I prefer.

Elizabeth Bear's Deriving Life

More Ruthanna Emrys: The Word of Flesh and Soul (local interest quote: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” ) and Those Who Watch (my personal introduction to the modern Lovecraftian revival)

Sharing largely because of the name: Pat Cadigan, AI and the Trolley Problem

Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed have a similar SJ bend, maybe not quite the same extent, and frequent good stories.

Novels... Malka Older's The Centenal Cycle. Interesting form of "micro-governments" and democracy, the interactions between micro-governments, etc. Same trend of "casual acknowledgement of SJ trends, not too hamfisted" that allows for representation but doesn't feel like you're being bludgeoned.

Ah, you beat me to sharing this by a few minutes. I've deleted my top-level post, but I'll keep it as a comment here, because my reaction was opposite to yours.

A fun interview to take you into the weekend: "[UK interviewer] Andrew Neil DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!" Lest you're thinking that quote is too boo-outgroup...

Shapiro was the one who tweeted it.

I'll cop to my bias prior to writing this. I've been hoping to see someone else post this, because Ben Shapiro is not my favorite, and this interview really doesn't present him at his best. I find myself enjoying this a bit too much to really be a credible neutral source, but I'll take a shot at summarizing nonetheless.

I had no idea who Andrew Neil was prior to this. Some context I have since heard: he is one of the leading conservative commentators in the UK, previously working under Rupert Murdoch and writing for the Daily Mail, currently chairman of a media group that runs some of the most influential center-right media in the UK. He's provided some passionate commentary in defense of western values, and is famous for hard-hitting interviews with a wide range of people. A great moment between him and Alex Jones: "This is half past eleven. You're watching the Sunday Politics. We have an idiot on the program today."

So what happened? This is one of the only times I'll actually encourage watching the video over reading a summary, because it's fast-paced and frankly pretty entertaining. Neil comes into the interview pretty aggressively, pushing back against a lot of Shapiro's positions and focusing especially on the contrast between Shapiro's commentary about the ways discourse is being degraded and the ways Shapiro himself degrades discourse at times. Shapiro responds largely by firing off questions and accusations about Neil's motives.

A couple of highlights:

1. Neil asks Shapiro about titles of videos like "Ben Shapiro Destroys The Abortion Argument" and "Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism". Shapiro responds by saying he can't be held accountable for what random people post on YouTube, not mentioning that the videos in question are, well, posted by The Daily Wire itself.
   
   
2. He asks about the recent Georgia anti-abortion law in pretty harsh terms, asking for a defense or response from Shapiro. Shapiro's response: "My answer is something called science. Human life exists at conception. It ought to be protected," then asking why Neil won't admit he's on the left and his questions are motivated by bad faith. I was disappointed with Shapiro's answer here, since I'm broadly pro-life myself and would like to see the position represented well, but "something called science" doesn't really do it for me.
   
   
3. In the end, Shapiro tersely cuts the interview short after one too many hardball questions. Final words from Neil: "Thank you for your time and for showing that anger is not a part of American political discourse."
   
   All told, it's a pretty fascinating crossover between American and British politics, and probably not Shapiro's finest moment.
   
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   That was my top-level comment. I'll take a moment to respond to your main question as well: Why throw old things at him? Because the UK isn't as familiar with him as the US, and snark is still a huge part of his brand. I'm fully and deeply on board with the message that there's too much hate in politics, but even as he writes condemnations of that hate, I see Shapiro as a vector for and intensifier of it. The video titles above are a good example, alongside his pinned tweet ("Facts don't care about your feelings"), his comments in the interview... this sort of combativeness is a huge part of his brand. If he's approaching things from that combative of an angle, I expect to see him prepared with thoughtful responses to combativeness directed at him. He didn't do that here.

Very cool article. As someone who's passionate about meditation and has studied it intensely I think it's important to realize that meditation is (1) not for everyone and (2) to be very cautious about what mindfulness has actually been able to help with. Mindfulness Based Stress Relief and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy have repeatedly been shown to be effective. However, these types of studies rarely have adequate controls so it is difficult to make the strong claim that mindfulness itself is the cause of these seen benefits. Likewise, claims that mindfulness can treat more extreme disorders like PTSD are often banded about, but the research on these claims is thin.

