savryn

I'm not sure how that's directly related, but I venture bullying among boys seems to be about the weakest / smallest / poorest/ easiest to harm and get away with it, not necessarily social skills or autistic stuff.

Violence must be met with violence, enough said there... A weak person needs support for that, and that's the issue.

Elon's biggest problem in life seems to have been his garbage narc creep of a father, who I recall even managed to blame that incident on little Elon! saying 'oh well the boy who did that said Elon made remark on a family member's sensitive passing or something, so you have to understand it was a matter of honor see', blah blah....

> can fluently navigate social situations

the vast majority of human beings can not "fluently" navigate social situations either...

the very small elite percentage of those who can are the 'social butterflies' that become actors, politicians, perfect 1950s social calendar wives, etc all depending on the culture they live in.

They are mesmerizing to watch, and rare like a lovely dancer or magician or elite athlete is rare. This is not normal, it's a special talent at the tail of the bell curve.

most ACTUAL normal social interactions involve simultaneous friction of many kinds under the surface-- as people have opposing motives (money, power, sex, pride etc) and limited face-saving default tools to navigate, dismiss, avoid, or paper over that friction.

(Maybe that's the difference, autistics suck at using or accepting the use of these shoddy tools as 'fake' and give resistance to all the sub-optimal goings on?? idk)

fake small talk and go-to phrases and lame jokes and polite chuckling and fake smiles and managed voice intonation ---these are the bread and butter of getting thru a interaction / dance while trying to still get what you want, balancing long term and short term incentives etc

Both people know it's fake and that's okay

----- it's exhausting to normal people too, at the 'end of a long day' it's not the physical toll

it is not evolutionarily normal to meet so many goddamn strangers every day and try to smooth over endless bits of friction (esp from so many cultures fundamentally at odds in core values and goals, but that gets into politics, so)

'normal' people deal with others sub-optimally and then let off the steam/ bitch and moan / insults and slurs to get out how they really feel in the safe space at home/ their tribe

Places where this is always at max capacity, it bubbles over and you see the failures and stress marks, i.e. strangers screaming at each other in new york traffic, littering and destroying things, unspoken boundaries (turf) being tested, shamelessness in breaking norms and criminality, helplessness/numbness to the disturbing etc

Most of the time, 'normal people' don't know what or why they are feeling / acting out the way they are either, they just relieve their tensions any way that comes up, angry at X person but take it out on Y person instead.

There are infinite ways to be dysfunctional and very few ways to achieve 'good-vibes only' haha

TV shows have skewed the sense of how smooth-talking and self-aware and charming normal real people are...

"we love listening to him talk about art because he also doesn't understand tact"

LOL thanks for posting this,

I love-hate this part, this is the state of things

------

Galloway then wants reassurance about his first big art purchase,

Saltz pseudo-approves, saying, Well despite all your self-loathing you perfectly bought a painting that represents you

(Swisher is dead wrong, this response is masterfully tactful in the most New York way, brilliant)

How much did it cost, he asks, 6K?

Gallawoy says to add a zero and laughs nervously...

Then he adds, well the artist of the painting is just so stunning and brave and really he bought it to support the artist and all they represent...

So I look up the artist, it's Grayson Perry and I guess google images is enough said

MDIIAMDIRuined

god if this is what a 'sincere' purchase feels like, well i guess the hedgefunders don't seem so bad

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Ironically, modern art is the one field that I do not think it's wise to 'separate the art from the artist' without losing most of the magic, whereas films, music, books etc the works feel like contained mini-worlds, can be transmitted as complete, stand alone.

Modern paintings don't have the 'density' for that without the story/aura, so getting the right work with the right story to unlock it for you can feel really special.

