07mk
7hr ago
If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed.
Things are going to get really interesting when AI reverses the direction of this and brings it down from 67 to roughly 20 (ironically the highest current age at which someone finds jokes about 6-7 to be funny), as the only form of employment available to anyone becomes the original form of employment. Then again, improving cosmetic surgery and sun protection might mean that the age goes back up and/or just remains stable before going up to the 100s.
07mk
7hr ago
My favorite example of this is that, apparently Bryan Adams's Summer of '69 was meant to be about the sex position, rather than about the year 1969.
07mk
8hr ago
simply parsing it on purely racial lines with no attempt to inform themselves. I simply cannot conceive of a situation where I'd consider Karmelo's behavior legitimate.
The part of the prior sentence I quoted is the explanation for a good chunk of them, I'd wager. Identity politics/social justice/woke-ism/the ideology that refuses to be named/etc. which still dominates the American left right now, demands that all interactions between anyone be analyzed on identity-based oppression-based frameworks, doubly so when it comes to altercations between white people and black people, due to the rather storied and violent history of such things in the United States. In practice, this means that, since black people belong to the "oppressed" category and white to the "oppressor," the evidence and reasoning must be twisted to whatever extent necessary to show that the black person was in the right (a somewhat-common example of this in the man/woman oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is the mantra "believe all women" which got laundered into "believe women" when the fallacious nature of such a statement got too embarrassing). For most people, when the evidence is this stark, the level of twisting required is simply too much and they step off the ride using one of many tools to alleviate cognitive dissonance, but there are plenty others who ride their true belief in their ideology all the way off the cliff.
07mk
3d ago
The conversation around this reminds me of a clip I saw of a conversation between Jon Stewart and some (former?) head of some government agency on a stage a couple years ago, where he was pointing out that the fact that the agency can't account for where all their funds went is, in itself, proof of mismanagement, and she was insistent that the fact that they couldn't actually point to a wrong place where the money went meant that there was no evidence of mismanagement. The idea that the people running things have a responsibility to pro-actively provide evidence that things were being tracked properly in order to clear the bar for "not mismanaging" seemed to be utterly foreign to her and completely impossible to penetrate her mind. When incompetence can so easily allow for malice, incompetence must be treated like malice. This is why the ethical standard for bribes and favors in business is that it must not even appear to be corrupt; the lack of actual corruption is not a defense and not relevant.
07mk
3d ago
That is wild. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, and that seems well over sufficiently advanced.
07mk
4d ago
I’ll just take the funny hot take. He’s 100% gay (or bisexual) if he said he would rape a male home intruder. I even have some dominant kinks. At no point have I ever had a thought of raping a guy because I am dominant.
I have a distinct memory of being in high school dorm in the early 2000s and watching the Red Sox play the Yankees and excitedly yelling to a friend something like, "Look, the Sox are raping the Yankees!" Which got me a talking to by one of the adult counselors about how I shouldn't use the word "rape" like that because normalization or trivialization or glorifying or whatever. But to my teenage brain, before that, "rape" had been just another way to refer to mercilessly dominating someone else, usually in a competitive environment. I'd probably picked it up from being a big competitive online Quake/Counter-Strike/Unreal Tournament gamer in middle/high school. Being charitable, I could believe someone like him having that same mentality with respect to the word "rape." I certainly wasn't trying to invoke the idea of Pedro Martinez holding down Don Zimmer and forcibly sticking his dick into him when I was using that same word.
07mk
4d ago
I'd absolutely say that John Wick is super high status, even before you account for the fact that he's, in-universe, famous as the assassin that makes other world-class assassins shit their pants. Ie even if he were some "everyday" assassin with just enough assassination skills not to be killed on the job, he'd be super high status. Men and women who are protagonists in fictional works are almost never very low status and often very high status, and even the very low status ones, like, say, Forrest Gump, are exceptional in a way that makes them relatively high status compared to similar people - it's exactly their exceptionality that makes the fictional story worth telling, because a loser being mopey and suffering and then dying without ever making anyone's life any better, including their own, is a really boring story.
But more to the point, perhaps you can argue that "apex" is the wrong term, and I would probably agree with that argument. It's a very broad "apex" being used to describe the slice of people in that genre who are high status enough to be noticeable. Which is probably like 40-70% among men and 60-90% among women, by my completely unevidenced speculation. In that bottom 10-40% of women are the women who aren't noticed by men, and I'd wager that women who are less traditionally feminine are more highly represented within that bottom slice. So if you build your vision of what a typical feminine woman's life is like while ignoring that slice, you end up with a vision that's, among other things, more feminine than the reality. I think a lot of transwomen combine that with some other pathologies to end up believing what they do about what being a woman is like.
07mk
4d ago
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
The standard feminist answer is that women objectifying themselves is empowering, but men objectifying women is degrading to the women. Of course, there are plenty of issues you can raise with this, but the standard feminist way of dealing with it is not to think about it too hard and to shame others who do - which, to be fair, is the standard way of dealing with most/all ideologies' thorny points.
07mk
5d ago
I've said it before that a lot of the gender culture wars seem to be caused by the apex fallacy. People draw conclusions about the typical or median of the other gender based on noticing the chunk that's high status enough to notice. I think a lot of transwomen suffer from a pathological level of it.
07mk
6d ago
For example, it seems like traffic stops can get scary because it's hard to tell if someone's reaching for a gun. Maybe the script should be "person being pulled over keeps their hands on the wheel until the officer comes over and can see what they're doing". And now if I'm pulled over, I can do that, the officer knows what to do with it, and my action isn't something he's worried about.
I wasn't handed a script when I was studying for my driver's permit/license, but this very thing was exactly what was drilled into me as the thing to do when pulled over by the police. Both hands glued to the wheel unless or until instructed otherwise. In general, the fact that you need to always show both your hands, don't reach for something that's hidden, and don't make sudden movements are what I'd consider the basic "script" for interacting with police which I had picked up growing up. I didn't grow up in an environment that had much police interaction, and I haven't had any meaningful interaction with police as an adult, so I can't remember where I picked up this "script," though.
07mk
6d ago
Its a sad situation but nothing here seems unique or even too particularly culture war.
Without commenting on anything about the actual facts of the situation, I think the very fact that one side of the metaphorical culture war believes that it's particularly culture war means that it's necessarily culture war. As in the case of Floyd & Chauvin, it doesn't matter if the killed/killer were unfairly treated because of their race or status or whatever, all that matters is that enough people on any given side believe that it's particularly culture war, and it seems evident to me that enough people do, among the people who do know about it. The absolute total number of people knowing about it is also, of course, particularly culture war, due to how issues like this tend to get covered in mainstream media, and it seems to me that the people who do know about it are trying to increase that absolute total number, which is, again, also particularly culture war.
Steam is only successful because of the availability of servers on which to run it and the proliferation of personal computers allowing everyday people to play video games on them, which they pay Steam for the license of. I'm sure somewhere in the chain of events leading to the production of servers and consumer PCs, one can find some sort of unethical or exploitative behavior by some supplier or vendor somewhere, and so Gabe Newell is clearly an unethical billionaire.
More to the point, you can play this 6-degrees-of-
Kevin-Baconunethical-production with anything, and so the entire concept is just a fully general argument that's meant to be pulled out of the quiver and deployed as needed when convenient.More options
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