Two books on this I would recommend:

Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism:

>Practicing mindfulness can be an effective adjunct in treating psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. But have we gone too far with mindfulness? Recent books on the topic reveal a troubling corruption of mindfulness practice for commercial gain, with self-help celebrities hawking mindfulness as the next "miracle drug." Furthermore, common misunderstanding of what mindfulness really is seems to be fueled by a widespread cultural trend toward narcissism, egocentricity, and self-absorption.

>Thomas Joiner's Mindlessness chronicles the promising rise of mindfulness and its perhaps inevitable degradation. Giving mindfulness its full due, both as a useful philosophical vantage point and as a means to address various life challenges, Joiner mercilessly charts how narcissism has intertwined with and co-opted the practice to create a Frankenstein's monster of cultural solipsism and self-importance. He examines the dispiriting consequences for many sectors of society (e.g., mental health, education, politics) and ponders ways to mitigate, if not undo, them. Mining a rich body of research, Joiner also makes use of material from popular culture, literature, social media, and personal experience in order to expose the misuse of mindfulness and to consider how we as a society can back away from the brink, salvaging a potentially valuable technique for improving mental and physical wellbeing.

Joiner is one of, if not the most famous researcher on suicide in the world. One of the things he talks about, for example, he talks about how many depressed individuals struggle greatly with rumination, and not much has been done about the fact that meditation tends to make rumination worse for many people.

I also greatly enjoy Daniel Goleman's Altered Traits. Many are quick to point out that "thousands" of research articles have been published on mindfulness meditation. These guys are upfront and critical of the fact that, well, most of these studies are absolute trash with either biased experimenters, poorly defined definitons, and lack of proper controls (They're extremely critical of their own somewhat sloppy mindfulness research in the 70's - a refreshing moment of humbleness). They review over 1,000 studies and do a literature review of the 50 or so highest quality ones.

There really does seem to be an effect at work here with mindfulness. However, people often fail to differentiate between state effects and trait effects. For many beginners, Mindfulness is no different than a drug - you get a bump of relaxation and positive feeling when you're meditating, and then no difference when you resume your life. Real, permanent, lasting change is seemingly, but only after long, continued practice - not just glancing at a 10-minute mindfulness app on your phone three times a week.

They also mention how easy the news media and other snake oil salesmen can misrepresent research: a famous finding like meditation can increase the length of telomeres, a process related to cellular aging is reported as "Mindfulness is going to make you live much longer!!" And of course there's always companies trying to make a quick buck: A related example is the company Luminosity, a company that vaguely throws around the word "neuroplasticity" as proof playing their games will make you smarter, a claim not supported by much evidence.

Above all I think it helps to have a skeptical eye. Mindfulness has become an extremely hot topic in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a self selection effect where most researchers really, really want mindfulness to be scientifically valid, and so they aren't really as critical of the research as they should be. Combine that with the fact that science journalism generally isn't great at actually reporting science, and marketing companies even less so, and that leads to a lot of misinformation floating around.

> Coming out in 1981, it clearly didn't coin or even popularize the term

It is not clear to me where the term was coined, though many sources point to Trent Schroyer's Critique of Domination (1973). But it takes time for books to be written and published. To hit print in 1981, Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology would have of necessity been penned as the movement was most ascendant, making it an invaluable primary source on what the phrase meant to the people who adopted it, however briefly, as a label.

> I've noticed out of print books with little demand can be extremely pricey just because of their rarity.

Of course rarity makes a difference in price, but so does demand. I'm not an aggressive collector but I have spent a little time buying rare, out-of-print books (both novels and academic works), including some pretty hard-to-obtain foreign language editions. My experience is that this one is a pretty weird outlier. It's not the most expensive rare book I own (I think that honor currently goes to Aetherco's Further Information), but it is definitely up there. Academic works can be fairly precious but the demand is typically pretty low and university libraries often sell unpopular works at substantial discounts. I rarely have to pay more than a couple of dollars for out-of-print academic volumes, provided I don't care about edition or quality (beyond "readable").

Even in the west, it depends enormously on context. Vern Bengtson has been running a longitudinal study of faith transmission over the past 35 years and touching on four generations, and he concludes that the overall inheritance of faith has been stable at approximately 60% since 1970, but higher for evangelicals, mormons and jews and dramatically lower for the mainline protestant denominations, who seem to be the source of most of the growing "nones" category that Robert Putnam described in 2011. This still sounds like it's bad for religion, but remember that "none" is a category of parental faith as well - which means that a fraction of children raised in secular families turn to religion as adults, and the "prodigal" phenomenon of adolescent wandering followed by a return to the faith in adulthood is common.