(That ineffable specialness is what you're really buying imo, and yes it very well can be worth it)

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p.s. My favorite easy-to-read book for cynics trying to understand why 'who the artists is' matters so much in the 'aura' of art is The Accidental Masterpiece, by Saltz's competitor haha, Michael Kimmelman of nytimes

his short essays capture the 'essence' of different types of minds at work. A decade later I'll randomly think of the people from the book, tho I can't remember their names or the paintings per se. The feeling of exactly who I'm thinking of sticks with you.

Everyone who makes things probably wonders how other types of people make things, since it feels impossible to describe.

I only saw this two months after this thread locked...

I've put my email in my profile if you still want to say hello

P.s. there were no google results for your username but I kinda suspect "ihoafw" likely stands for In Hopes Of A Future Wife, not sure how I feel about that on a 3 year old account ;)

'the fittest' could destroy him but choose not to -- since fitness in a social species is, reductively, how groups of elites structure their power games over others.

elites 'let you win' some games for all sorts of ulterior motives, implicit or unconscious even.

Vincent barely wins for a small time, he almost collapses on the treadmill lmao

My point is they left the exclusion / ruthlessness dial at level 7 when they could choose to crank it to 9

Vincent takes advantage of that temporarily, next guy and group will be punished for it.

>nature‘s rules (survival of the fittest)

no he isn't, he is merely exploiting the compassion of the society of the fittest that temporary allowed the less fit/ gifted /engineered to still live / work near them and infiltrate at the right time

-- it's got a bit of that a heist/noir of criminal cat and mouse

Vincent uses criminal connections to pull the entire scheme off (the german), just like a bank heist in a film it feels fun for reasons that don't work without a movie's magic 'genre' control of tone/sympathy/agency etc.

similar to other problems we have today where 'compassion' politics actually harms the fittest members most

An old homeless loony stabbing a brilliant healthy young person today isn't a show of the former's fitness, it's because (there are other incentives for the) the fittest of society (elites) choose to not wipe out/exile/enslave the unfit for various reasons (inextricable from the society itself--labor dynamics, crime and fear being useful, christian virtue, etc)

Gattaca in the opening even says it's only because he was born in the 'early stages' of the transition

Actual 'meritocracy' safety and other values require ruthlessness and violence, which we already have as all states do, just distrubuted in one configuration (gattaca) versus another configuration (chaotic US today, versus say the safety of singapore, or dictatorship of north korea, or some other gattaca 2.0 where the Vincents aren't born at all because fertility is managed)

A society can distribute its coercion/violence/reward structure in different ways, vincent is just a defector in a trust game

Always reminds me of that lame smug 'Feynman negging woman at a bar' anecdote, how is defecting on social norms clever? that's literally the point of lying/cheating/stealing/littering etc, one individual wins a temp game at the harm of the environment / culture long term. Once a few men are rude / cads, reputation of the place declines and fewer girls show up, or only certain types and not others, etc. A higher status guy like F can avoid/internalize the social ding of resentment from others who lose out of the good vibe/meeting someone cool while he's there, but can't tell him off.

Managing mini social games everywhere is 'culture' and essentially the reason infinite invisible class norms are so 'stifling' and invisible at once, it excludes the riff-raff and keeps those included people on their toes, behaving in a way that makes the place/group/experience "rich" rather than the vincent-like 'richness' of just maxing his own experience at cost of group.

(essentially why costume dramas are so fun to watch for girls (me included, I just don't lie to myself lol) as a guilty pleasure that doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure (you claim it's high status reasons -- the set design, jane austen, the history, so well written!!! etc) -- But the ideology of the genre of the movie itself does all the heavy lifting on cost of the 'nice things' you're not allowed to advocate for or admit to yourself you want as an elite experience missing from our lives today (the fantasy of *extreme social exclusion* so only the very pretty, very rich, and very witty girls can join the tea party-- as well as enjoy the courtship dance pre-filtered by only worthy rich/pretty/witty men :) Genre expectations let you relax, they 'hold the space' ideologically. Real life is social chaos of competing norms and suspicion and low trust, that's the price... But I digress

Once they find out Vincent's fraud, next years space program is gonna have to be even more draconian, annoying rules for all coworkers because of him... Maybe all the fellow blue-collars will get fired too.

