I think most of the dystopia options were actually just negative looks at what things are really like, except for the technological and the cognitive ones. And even in the cognitive one, there’s mention of “or the darned government banned everything again, and people are still getting Alzheimers due to lack of stem-cell research” which sounds like real life to me.
This is a pretty extreme claim. Care to back it up?
...by which I mean that all the bad things it lists are already true, and we have other problems on top of those
“10% of women have never had an orgasm. States adopt laws to ban gay marriage. Prostitution illegal.”—doesn’t sound like modern Europe, say.
And surely if one would associate this description with the really existing societies in which this was true, like early 19th century Europe, there would be lots and lots of other trade-offs against the modern world to consider in the sexual sphere—so those problems being “all that was wrong with it” would be false in the face of historical comparison. Because a society where gay marriage and prostitution are illegal—yet there’s little or no socio-sexual domination of men and women (access to sex as a carrot in front of men’s noses), or pressure to fit into narrow heteronormative roles of masculinity and femininity, or aggression against people who don’t fit into those… doesn’t sound like it ever existed historically. I agree with the conventional social sciences/”women’s studies” narrative that all these problems and attitudes are linked, as is the backlash against them.
Now, you may contend the awfulness of those deeper systemic things that I presented as correlated with the symptoms in Eliezer’s “dystopia”—but I do not doubt that what’s really up for debate here is the dystopian aspect of those systemic things, and not some hardly-coherent “everything is wonderful unless you’re gay” state of sexuality.
Ah. Yes, spreading these problems worldwide would make things worse. I took the ‘States adopt laws’ to mean ‘US states’, not ‘independent nations’ as the more conventional meaning of state.
However, there are many places in the world where this is so. These places are dystopian in this fashion.
And yes, it’s difficult to imagine those problems existing in complete isolation. I suspect that our world does not provide these problems with the minimum level of support.
I think most of the dystopia options were actually just negative looks at what things are really like, except for the technological and the cognitive ones. And even in the cognitive one, there’s mention of “or the darned government banned everything again, and people are still getting Alzheimers due to lack of stem-cell research” which sounds like real life to me.
The others require stretching. The sexual one is just true.
This is a pretty extreme claim. Care to back it up?
“10% of women have never had an orgasm. States adopt laws to ban gay marriage. Prostitution illegal.”—doesn’t sound like modern Europe, say.
And surely if one would associate this description with the really existing societies in which this was true, like early 19th century Europe, there would be lots and lots of other trade-offs against the modern world to consider in the sexual sphere—so those problems being “all that was wrong with it” would be false in the face of historical comparison. Because a society where gay marriage and prostitution are illegal—yet there’s little or no socio-sexual domination of men and women (access to sex as a carrot in front of men’s noses), or pressure to fit into narrow heteronormative roles of masculinity and femininity, or aggression against people who don’t fit into those… doesn’t sound like it ever existed historically. I agree with the conventional social sciences/”women’s studies” narrative that all these problems and attitudes are linked, as is the backlash against them.
Now, you may contend the awfulness of those deeper systemic things that I presented as correlated with the symptoms in Eliezer’s “dystopia”—but I do not doubt that what’s really up for debate here is the dystopian aspect of those systemic things, and not some hardly-coherent “everything is wonderful unless you’re gay” state of sexuality.
Ah. Yes, spreading these problems worldwide would make things worse. I took the ‘States adopt laws’ to mean ‘US states’, not ‘independent nations’ as the more conventional meaning of state.
However, there are many places in the world where this is so. These places are dystopian in this fashion.
And yes, it’s difficult to imagine those problems existing in complete isolation. I suspect that our world does not provide these problems with the minimum level of support.
I don’t understand your last sentence at all.