I do expect the "nones" to increase into the immediate future at the mainline protestant denominations continue to secularize, though this growth curve is likely to flatten as the baby boom echo of the millennial generation enters middle age and the prodigals begin to return. The evangelical churches seem to be stabilizing with the assistance of immigration and will likely persist well into the future when reproductive competition becomes more of a factor.

Finally, the God Gene may have been a bit overblown, but religiosity as a personality trait is unequivocally heritable in part (as are other personality traits), with limited twin studies indicating an approximately 40% heritability in adulthood. If reproductive trends persist into the future, in the long-long term, society may undergo a genetically determined shift towards increased religiosity.

Related Vogue headline from 2017: "Why Women Are Choosing to Marry Themselves".

Or this Cosmo headline from 2016: "Why I Married Myself"

Or see the many related stories on "sologamy" from the BBC, Vice, Telegraph, The Washington Post...

(Of course, there are no stories about men marrying themselves. Why? Probably the same reason that there's a "Wedding: Game Over" t-shirt in the men's apparel section of your local Wal-mart, and the same reason that the most popular wedding publications have names like "Brides" and "Bridal Guide.")

I became aware of this "self-marriage" phenomenon several years ago when my mother shared one of these stories with me and talked about how she knew a woman who had done exactly this. Her conclusion was that these women were jealous of the fact that married women got to have a big "special day" where all of their friends and family showed up to celebrate them and toast to their future, and wanted the same for themselves.

My mother's take is that these are women who appear to have missed the point of weddings: weddings are to celebrate a union, not to put a woman on a pedestal for a day, and only a narcissistic would fail to understand this. (Not so coincidentally, my mother observes, these narcissistic women also seem to be the kind of people who are incapable of attracting a mate who would be willing to make the long-term commitment of marriage. I have another hypothesis slightly from my mother's: perhaps it's more the case that these narcissistic women would never willingly devote themselves to a single partner for the rest of their lives.)

Anyway, there's a good chance that the Emma Watson announcement is a similar deal: a female celebrity (or her publicist) realized that whenever a celebrity announces a change in their relationship status, they get a news cycle devoted to them. What if you could get that news cycle, without the pesky need to involve a partner?

EDITED TO INCLUDE AMAZON LINK

Allow me to recommend a book.

It's called "The Story."

It does a great job of setting up the overall narrative of the Bible and Christian theology. Think of it as the Through Line that you can use to hang the rest of the supporting books.

It's not written for Christian insiders - and if you really want to get a sense of what is there and an understanding of the Whys, it would be a great aid for this venture.

I would definitely consider him to be on the left, but he's definitely not a bog-standard Vox liberal. He has a lot of interesting/non-mainstream ideas in his book Radical Markets:

• have all private property constantly be on sale (according to the owner's self-assessed value) in order to increase allocative efficiency (i.e. whoever values something the most gets to have it)
  
• quadratic voting (you can vote more than once on an issue, but each vote costs progressively more so that n votes costs X\^n dollars or credits), so that people can vote on issues in proportion to how important they are to them
  
• individual visa sponsorship (allow each citizen to give a visa to a migrant in exchange for money)
  
• also some other ideas that are non-standard
  
  Summary of the book in the Economist (titled "Don’t shrink the role of markets—expand it")

Aside from popular mainstays like Rogan, Hello Internet and Hardcore History

Culture war news/wagery: Beauty and the Beta

Former leftist turned secular/civil libertarian tries to convince his dyed in the wool "repeal the 19th" Reactionary friend that burning down all our institutions is not the appropriate response to the left being dumb.

Main value to me: Getting a look at what a legit Far Right perspective looks like when contrasted with an amenable center-right foil. Also, his intros are amazing.

Lifestyle(?): Jocko Podcast

Retired Navy Seal LCDR that writes Childrens books teams up with his dorky co-host to review books covering topics from Unit 731 to Macheavelli to Military Psychology and to interview people who've survived dismemberment but workout more than you (and to sell you actually-not-horrid protein powder). In other words; "What if Oprah was taking exogenous testosterone?"