'we live in a society'

sorry but discussions of culture trends can't be easily parsed by people who can only think so ...literally

why not just get stuck on 'what IS culture even', 'what is a trend Really??', and other forms of useless filler-think that magically only crop up when a middle class smart-and-friendly-smile type person is made uncomfortable by working class people actually 'noticing things' with their eyes and ears...

Policy-wonks aren't gonna be in the family rooms where people say things that matter to them, where populism and/or prejudice brews.

Get to know some immigrant communities, they don't understand english to watch fox or cnn. Black folks didn't make vaccine decisions based on what channel you think they should watch. Wealthy white people buying property or voting with their feet/dollars aren't going to tell all the friends they went to college with exactly why, revealed preferences and all that.

I'm a radical feminist, if american conservatives/rep have common cause then all the better

Imagine understanding capitalism, the state, warfare, or the history of any nation at all.... and still having party loyalties??? sad :)

the people beating up anyone are the cultural underclass/proles, be it rural whites or ghetto blacks -- by definition these are not cultural elites.

Physical violence (and any indicator of physical needs- shelter, food, safety) basically signals 'cheap animal unit', and animals are useful tools to be managed by the machinery (of capital, patriarchy, globalism, blah blah etc whatever left or right wing flavor of 'power structure' you mentally choose to sketch it out, it's there churning, by whatever name you like)

you seem to confuse elite signaling and countersignaling with personal sufferings when in reality, both are exactly how it's supposed to go

The cultural machinery works thru contradiction and desperate elite mimicry, people trying to aspirationally sound like the class right above them, leading to tragedy of the commons, for example:

Rich women support bail reform/ islamic immigration/ transgender craze/ porn-culture that gets poorer women raped/ scared/ fired / cheapened, and that's the new feminism

Pragmatic feminists/terfs/lesbians/mom groups/anti-vaccers are the new witches to be burned as the purity test for desperate psuedo-middle-class aspirational women, supplying the cultural fodder content mill, while Republican women/Christian evangelicals make popcorn...

Abortion rights are a cheap voting lever, the more passionate you are the more the machine knows how to use you, people are putting their carrots and sticks in their bios, announcing the best ways to control them with a smile lol

Women in Iran and Afghanistan not allowed to go to school, that is defacto no longer a feminist issue but something something 'why not both' meme-mumbles by nonbinary mental illness connoisseurs.

Gays getting beat up by rural whites so they move to metropolis and work for the rainbow utopia of corporate America is exactly how the machine eats :)

this bit from a diff article made me lol--

'When I wrote 'In Cold Blood' many were critical,' Capote said. 'I spent six years on that book wandering the plains of Kansas and nearly went mad but I saw it through. (Fellow author Norman) Mailer called it 'a failure of the imagination,' and now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I'm glad I was of some small service to him.'

-----

great capote interviews are Paris Review 17 and especially controversial Playboy 1968 interview....holy moly

you can't believe the actual meat and saucy opinions this guy really said out loud

Compare to the insipid 'i love puppies and rainbows' interviews of writers today, ughhhh

I wished I'd had legit 'bad' experiences, then I'd know they were outliers and would make for a story, but really I was shocked by deep mediocrity of several therapists, diff regions, male and female, diff costs etc.

The costs / risks of trusting important matters to average middling people makes it not worth it.

It's not a horror show, it's just a waste...

The reputation of therapy came from the top/excellent practitioners in the field over several decades.... and now it's a cheapened wonder-bread experience and even app based, lmao

The hype needs extreme push back.

another person who read the letters!

I'm shocked at how high quality the correspondence was, makes friendships of today feel kinda cheap

Abstract Algebra: A Student-Friendly Approach by Dos Reis

Paperback layout feels like a workbook, not overwhelming-- beginner friendly