I do think there is merit in the “Game of Thrones” books, and I don’t share Kirk’s visceral unease with them, but after having read the first couple, and not knowing any other of his works, I did a little digging, and based on some of his short stories and Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury Theater scripts, I can see where Kirk’s unease comes from. There is definitely some weird stuff going on in his head.

Yes, that was in response to some observations by Paul. Sorry about that.

Late evening fumble reading and too quick to reply.

I’ve rather enjoyed Game of Thrones on tv but the consensus even among fans is that the books are significantly worse for sexual violence.I don’t think I’ll try them.

Whether Martin has adopted any kind of feminist pose in response, I’m not sure. He did create a couple of characters along those lines.

The next paragraph would be:

And, while that sounds hypocritical when I say it in conjunction with what I just wrote about authors, it’s actually not. There are words that you’re just mouthing, when you’re angry, and which you don’t mean much by. Ones you’d never actually put into action.

But, at the same time, there are words that do bear watching and attention: Someone tells you that they fantasize and fetishize rape, well… You should pay attention to those words, because the fact that they let them escape their reflexive self-censorship is what we’d call “highly indicative”.

I’m always cautious to take the work as true expression of the author’s inner mind, because I’m right there with Heinlein’s quote about there being a specialized technical term for that, and that term is “Idiot”.

However, I do think there are authors who are giving us glimpses into the inner workings of their ids with their writing. G.R.R. Martin springs to mind, among others. He isn’t someone I’d put in charge of a girl’s school, that’s for damn sure.

I’m a big believer in the adage that “…by their works, ye shall know them…”. Watch the hands, ignore the mouth. Actions, not words.

I’m willing to believe the archetype redneck wife beater, or urban working class wifebeater, existed and still exists, as does the street rapist and the prep-school Ivy League date rapist. All default bugaboos of the left.

Still, there’s a few weird sorts of male feminist out there.

One is the heirs of William Moulton Marston, who created the character Wonder Woman because he not only liked being sexually and in all others ways dominated by women, he constructed a theory of life and society around maternalism and matriarchy.

Another is very common in the SF/Fantasy/Comic Book subculture, certainly to my past observations. This also partakes of a certain submissive personality and a, not necessarily lower, but an odd sort of dependent self-respect, but it’s mainly about sexual attraction to the idea of, to use the vernacular, ass-kicking teenage girls. The god of this crowd for a time was and perhaps still is Joss Whedon. His ass-kicking girl was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have time for him as the creator of Firefly and Serenity, but he was at once an unctuous prat and an angry firebrand in his feminism. Turned out to be pretty nasty to a lot of women. Seems to have recovered status though.

Then you have the suave types who I can’t always pin a motive on. They might just like the attention. One thinks of some prime ministers.

Now all these may be sincere in many ways, Marston certainly was a true believer. But more is going on behind the eyes.

You have said two things in the last 24 hours that have penetrated my thick skull, and stuck there, festering and fermenting.

The first is the statement about socialization;

“…set of experiences and behavioral conditioning events that you need to experience in order to be a well-rounded, fully actuated human being–And, we just are not getting those events and experiences into the lives of the general population…”

I love the “actuated” . Different tense, but very much in line with Maslow’s “actualization”. (When I was getting leadership training in the C.F. they were big fans of Maslow.),

It Instinctively sounds right to me, and ties in with my point about IQ not being everything, that personality, character, ideology etc., and what I facetiously called the “ Total Personal Ability Quotient”.

The second was your message vs. signal dissonance point.

That is almost Marshall McLuan level!

I think I was aware of this at a subconscious level, but couldn’t articulate it like you did. It is like a “where’s Waldo’ puzzle, or one of those 3D pictures like you used to get on the comics pages of the newspaper. Once you have seen it, you can’t “un-see” it. Once I twigged what you meant, I couldn’t un-see it, and noticed all sorts of examples besides the military ones you cited, (with which I totally identified), but now I can see political, business and social example galore! I think what you described as your “autist” tendencies allowed you to notice this consciously, which caused a cognitive dissonance you could not ignore, triggering your frustration and anger with the situation, which is what brought us here.

This is what triggered my last comment on the thread, YOU could see the dissonance, as an outside observer, (as it were), but could the participants? Part of what triggered this was your initial criticism of Dr. Wong. It occurred to me that from the inside, he could NOT see it , until he was a dis-interested outside observer, an outside academic, rather than an active participant. Rather like how an academic historian can make better sense of a battle than those who participated.

It made me wonder about the mindset of those caught up in the middle of the situation. One of the criticisms of armchair historians, is the “Monday morning quarterback” criticism. Of course, fifty years later, with access to all the information, and the enemy’s archive too, you can fault the decisions of a commander, but what was he seeing and what did he know at the time?

So to what extent does this cause an unconscious cognitive dissonance in the participant, rather than a conscious one in you, and what are the consequences?

It is a combination of Dunning-Kruger, and Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and I am still working out the implications.

Inbound draft, headed your way…

Yes, that is interesting, the what do they do part.

There is a recurring tag or category (I think on Instapundit, but I think also used elsewhere): “Why are anti-gun activists so violent?” This is used as a tag when some earnest anti-gun activist gets arrested for domestic violence, or every one in a while, one actually, ironically shoots someone.

Now I suspect that some of this is projection. Every time a state loosens their carry permit law, there is always hysterical shrieking about “blood in the streets” and shootouts over parking spaces, and it never happens. I have come to suspect that it is because THEY have anger management issues, and that THEY imagine themselves shooting someone over loud music or a parking space, and imagine everyone else is the same.

Likewise rape and sexual harassment. Some of the creepiest people are so-called male feminists. I often thing that one of the reasons SJW women are all up in arms about the sexism and misogyny of men in general, and conservative men in particular, is because of the creepy men on the left that they associate with.

I think that a lot of them get sexually harassed or assaulted by the leftist men they associate with, and they think “Wow, if men are so bad that even the woke, allied feminist men I associate with are such pigs, the evil right wing men must be mush worse”. Message/Signal mismatch; Harvey Weinstein is a left wing progressive, allied to feminism and pro-choice / Harvey Weinstein is a disgusting misogynist pig.

I wonder if this message/signal mismatch is why we have so much mental illness.

Kirk is very good at NOTICING the mismatch, his military examples are spot on, but I wonder how many of the participants are actually aware of their “hypocrisy”. One of the ways we handle cognitive dissonance is either to rationalize it away, or ignore it. Kirk sees the mismatch between the message and the signal, but I wonder if all of those doing the signalling are aware of it, at least consciously.

I wonder if the apparently f’ed up nature of our current society,and the epidemic of unhappiness and mental illness might be in some way related to unconsciously being aware of the mismatch, and the associated cognitive dissonance, and not dealing with it.

Just an idea that popped into my head, not sure how valid/if valid. Thoughts?

The “elite” tell us troglodytes that we need to upgrade our skills, become competitive, learn to code.

Message, yes? We can all agree we’ve seen that, because that’s what they tell everyone.

Signal, now? Oh, that’s when Disney lays off the majority of its IT department, or HP fires all of its US-based engineers.

Resultant behavior stemming from that? LOL… Do I really need to explain how we got to Trump, folks?

I think that at least a part of Trump’s election came out of a bunch of people saying “Well, you’ve ruined my life, sending my job off to MexiVietThaiChinaIndia, so ya know what? Imma gonna ruin yours by voting for Trump…”.