Main value to me: Very useful for someone who grew up in and currently lives in an environment lacking a positive conception of masculinity, learning to channel a fraction of these guys' intensity rather being fearful of intensity has helped a lot in dealing with anxiety and lack of drive. It's hard to skip the gym after hearing a Vietnam vet-POW who can't walk straight tell you about how they'd still exercise while tied up in a bamboo cage.

I'd recommend starting with the Jason Gardner episodes to see if the tone's for you. It runs the gamut from serious stories about making Somalis explode with .50cal HEI rounds in Mogadishu, to goofy anecdotes about the guest's cosplay hobby.

Wild Card: Reasonable Doubt

The unlikely duo of comedian Adam Corolla and defense attorney Mark Geragos (Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, Chris Brown, Jussie Smollet) discuss current events and high profile legal cases.

Main value to me: Get access to the unique perspective of someone who makes their living fighting for scoundrels, explored by a clueless, but curious layman.

I do think you're romanticizing and overestimating the extent to which other countries have a coherent 'natural' ingrained ethnic/national identity by so rashly describing
> Nowhere else in the world is your identity conferred through bureaucracy

I mean, read a book like The Discovery of France that talks about the mapping of France and construction of the French national identity by the government. Up to WWI, the majority of the population wasn't even fluent in French, all the little villages had their own dialects. Spain still has smoldering independence movements and unique languages besides Spanish, from in Catalonia to the Basque region. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson is another great book that talks more broadly about the beginnings of the concept of nationhood, tying it in Europe to the rise of the printing press which enabled a national language for the first time.

And you mention India, which probably wouldn't even be a unified country if it weren't for the conquest under the British empire and subsequent independence. India is culturally and ethnically divided in the extreme, up to and including their caste system.


Not to mention the great success and relative stability of very divided multi-ethnic societies in countries such as Switzerland or Singapore in the first world. Many of these peoples have a longer shared history than the ethnic groups in the United States do, but I don't see why that makes a huge difference in terms of the strength of identity. In either case, the memory of that shared history has to be constructed anew for each generation. Our shared history up to this point is more than enough to serve as a basis to construct national identity on; these days few Italians or Irish descendants of immigrants have any other primary identity than 'American'. Imagining a shared national community such that it is a primary identity isn't easy but the American government has played a large part with mandatory public schools and other measures. Bureaucracy is a large part of forging national identity, no doubt, your mistake is thinking that this is isolated to America.


So your description of America as

> not a serious country

on these grounds says more about your unique antagonism to it than anything else. If America is particularly notable on these grounds it is that as a relatively young nation compared to many of these older countries, our national identity ambiguities and contradictions stand out more. You're doing a negative version of American exceptionalism, which I think is just as incorrect.

Just some interesting notes regarding IQ, intelligence and g;

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If there is hardly any consensus on what IQ tests measure or what ‘intelligence’ is, then construct validity for IQ seems to be very far in the distance, almost unseeable, because we cannot even define the word, nor actually test it with a test that’s not constructed to fit the constructors’ presupposed notions.

Now, explaining the non-existent validity of IQ tests is very simple: IQ tests are purported to measure ‘g’ (whatever that is) and individual differences in test scores supposedly reflect individual differences in ‘g’. However, we cannot say that it is differences in ‘g’ that cause differences in individual test scores since there is no agreed-upon model or description of ‘g’ (Richardson, 2017: 84). Richardson (2017: 84) writes:

>In consequence, all claims about the validity of IQ tests have been based on the assumption that other criteria, such as social rank or educational or occupational achievement, are also, in effect, measures of intelligence. So tests have been constructed to replicate such ranks, as we have seen. Unfortunately, the logic is then reversed to declare that IQ tests must be measures of intelligence, because they predict school achievement or future occupational level. This is not proper scientific validation so much as a self-fulfilling ordinance.

Construct validity for IQ does not exist (Richardson and Norgate, 2015), unlike construct validity for breathalyzers (Landauer, 1972) or white blood cell count as a disease proxy (Wu et al, 2013; Shah et al, 2017). So, if construct validity is non-existent, then that means that there is no measure for how well IQ tests measure what it’s ‘purported to measure’, i.e., how ‘intelligent’ one is over another because 1) the definition of ‘intelligence’ is ill-defined and 2) IQ tests are not validated against agreed-upon biological models, though some attempts have been made, though the evidence is inconsistent. For there to be true validity, evidence cannot be inconsistent; it needs to measure what it purports to measure 100 percent of the time. IQ tests are not calibrated against biological models, but against correlations with other tests that ‘purport’ to measure ‘intelligence’.

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IQ tests “test for the learned factual knowledge and cognitive habits more prominent in some social classes than in others. That is, IQ scores are measures of specific learning, as well as self-confidence and so on, not general intelligence“ (Richardson, 2017: 192).

I agree with this article inasmuch as I agree that Klein's take ("A universal basic income only makes sense if Americans change how they think about work") is stupid. Getting rid of the stigma against being a slacker* is neither a necessary nor desirable prerequisite or effect of UBI. I'm in favor of more experimentation with and exploration of UBI/NIT based on thinking it is a better form of welfare than what we have now. It doesn't need to be part of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. $10k/$12k a year are just two of the more prominent version suggested, not the platonic ideal of a UBI. The idea space is potentially much larger than many people seem to think.

UBI seems to attract what I call 0 to 60 thinking. Similar to how some atheists loudly insist that only the most fundamentalist interpretations of a religion are the correct ones. They don't believe in God (0) but then act like only young earth creationist biblical literalist snake handlers can speak for Christianity (60). I've had several conversations with people who are against UBI but then also reject any discussion of a UBI that doesn't allow someone to live alone in a 2 bedroom in Manhattan as not a real UBI.

UBI doesn't require us to change how we think about work. Adopting it wouldn't necessarily force us to change how we think about work. But for some reason lots of people who write about it really want it to do those things even if they think this means a UBI is impractical. I first learned of UBI from this book, where it was presented as just a better way to do welfare. I have issues with the practicality and desireability of Mr. Murray's specific plan but he talked about the issue more seriously than almost any other writer I've read on the topic. He's at least trying to look at numbers rather than write a Star Trek pilot.

*I think slacker is the better descriptor for what we're discussing than just "unemployed". Staying at home can be socially ok it just depends on why you stay home. Being a parent or taking care of family is usually ok. Smoking pot and playing video games isn't. Both the gamer and the housewife are unemployed but one gets a lot more social grief and probably feels more stress over the lack of a job than the other.

>psychopathy(Which I call the phenotype of domineering/callous/deceptive/manipulative/charming) is distilled in social systems across eons of evolutionary time, and this force gains a stronger and stronger grasp over social systems across this same stretch of time by ascending human hierarchy and creating greater and greater gaps in domination. Beating psychopathy is only possible by being a bigger psychopath, truth and ethics are lost because they are at the whims of apex psychopathy, and engaging in these strategies from a "We can win" point of view, is a losing strategy.

If so, how come the world seems to be becoming less of a dystopian hellhole over time? Our global power elites would be be hard pressed to recruit staff they could treat anywhere near the impunity of a petty landowner or factory manager a century ago, if they wanted to. Compare, say, the lifestyle of Trump or Zuckerberg to that of Hong Xiuquan in the 1800s:

>The approximately two thousand women working there are divided into three main categories ... One group of attendants is assigned to the care of his upper body, one for his lower. ... The two attendants assigned each morning to his dressing, may stand directly in front of him, and face him, but like every other woman in the court they may not raise their eyes higher than his shoulders, and never meet his gaze directly. ... His anger can be provoked by anything from a misplaced swing of a fan to the late arrival of his hot towels. ... those enduring the blows are expected to look cheerful and even to praise their Heavenly King as the blows fall -- those who refuse to acknowledge their guilt may find that the punishment for their stubbornness is death, the woman being first ritually bathed and then carried to the back garden of the palace compound for execution with the "great sword". "If you do not care for your Sovereign," as Hong says bluntly, "there are others who will." [God's Chinese Son]

If the moral arc of the world tends toward better adapting of social systems to the whims of psychopathic king apes, why don't top politicians' and executives' social lives look more like Hong's, and ours more like feudal serfs' or 19th century factory workers'? This seems like a pretty bad time, compared to the rest of history, to be a sadistic ape that just wants to lord it over other apes.

>Also, there's nothing preventing a cooperative scenario from being co-opted by manipulators. Example would be the research of Yuma Fujimoto and Kunihiko Kaneko at the university of Tokyo.

I'm curious what you think of the research on ultimatum games and fairness, for example https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05104 . That is, the tendency of people to punish unfair game moves, even at a personal cost to themselves. That's at least one thing that would tend to annoy manipulators.